A mesmerizing memorial to 1.5 million Jewish children

Have you ever seen a million of anything? How about a million-and-a-half?

There is something remarkable and beautiful about the act of collecting that many of any particular object and finding a way — nay, a need — to display them in their entirety.

Currently on exhibition at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery at Bristol Community College’s Fall River campus, a million-and-a-half buttons are on the floor. And it is mesmerizing. 

The footprint of the gallery is 25’ X 75’. Arranged in a rectangle measuring 12’ X 45’ and carefully raked into depths ranging from ¼” to 1½”, the buttons become a field of color that is reminiscent of a dense abstract-expressionist painting, in the manner of a Jackson Pollock. After all, ol’ Jack the Dripper famously painted canvases on the floor.

It is a densely populated metropolis of buttons rich in color. There are sections thick with black and gray and white, visited upon by gatherings of blood red, random pops of pink, touches of lavender and shamrock green. There are visitations of school bus yellow and the occasional floral patterned disc and what appear to be belt buckles. Ivory, gold, silver. Transparent, translucent, opaque. Metallic, plastic, wooden.

It is easy to imagine the shallow gathering of buttons as fluid, even liquid, like a swampy pond in which one could wade or swim. By the sheer virtue of their multitude, they become akin to a living environment unto itself. It seems to ebb and flow. It’s meditative. It’s zen.

The installation itself came into being over the course of 10 hours with volunteers unpacking boxes of buttons for nearly five hours. Gallery Director Kathleen Hancock and her assistant, Olivia Harris, a BFA graduate of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, began pouring and sorting and gently manipulating buttons into place with a fine rake, constantly assessing and correcting and fine tuning the sea of buttons into a majestic and moving (albeit temporary) work of art.

The buttons demand your attention as a million-and-a-half of anything would. But why a million-and-a-half? Why not a million? Why not two million?

1.5 million is the approximate number of Jewish children that were exterminated by Germany during the Holocaust. 

To put that figure in perspective, 1.5 million is just shy of the entire population of Philadelphia.

Back in 2017, Linell Dean, an administrative assistant at the Holocaust and Genocide Center at BCC, initiated collecting 1.5 million buttons in an act of symbolism to honor the murdered children of the Nazi death camps. Inspired by a 2016 Australian project, Dean’s proposal was the first known attempt to replicate it in the United States. 

Other remembrance projects had gathered items such as paper clips or stamps but there was something about buttons as intimate, personal, oft-touched common objects that made sense, and felt right and just. BCC embraced the idea and reached local businesses and organizations, placing button collections jars throughout the region.

One donor contributed 10,000 buttons from his late mother’s personal collection. Ireland Nordstrom, a 12-year old girl from Fairhaven, created and distributed a flyer about the button gathering effort and she received over 100,000 buttons which she donated to the Holocaust and Genocide Center.

In the first year of the campaign, Professor Marisa Millard and students from the BCC Art Department utilized some of the buttons to create portraits of diarist Anne Frank and of Holocaust survivor Stephan Ross. Both are presently displayed in BCC’s Jackson Art Center.

After Dean’s departure, Michael Santos, a Providence College intern, expanded the campaign to local schools, collecting over 500,000 buttons. Later yet, Bristol honors student Corrine LePage continued the effort during the COVID-19 pandemic. A button factory contributed a large donation, pushing it over its stated goal of 1.5 million buttons.

So what does a small regional college do with that many buttons? The Holocaust and Genocide Center began to formulate a plan to create a permanent installation for the buttons, focusing on soliciting proposals for a site-specific outdoor monument.

In October 2024, BCC issued an international call for proposals, asking artists to submit designs. The call was answered with 23 submissions from national and international artists and designers. 

The Button Project applicants were narrowed down to three finalists, Søren Nellemann, Josh Zubkoff and Boston-based artist Zach Horn, who would ultimately be selected to be the designer of the memorial. 

Horn, who received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Boston University, is an interdisciplinary artist, with a focus on drawing, stop-motion animation and social practice. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In his studio, he depicts local labor unions and common objects, such as BBQ grills. He defines his work as “assertively political and intimately heartfelt.” 

A self-described Jewish humanist who has visited Auschwitz, he seems particularly predisposed to tackle the permanent memorial that will be situated in a courtyard at BCC, with paths from the Hudnall Administration Building and the Siegel Health Technology Building leading directly into it. 

Horn’s project evokes the Auschwitz Museum, where there are stacks of suitcases, eyeglasses and cooking pots. At the site, there is a mountain of 110,00 shoes, including 8,000 children’s pairs. The stuff of everyday life has been sanctified by tragedy.

The slaughter included six million Jews, three million Soviet prisoners of war, two million Poles, 500,000 Romani, 300,000 Serbs, 300,000 people with disabilities and many more.

Horn’s Button Project memorial will consist of 12 124” tall and 52” wide cases. Each case will be filled with a layer of buttons, sandwiched between two ½” thick laminated glass panels. Each button is an element in the mathematical memorialization.

Horn notes that “The Button Project is personal. I am a father to three young Jewish boys. It could have been us. The memorial is an admonition that this evil didn’t happen a long time ago in black and white photographs. The genocide happened in modern Europe, with contemporary cruelty, at industrial scale. This tragedy is real: the world let it happen.

“The metaphor of the button, an often overlooked object, presented at such a large scale, is staggering. 1,500,000 children is a tragedy at a number that we cannot fully fathom. The limitation of our imagination makes that much suffering impossible to conceptualize. The Button Project, with its mournful grace, affirms our commitment to peace and the sanctity of our children.”

The memorial is expected to be underway in the late spring, and if all goes well, to be completed by the autumn.

“Bearing Witness: A Sea of Buttons in Memory of the Holocaust’s Youngest Victims,” the precursor to the memorial, will be on display at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery, Dunn Exhibition Hall, Bristol Community College, 777 Elsbree St., Fall River until April 3.

Take a deep breath. And take it in. And don’t ever let it happen again.

Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org

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