Ronald Feldman Gallery will exhibit Violated! Women in Holocaust and Genocide, an exhibition of more than thirty international artists who present artistic representations of and reactions to sexual violence against women during the Holocaust, as well as later genocides. Although there has been extensive documentation of the violence of the Holocaust, sexual violence against women has mostly been covered up or denied. Women who survive today’s genocides, like Holocaust survivors, are frequently silenced by their own unwarranted sense of shame.

The exhibition uncovers the past and confronts the present in order to include women’s stories as education for the future. The artworks commemorate and reflect upon this violence and serve to inform viewers about this missing part of history, encouraging empathy and shedding light on this heinous component of genocide. To lift the silence is to move past despair to hope and gives women a voice.

Artists include Holocaust survivors, their close relatives, witnesses, and concerned others. Featured are two artworks done secretly inside Nazi concentration camps, borrowed from the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Israel, and works by Boris Lurie, a Holocaust survivor and co-founder of the NO!art movement in the United States in 1960. An installation, Body of Work (2017), was commissioned for the exhibition and presents crocheted sculptures by Israeli artist Gil Yefman and the Kuchinate Collective of African women refugees, who suffered trauma before reaching Israel from Eritrea. Works by other artists represent voices from Israel, Iraq, Guatemala, Darfur, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Historic works by American artists include Ballade von der Judenhure Marie Sanders and Document Trouvé by Nancy Spero, both based on a photograph found in a Nazi’s possession; and Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman’s Double Jeopardy (half-scale) from their Holocaust Project (1992), structured as a journey into the darkness of the Holocaust and then out into the light.

The exhibition is a project of Remember the Women Institute, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to integrating women’s stories into history. It follows the first book on the subject, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Brandeis University Press, co-published by Remember the Women Institute, 2010). Coordinator: Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel; Curator: Dr. Batya Brutin.