‘Past and Present: Commemorating Women Affected By Genocide’

The keynote speaker, Anna Aleksanyan, is a Harry and Ovsanna Chitjian Fellow and doctoral student in Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research delves into physical and non-physical destructive techniques used against women during the Armenian Genocide.

Sandy Smith-Garcés’ Kindling exhibit was inspired by the plight of Darfuri women, driven from their homes and living in refugee camps in eastern Chad. Smith-Garcés was struck by the divide between the lives of mothers in her own community and the lives of mothers working to provide for their families in the camps, where basic needs are scarce. Venturing outside the camps in search of kindling to cook meals often ends in rape and other forms of violence. The search for firewood takes on new meaning, as essential for survival as the quest for fire, food and shelter from the elements since time immemorial.

The Pax Rwanda Embroideries are a traveling exhibit owned and curated by Juliana Meehan, a New Jersey educator who supports the Savane Rutongo-Kabuye embroidery workshop. This workshop was created by a group of Rwandan women living in the aftermath of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis. They came from both sides of the conflict, yet they put events of the past behind them to work together in the hope that their children would have a better future.

Savane Rutongo-Kabuye and Christiane Rwagatare, the founder and creative director of the workshop, have won awards for their work in Rwanda, and their embroideries are displayed in the national Rwesero Art Museum at Nyanza. The workshop is one of many collectives of artisans that reflect a larger phenomenon taking place all over Rwanda: reconstruction, reconciliation and the desire for peace.

Netty Vanderpol is a Holocaust survivor from Holland and was a classmate of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. Forty years after she escaped with her family from Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic, Netty took up the art of needlepoint. She has used this artform as the vehicle to tell the story of how she and her family survived the Holocaust.