Race and Visual Culture under National Socialism

This exhibition is at the Frost Art Museum on Florida International University's campus.The Wolfsonian–FIU presents Race and Visual Culture under National Socialism, an exhibition that uses ordinary objects to reveal how the Nazi Party in Germany promoted the idea of a racially pure nation—a campaign that helped lead to the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The exhibition at the Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery at the Frost Art Museum, is intended as a complement to a course about the Holocaust taught by Oren Stier, guest curator of the exhibition, Director of the Jewish Studies Program, and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at FIU. The exhibition demonstrates how the Nazi regime combined pictures of vigorous young athletes, soldiers, healthy families, and contented rural people with pastoral landscapes and scenes of modern infrastructure rising on the land. Together, these images created a vision of the nation that was meant to be both inspiring and comforting, modern and traditional. Excluded from this vision were “others,” primarily Jews, identified as unhealthy, degenerate, and dangerous to German society. The exhibition will be augmented by a lecture series, "Material and Visual Culture of the Holocaust," organized by FIU’s Jewish Studies Program. All events will be free and open to the public, but registration is required. For information about the series, and to register, see http://fiuholocaustseries.eventbrite.com.