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Several years ago, we featured the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies(CHGS) at the University of Minnesota in a cover story for Minnesota. By coincidence, as we were preparing the article to go to press, the president of Rwanda passed through campus. This was 10 years after the Rwandan genocide, and I wanted to hear Paul Kagame speak about the massacres and their aftermath.

I published a summary of his appearance at Williams Arena and wrote about appealing “to the next generation to exercise compassion and tolerance.” Soon after, I received a letter from Stephen Feinstein, then director of CHGS. Feinstein was known worldwide for his tireless efforts to educate others about the horrors of genocide and crimes against humanity. He understood the power of words and gently took issue with my use of tolerance.

Excuse me? Isn’t unbridled tolerance about the only thing that will help us all to get along?

Tolerance, Feinstein wrote in his note, implies that someone or some group personifies negative qualities that other people or groups must try to see beyond. It’s a word best avoided in the context of race, ethnicity, or religion, he said, and that a preferred term is coexistence, which suggests enduring harmony and equality.

Feinstein died unexpectedly this past March while speaking at a Jewish film festival. His primary area of research was artistic responses to the Holocaust and genocide, and the center’s Web site (www.chgs.umn.edu) is a virtual museum of hundreds of works of art by survivors. This fall, the University’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery presents “Voice to Vision,” a CHGS exhibition of multimedia art created by teams of artists, art students, and Holocaust and genocide survivors.

“Voice to Vision,” highlighted in our arts preview (page 32), began in 2002 when David Feinberg, associate professor of art at the University, approached Feinstein with the idea to document in art and video the memories of genocide survivors. Each work of art took 18 months to complete, beginning with interviews with survivors from Rwanda, Tibet, Darfur, Laos, and the Holocaust. Feinberg provided his artistic talent and served as a conduit. The survivors provided the imagery, direction, and—although most had never held a paintbrush before—a few of their own brushstrokes.

“If you make a mark, no matter how badly it turns out, it’s information,” Feinberg explains. “If you don’t like something, you figure out what to put next to it or to overlap it. It’s just like words; only it’s a visual language. There’s an aesthetic to the sequence.”

In the artists’ studio, survivors were asked to respond to certain words, sketch quickly on index cards, or to pick up an object associated with a memory and to tell the story behind it. (For one survivor, a sugar bowl evoked wartime starvation and her recollection of rising in the night and eating half her family’s sugar ration.)

The exercises often nudged sleeping and painful memories and brought out stories the survivors hadn’t ever spoken about before. The artists and survivors met four or five times during the creation of a piece, adding layers and elements and then reflecting on the result before developing it further. The direction of each piece was unknown, just as the survivors’ hour-to-hour existence during the genocides was uncertain.

The works of art in “Voice to Vision,” which is dedicated to Feinstein, are permanent testimonies to the crimes and the suffering, but also to perseverance. If the art stirs generations of viewers’ curiosity, draws them in, and reveals to them a bit of their own humanity, the exhibition will have been a success, moving us a little closer to coexistence.

Shelly Fling may be reached at fling003@umn.edu.