Evan Bautista
Ms. Valdez
English 10
27 March 2023
The Art of Genocide
In the 20th century, an estimated 200 million people died due to genocide. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or group with the intention of destroying them. The novel Night written by Elie Wiesel follows him and his father’s journey during the Holocaust, moving from concentration camp to concentration camp.Wiesel aimed to express the tragic events through the writing of the book, but there are various mediums people used to express themselves and the events they experienced and witnessed. To illustrate, visual art helped people perceive the events by being able to see the events, poetry helped people interpret and visualize
…show more content…
Esther Lurie’s watercolor and nature scenes, specifically “The Last Road”, opened people to a new perspective during that time period.Lurie depicts a ghost town, utilizing soft, bold colors to emphasize an emotionless world in the watercolor piece. On a closer look, people can be seen walking, or marching in the background. It can be inferred their walk to their deaths based on the given title, “The Last Road”.This town seems to have no protest against what is happening, expressing how normalized these events were. Without any words, the piece shows what happened and how the world just moved on with it by doing nothing to stop the inhumane actions because it wasn’t directly affecting them. Another form of physical art, dioramas, from the Armenian Genocide helps people relive what their old lives were. Dioramas are models that represent a scene in a third dimensional fashion. One of the dioramas in specific, the Bogigian Complex, shows an Armenian family and their daily life. What sets this art piece apart from the last piece is it being third dimensional. Dioramas try to interact with deeper, unknown layers which wait to be discovered and understood. Another dimension allows for more perspective on the event. The dioramas conveying a personal feeling and life help the audience understand that the genocides didn’t happen to anyone out of the ordinary, but rather normal people whose homes were destroyed for the group of people they were associated