A note from the artists, Julie Meetal and Veronique Jonas

We have created this exhibition, The Color of Memory: Art by Two Daughters of the Holocaust, out of a personal need to express the ongoing emotional repercussions of this unspeakable event. We see it as a teaching tool, a very personal way of conveying the fate of European Jewry to both the Jewish community and to a wider audience. This work is not just a memorial to the past, but a reminder of our collective responsibility to prevent genocide, which remains not just as a nightmare of history, but as a continuing threat in the world today.

The Color of Memory: Art by Two Daughters of the Holocaust consists of five elements:

1) Julie Meetal’s paintings begin with her Hungarian parents’ experiences in the Holocaust, focusing on their individual stories. Meetal works imaginatively, often combining images into a dream-like nexus of figures, symbols, and saturated color. In some paintings, she uses watercolor almost abstractly, depicting those who perished as phantom-like figures.

2) Meetal’s Memorial Wall combines recreations of headstones from Jewish cemeteries desecrated by the Nazis. The sculpture is a proposed monument for Treblinka, the extermination camp in Poland, where the original stones are preserved. The wall, carved from a single piece of XPS Extruded Polystyrene, 8’x4’x2′, and is shown with three replicated individual gravestones.

3) Veronique Jonas’s paintings evoke the experience of her family on the Greek island of Rhodes, and the decimation of the Jewish community by the Nazis. Jonas’s paintings reimagine the Jewish quarter–empty, but haunted by photographs of the dead, and by the text of the Jewish prayer for the dead. A number of the works convey a sense of sweetness and hope that endures.

4) Text accompanies the paintings of both artists, amplifying the meanings of the work. Julie Meetal has written evocative prose and Veronique Jonas has composed poems for their respective works.

5) A documentary section includes a DVD of an interview with Julie Meetal’s mother and father taken by the USC Shoah Foundation and photographs of Veronique Jonas’s family and of the Rhodes Jewish quarter.

Please contact us to learn more about exhibition availability.