About this campaign

Join Episcopal Migration Ministries' community this World Refugee Day, June 20, and proclaim that you are part of the welcoming movement. World Refugee Day is a time we celebrate the resilience, strength and diversity that refugees bring to our communities. In addition to our EMM logo apparel, we are offering this Special Edition World Refugee Day t-shirt, with art on the back of the shirt designed by Artist Ammar Alobaidi, a former refugee from Baghdad who lives in his adopted city of Houston, Texas.

Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) is The Episcopal Church's refugee and migration ministry. EMM is one of nine national agencies responsible for resettling refugees in the United States in partnership with the government. Episcopal Migration Ministries currently has 12 affiliates in 10 states. In addition to its long-standing work in refugee resettlement ministry, Episcopal Migration Ministries is The Episcopal Church’s convening place for collaboration, education, and information-sharing on migration.

This fundraiser is open through June 30 in celebration of World Refugee Day month. After the fundraiser closes, you will receive your apparel within approximately two weeks.



About Ammar Alobaidi: Ammar Alobaidi was born in Baghdad on 1969. He has Bachelor of Engineering from University of Baghdad. In 2005 he decided to pursue his more intense passion for art and in 2007 began a mentorship with the celebrated artist Moher Aldeen. In the last decade he has actively engaged in his artwork, in Jordan and then continued after moving to the USA in 2014. Since that time, he has shown work in exhibitions in both countries including solo exhibitions at O’Kane Gallery, UHD and at Mixed Emotions Fine Art Gallery in Houston, Texas. His work has been positively reviewed in the Houston Chronicle and Houstonia Magazine. He continues to pursue his art work as his central focus and aspiration in his adopted city of Houston, Texas.



Artist statement: I orchestrate painting around a dynamic use of colors. Abstraction is the matrix of my work as a painter. It communicates the harmony I build between my emotions as a contemporary man of Middle Eastern (Iraqi) culture and my sensitivity to European civilizations, between my experience as a precise, thorough scientist and my knowledge of Modern and classical painting. I seek to convey the sense of others, their qualities, together with my own sense of human relationships. My purpose is to share my singular ability to see today's world, and what I would describe as people discover their lowest instinct of individual and collective destruction, and also their ability to still see the strength of love, solidarity, and the exchange of generosity that spontaneously happen between a man and a woman. I feel my art work follows the footsteps of Pablo Picasso in his synthetic and analytic cubist periods, drawing from El Greco his color, those of Antoni Tapies regarding his particular way of working with the medium used, which was transmitted, to me, by the painter Moher Aldeen, as well as the lines of the School of Bologna.