SHEILA KAY FOX

The Butterfly Project was an installation created as part of Ballet Austin’s Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project. “Light” is a “contemporary ballet and Holocaust education partnership that promotes the protection of human rights against bigotry and hate through arts, education and public dialogue". In 2012, 46 Austin community partners engaged in related programming and projects. My work culminated in an installation where viewers were invited to walk through a simulated concentration camp fence covered in 10,500 paper butterflies created by local school children in memory of children killed in the Holocaust. The experience was meant to personalize the victims so the entire event and the general topic of contemporary genocide is more relatable.

I collaborated with Carl Wilkens fellow, Beth McDaniel, who was leading educational programming within AISD related to the Houston Holocaust Museum’s Butterfly Project. “The Butterfly” is a poem written by Pavel Friedman, a young man killed at Auschwitz in 1944. This poem tells of life inside the camps, where there are no butterflies. Inspired by this poem, Houston led an initiative to gather 1.5 million paper butterflies in order to remember the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. Curriculum in Austin included students reading biographies of children killed in the Holocaust and creating butterflies in their memory.

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