Release Date: April 21, 2008
Anniversary of Hitler’s death marks relocation of Holocaust art
Contact: Cheryl Anderson Brown, Assistant Director of Public Relations, 770-499-3417 or cbrown@kennesaw.edu
 |
(Above) A handcrafted butterfly (Below) Charlotte Collins (left) and Natasha Lovelace Habers (right) brought the Butterfly Project to KSU. |
 |
KENNESAW, Ga.—On the eve of the 63rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death, nearly 4,000 handmade butterflies will begin their journey from Kennesaw State University to the Holocaust Museum Houston in Texas. These works of art are for “The Butterfly Project,” a nationwide initiative of the Houston museum to commemorate the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust. KSU’s contribution to “The Butterfly Project” will be sent to the Houston museum for permanent display.
KSU has been participating in “The Butterfly Project” since 2005, gathering handmade butterflies by students from the university and from the surrounding schools and communities. Assistant Professors of Art Natasha Lovelace Habers and Charlotte Collins brought the project to KSU to help the Holocaust Museum Houston meet its goal to collect 1.5 million butterflies by June 2008.
The impetus of the project was the need to have young people comprehend the number of deaths during the Holocaust. Many of the butterflies have been inspired by the writings of people who experienced the Holocaust, including teen diarist Anne Frank and young poet Pavel Friedman, who wrote the poem “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” while he was imprisoned at ghetto of Theresienstadt (Terezin). Both Frank and Friedman died in concentration camps but their writings have survived to instruct and inspire.
At Kennesaw State, Collins saw the project as a way for her students “to engage in critical thinking and connect to this difficult subject in a way they were not connected before.”
Currently, the KSU “Butterfly Project” is on display in the entrance of the “Parallel Journeys: World War II and the Holocaust through the Eyes of Teens” exhibition, which will continue to be displayed at the KSU Center on Busbee Drive for at least two more years. However, on April 29, Collins and Habers will begin the process of removing these works of art from the exhibit, carefully packing each one to join the hundreds of thousands of butterflies from across the country in Houston.
The exhibit is open Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.kennesaw.edu/paralleljourneys or call 678-797-2083.
# # #
A member of the 35-unit University System of Georgia, Kennesaw State University is a comprehensive, residential institution with a growing student population of more than 20,000 from 132 countries. The third-largest university in Georgia, Kennesaw State offers more than 60 graduate and undergraduate degrees, including new doctorates in education and business.
The KSU College of the Arts is one of only four Georgia institutions to have achieved full national accreditation for all of its arts programs.