Exhibition Introduction
The following is the main didactic label from the exhibition.
"Witness and Legacy" is a group exhibition of American art of the last twenty years on the subject of the Holocaust. The twentyfour artists in Witness and Legacy represent three "generations" or levels of experience with the Holocaust. The witnesses are survivors of concentration camps, ghettos and hiding places. The children of survivors are often called the "second generation"; they live with the legacy of the Holocaust, passed on by their parents. The third group, while not having direct experience with the Holocaust, recognizes its legacy in broad historical terms and its effect on humanity as a whole. Because of the variety of artistic approaches within each group, the exhibition does not separate them by generation. Rather, it allows the artworks to establish recurring themes among the generations.
Certain themes reverberate throughout the exhibition, as seen from different perspectives: the need to preserve and convey memory; the political, social and economic causes of the Holocaust; the symbols and apparatus of dehumanization; the loss of masses of people and the loss of individuals; the loss of place and culture; the physical and emotional traces left by the Holocaust; the gaps between experience and understanding; and the persistence of hope beyond reason.
Each artist has found a language with which to discuss these themes, aware that, as survivorauthor Primo Levi observed: "Daily language is for the description of daily experience, but here is another world, here one would need a language 'of the other world."' In these artworks the language is realism and abstraction, darkness and light, coded colors, uncomfortable spaces, sounds, symbols, texts, and mute images of the past and present.
But even with this broad vocabulary, the exhibition should not be seen as an attempt to sum up the Holocaust. It speaks of unfathomable aspects of human nature, of an event that continues to defy comprehension. However, these artworks broaden the cultural discussion of the Holocaust while confirming our need to do so.
Witness and Legacy was organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and curated by:
Stephen Feinstein (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Paul Spencer (Minnesota Museum of American Art)
Lynette Henderson (Minnesota Museum of American Art)