The Butterfly Project

I apologize for not posting. I spend my days interviewing, researching, and writing. I am trying to finish my book. When I'm not working on my book, then I try to find someway to be creative in a different way. With Las puntadas del alma/Stitches of the soul, my group at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, we are creating butterflies for the Holocaust Museum Houston. 

1,500,000 innocent children died during the Holocaust. In an effort to remember them, Holocaust Museum Houston is collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies. The butterflies will eventually comprise a breath-taking exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2013, for all to remember.The project is based on this poem.

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone...

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ’way up high.
It went away I’m sure
because it wished
to kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.

Pavel Friedman, June 4, 1942

Born in Prague on January 7, 1921.
Deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942.
Died in Auschwitz on September 29, 1944.

More than 12,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942-1944. More than 90 percent perished during the Holocaust. 

More than anything, I wanted to take the time to create something that took time to honor all those lost children. It's approx. 10 x 8 inches and took me about 30 hours to create.