Gratitude Monday: Bridges of art

It’s Gratitude Monday, between Remembrance Sunday and Veterans Day, so here’s what I’m grateful for today: Installation art.

Yeah, you heard me—I’m going back to my roots in the humanities and am grateful for installation art projects that help us get our heads around losses that simultaneously crush us with grief and render us completely unable to understand their magnitude.

Let me give you some examples.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt, AKA The NAMES Project. It’s a collection of more than 48,000 3’x6’ panels, each representing the life of one person who died of AIDS. Friends and family created each panel, embroidering, appliqueing, painting—however they wanted to depict what was important to them about the one they lost.

Panels were combined in groups of eight to form blocks. The first panel was made in 1987, in San Francisco. By the time I saw the Quilt in DC in 1996, those blocks covered the entire National Mall. There is a display ceremony—volunteers rotate the blocks before laying them on the ground—so there’s a stylized movement to the installation. And then there are those who line up to read the names of the lost over the PA system.

Nearly 20 years on I can still recall the woman’s clear, strong voice, as she read out her apportioned list, ending with, “And my magnificent son…” I don’t remember the name, just how her love and loss seemed to fill the autumn air all across that space.

It was also something to see how the Mall visitors responded to the Quilt, the looks on their faces as they took in each panel, each person represented in fabric, thread and photos. And then, the view along the Mall completely under those blocks, like a child asleep under a handmade quilt.

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In 1998, the kids at Whitwell Middle School, in Whitwell, Tennessee, were learning about that most elusive of civic-social concepts, tolerance. What better example to use for what happens when society fails to exercise tolerance than the Holocaust?

Only—six million people? What does six million even mean?

In a community of 1500 souls, the children couldn’t grasp that kind of number. So they decided they needed to collect six million of something, to help them get their heads around how many people had been murdered. They chose paper clips, because they found out that Norwegians wore paperclips on their clothes to protest the Nazi occupation.

The Paper Clip Project expanded as they wrote to public figures and news outlets took up their quest. Eventually they acquired one of the boxcars that had been used in deportations, installed it next to the middle school, and filled it with 11 million paperclips, which number includes other groups specifically targeted for destruction by the Nazis, like the Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Whitwell Children’s Holocaust Memorial was dedicated on 9 November, 2001. It encompasses the paperclips and historical artifacts and mementos the kids collected over the course of reaching out across the world in their quest to understand the loss that policies of intolerance creates.

A local artist also installed a variety of metal butterflies around the boxcar. These tie in directly with the collection of poems and art created by children in the Terezín transit camp. And also—butterflies are such a powerful symbol of transformation and rebirth.

This project connected the young people of a tiny, backwater, largely homogeneous town with Holocaust survivors, historians and children around the world. But beyond that, the way they depicted what devastation results when intolerance is raised to policy is a stunningly clear and vivid presentation.

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And, of course, the installation at the Tower of London, “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red”. Each ceramic poppy represents a British or Commonwealth soldier who died in the First World War. Each one is exquisitely beautiful: bright and brilliant and shiny as youthful hopes. Each one is unique, as was every life lost.

And there are 888,246 of them.

As I’ve said, it’s when the individual poppies are planted next to one another in their hundreds of thousands, they become a visual ocean of blood. They swell over the Tower’s dry moat, almost reaching up into the nearby streets.

And here’s the thing: in each of these examples, it’s art that lets us see all at once the individual and collective loss. One panel, one paperclip, one poppy; added to ten, to a thousand, a million—what was a tragedy for a family becomes the depletion of a nation and a shift in the course of history. But without the panels and blocks, paperclips and butterflies or waves of poppies, we as individuals and communities can only take in a single dimension at a time. If that.

So I am deeply grateful for the installation artists who are able to evoke the individual and the mass in showing us the consequences of our actions as individuals and as nations. They make the impossible visible and invite us to take it all in.

And, maybe, to learn from it.