Gov. Asa Hutchinson will be among the speakers when Arkansas Tech University hosts an opening event Wednesday, Feb. 5, for “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust,” an exhibit of photographs by Gay Block.
The opening event will begin at 2 p.m. at the Techionery building, 1502 N. El Paso Ave. in Russellville. Admission will be free and open to the public.
The exhibit will remain available at the ATU Museum in the Techionery weekdays from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. through the end of March 2020.
“Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust” consists of portraits captured by Block during the late 1980s. She and her collaborator, Malka Drucker, photographed and interviewed approximately 100 non-Jewish Europeans who risked torture and death to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The resulting exhibition was featured at the Museum Modern of Art in New York in 1992. A separate traveling show traveled to 50 venues over 11 years.
Block will speak at the ATU opening event, as will Dr. Robin E. Bowen, ATU president; Dr. Barbara Johnson, ATU vice president for academic affairs; Dr. James Moses, ATU professor of history; and Dr. James Peck, director of the ATU Museum and assistant professor of art history.
“Each rescuer was so different…was their own person,” said Block in a 2018 interview with the New York Times. “There wasn’t any kind of formula. But by the time we met them so many years later, they didn’t always have such an easy life. It was the biggest privilege of my life to be able to meet these people.”
For more information, visit www.atu.edu/museum or call (479) 964-0826.
