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Confronting Racism: A Conversation to End Hate

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This September, a nationally-recognized exhibit is coming to the Virginia Holocaust Museum to start a conversation on which lives depend. “Break Glass: The Art of V.L. Cox – A Conversation to End Hate“ is a striking collection of found-object sculptures meant to shape a timely narrative about civil rights and equality.

“Discrimination never stops with one group, that has been my message since day one,” said Cox, an Arkansas native. “If you allow one group to be dehumanized and treated as second-class citizens then it will automatically bleed over into others. Discrimination is like a virus, it spreads.”

From the series of doors once installed on the Lincoln Memorial steps to protest a discriminatory Arkansas religious freedom bill, to an original 95-year-old bloodstained Klan Robe, the works offer a cathartic commentary of the discrimination and prejudice that plagues American southern culture.

After seeing the exhibit at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, VHM’s director of education Megan Ferenczy knew immediately the works would be invaluable installations in Richmond’s museum.

“This is really relevant to what we do here,” said Ferenczy. “It doesn’t necessarily focus on the Holocaust, but it focuses on the larger issues of discrimination, intolerance, and hatred in our own country.”

Ferenczy explained that most importantly, the works create a conversation that is crucial to the ignition of positive progress. Although many of the works aren’t directly commenting on the treatment of the Jewish population in America, they further an essential dialogue in a space where creating conversation is the mission.

“The purpose of it is to confront this legacy of racism,” said Angela Rueda, assistant curator at the VHM. “It’s shining a light on this legacy, where hate and bigotry hides, and then using that as a platform to start a conversation…to create a space where people can confront this and…reach a place of civility.”

“White Bread” – This piece was created after Cox read about “Klan Camp” for kids held this summer at the National Ku Klux Klan headquarters in Harrison, Arkansas. The teddy bear is facing backwards to represent the loss of innocence, and addresses children and early indoctrination

Many of the pieces are massive, like lifesize hooded figures, columns, and doors. “You enter the space and you’re immediately confronted with it,” said Rueda. Superficially, many of the pieces present messages that feel at odds with the space–like the gut punch of walking into a room and coming face to face with a Klan member–but deeper reflection reveals the stark juxtaposition of the intended use of these objects, and the way they are being offered to the exhibit’s audience.

Closer examination of each piece unveils hidden messages that, even when subtler than the iconic imagery of the white hood, still hits just as hard. For example, a mixed-media American flag–”Stained”– is actually created from pages of the Bible, ripped from their binding to represent the harm done when these verses are torn from context and used to oppress others.

“Stained”- Represents the damage the extreme faction of the ‘Tea Party’ has done to our country when the pages of the Bible are ripped out of context and used to harm others. Stained is created with over six hundred and six (606) individual pages of the Bible made into tea bags with real tea leaves inside.

Cox worked with ministers of different denominations when creating this piece, careful to tell her story, but to include the voices of others as well. “People rip pages out of the Bible every single day to harm others, you’re taking them out to show them that that’s wrong,” said Cox.

Rueda posited that while most people entering the museum are ready to face the atrocities of the Holocaust, they are not always ready to turn their eye inward on our own country, and the current perpetuation of hate and injustice in America today.

“This stuff is in our backyard. It’s right here in our state,” said Rueda, a fact made apparent by the recent one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August. Despite declarations of progress and advancement, white supremacists and fascists were more empowered than ever to hoist their Nazi-ideologies sans hood, and revive World War II era anti-semitic chants, like Nazi slogan “blood and soil.” It’s vital to confront these issues as a current national epidemic, and not arbitrarily confine them to a past that isn’t so long gone.

“Conformity”

“It all starts with conversation,” said Cox. “People don’t talk to each other anymore. We communicate behind keyboards, and behind cell phones. It’s important that we get to know each other again.”

According to Cox, the best way to do that is through art. “You can look at something and you’re impacted by it,” she said. “You see it, feel it, it moves you. It communicates something to you, and that’s been going on since the beginning of time.”

“Cease”

“When archeologists do a dig in an ancient civilization, the first thing they look for are objects. They look for murals, they look for mosaics, they look for hand carved tools. That’s what tells them about this society, this civilization,” said Cox. “The arts are very powerful.”

Works like this help create the language future historians will use to understand our culture, but more importantly, it’s inserting that language into our current narrative. Through her work, Cox provides a context that can begin to change minds–even those as deeply rooted in Southern culture as rural Arkansas, or as historically chained to toxic narratives as our own former capital of the Confederacy.

Cox is from deep in the Bible Belt, where miscommunication, isolation, and misconception are to blame for much of the area’s deeply intolerant rhetoric. Arkansas has only 70 percent broadband access, Cox explained, and much of south Arkansas lacks cell phone service. The ability to surf the web is a luxury not everyone can afford. “Sometimes messages get cherry-picked, twisted, and turned around to be a misleading statement, and then it’s spread into the population.”

“Freedom Fighter”

That makes the circulation of intelligent and thoughtful conversation critical, and is part of the reason why Break Glass is presented hand-in-hand with a number of educational components and opportunities.

The VHM is holding a professional development workshop for teachers to give educators the resources they need to have difficult and essential conversations with their students. “It empowers teachers and gives them the tools to have these conversations,” said Ferenczy. “If these conversations aren’t happening in the classroom, then where can they be had?”

They also invited reformed former skinhead Christian Picciolini to speak at the museum on Oct. 17, presenting to students, then later in the evening to the public. Once a leader of an American white power organization in Chicago, he is now the co-founder of a non-profit peace advocacy organization who works to get others out of a life of violent extremism.

Education is crucial to break the cycle of ignorance. Though it would be easier if our history remained rooted in the past, the cyclical nature of prejudice guarantees the repetition of inequality if a dialogue is never created.

“IT’S TIME WE START OVER AND TALK ABOUT HATE”

“The arts step up in times of need, in dark times,” said Cox. “They play a powerful role in our society in reaching across boundaries and bringing about change.”

For some, the Holocaust is ongoing, and it’s only through conversations like those created by Break Glass that we can shatter the established national narrative.

“There really isn’t ever an end to the Holocaust, is there? Yes, maybe we hold people accountable, and maybe justice in some legal sense is served, but for Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust is still going on, for their children it’s still happening,” said Ferenczy. “This hatred still exists, it never went away.”

Break Glass opens on Sept. 28 and will run through Feb. 11 at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. Admission is free and open to the public.

Photos Courtesy of V.L. Cox. Top Image: “Soiled” A 1920 (95-year-old) bloodstained Klan robe installation. The robe was kept intact, and Vox purchased the vintage metal signage to show the true level of hatred this robe and installation represents.

Faces of Survival: Virginia Holocaust Museum Wants You to Remember What Survivors of Genocide Looks Like

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In an age when 22 percent of American millennials said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are confused as to what the historical event was, “Faces of Survival” meets the viewer head on with a powerful reminder of what modern genocide looks like.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum’s (VHM) newest portrait exhibit features more than a dozen Holocaust survivors currently living the Tidewater (Hampton Roads) Region. The exhibit was the creation of photographer Dean Whitbeck in partnership with The United Jewish Federation of Tidewater.

The same survey reported by the Washington Post also found that two-thirds of American millennials cannot identify what Auschwitz was – the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps based in Poland – that exterminated close to 1.1 million people. Yet despite the increasingly modern relevance, contemporary knowledge of the genocide that killed more than 6 million Jews during World War II is deeply lacking.

Angela Rueda, Assistant Curator at the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, said the photography exhibit is a crucial part of preserving these stories and legacies, especially stories that might be overlooked.

“It’s about memorializing these individuals,” said Rueda. “Unfortunately, Holocaust survivors are passing away…so [it is] part of the process of preserving their memory, their experience, their legacy, what their history means for future generations.”

The portrait exhibit is a striking installation in the renovated space that houses the VHM. Once an American Tobacco Company warehouse, the massive brick building is a cavernous and winding dedication to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.

“Faces of Survival” forces its audience to be eye-to-eye with Virginia’s own survivors; a move that not only allows for a naked display of humanity, but holds the viewer accountable for a narrative that too many people don’t want to acknowledge.

“To step inside an 88 to 90 year old’s [experience], to see life through their eyes, it was very powerful,” said Whitbeck. “When I’m photographing survivors, I’m also photographing an immense amount of trauma.”

The portraits are shot without any real background, free of noise or color. There is a simplicity and intimacy that speaks volumes about the nuance and character of each individual. “I weed out context and atmosphere,” said Whitbeck. “Because at the core, what I am focusing on is compassion, dignity, and humility.”

While the modern memory of the atrocities of the Holocaust are fading, the historical realities of anti-Semitism, prejudice, and pervasive violence is far from disappearing. In fact, anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise in the US, up 57 percent in 2017 from 2016. The modern narrative reflects a regressive turn back to the authoritarianism and fascist mentality of the 1930s and 40s, along with the complacency that accompanies it. Something the Jewish writer and philosopher, Hanna Arendt, once referred to as “the banality of evil” when covering the Nazi war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the holocaust.   

As a more modern example, Rueda says the VHM is turning their focus to programming surrounding Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally last summer; where white supremacist James Fields Jr killed counter-protester Heather Heyer.

“Especially today with a lot of the rhetoric that’s out there, you can see a connection between… the ideology from the Holocaust to Neo-Nazi groups,” said Rueda. “We’re working to preserve these stories because they are relevant today, unfortunately.” She went on to explain that one of their core missions is to encourage tolerance through education.

According to Rueda, their hope is that, “Sharing these stories and connecting it to what is going today, hate speech and continuation of anti-semitism, can combat that ideology and show that these are people—like you, like me, like everybody else. They have their own stories, their own struggles.”

Whitbeck, however, stressed that the connection goes deeper than just the rise of neo-Nazi groups in the US. Because so many of the Tidewater survivors came to the US as immigrants – many of them Russian survivors who fled Moscow – it opens a crucial dialogue about refugees and immigration.

“There’s a very interesting throughline between contemporary refugees, immigrants, and this conversation about Russian Holocaust survivors,” said Whitbeck.  “[With] the state of affairs now, in our country and globally, it’s so important that we see that synergy from 40-50 years ago and ask ourselves: are we repeating the same humanitarian crisis over?”

Whitbeck focuses his portrait photography on documenting the dignity and courage found in marginalized communities, be it Holocaust survivors or working with Reestablish Richmond to create portraits of refugees who have sought sanctuary in Richmond away from their home countries as a result of war.

“There’s a way in which you look at what defines the survivorship,” said Whitbeck. “The survivorship is rooted in persecution, of being forced out of your home. This is not a choice.”

Each survivor of the Tidewater Holocaust portrait series has a different story, from fleeing their home to living in hiding to escape persecution and death. While the topic is unspeakably heavy, Whitbeck references the impact and power of these kinds of individual interactions in a 2017 Ted Talk.

Since many of his Tidewater participants didn’t speak English, he said, “Half the time I just had to work with this way of communicating kinesthetically and physically,” going on to say that sometimes he was less a photographer and more a visual communicator.

While it’s easy to get stuck on the importance of the story, on the context and narrative that surrounds each individual, Whitbeck makes a point to focus on that single moment of authentic truth that a photograph can capture. “Storytelling is big, it’s macro. Truth is really a much more condensed and micro way of looking at emotions through the lens of the camera.”

It’s through this truth, this humanity, this head-on, face-to-face interaction between viewer and survivor, our present day narrative can begin to re-acknowledge the weight of our country’s recent and debilitating history.

The exhibit runs through July 29 at the Virginia Holocaust Museum on 21st and Cary. Admission is free and open to the public.