Student Art Commemorating the Holocaust on Display at Virginia Beach Center
April 27, 2017
"Eyes:" Julia Maslankiewicz, Emerson Middle School, Park Ridge, Ill.
"Triptych of legs:" Tatiyahna Blakely, Lakeland High School, Suffolk
Old Dominion University's Virginia Beach Center is displaying through May the artwork of middle and high school students commemorating the Holocaust.
The exhibit will showcase the winners and finalists of the 2017 Elie Wiesel Visual Arts Competition for Students, sponsored by the Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater.
The works, including paintings and sculptures, were created by students from Virginia Beach to India.
The art will be on display in the atrium of the center through May 31.
"ODU Virginia Beach is honored to host the Elie Wiesel Holocaust exhibit for the fourth year," said Renee Olander, associate vice president at Old Dominion. "Each year we find that the award-winning work is deeply moving, and it invites our students, faculty, staff and community members to consider the dimensions of inhumanity as well as humanity, concerns perhaps as pressing now as they were during Wiesel's remarkable life."
The student artists were inspired by Wiesel, a Nobel Prize-winning author who died last year, and local Holocaust survivors "to face the themes of prejudice, indifference to suffering, peer pressure and the value of moral courage in their work," said Leslie Siegel and Phyllis Sperling, the co-chairwomen of the visual arts competition.
"We continue to be amazed by their talent, creativity, messages and emotional responses to these highly provocative issues," they said.
The exhibition is being sponsored by TowneBank. The Virginia Beach Center is at 1881 University Drive, and the phone number is 757-368-4100. The center is open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Visitors should park in Lot 3.
For more information about the competition, go to www.holocaustcommission.org
