Art engages broader audiences and raises awareness of genocide in Rwanda, says Kwibuka20 international creative director Stacie Chaiken in the spring 2014 issue of PastForward.

USC Shoah Foundation’s academic year programming kicks off next Monday with a screening of the documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who made art during and after World War II.

Stunning works of art, film and writing have once again been given top prizes at Chapman University and The 1939 Society’s 16th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest.

You never know what you are going to discover in the Visual History Archive. Each one of the 53,000 testimonies in the Archive tells a different story of life before, during and after the individual’s experience with genocide.

Over 100 students and teachers who participated in USC Shoah Foundation’s testimony-based art and writing project in Hungary this year came together last week for a closing celebration that honored the students’ achievements and showcased their thoughtful responses to testimony.

Ukrainian students once again demonstrated their artistic skill and sensitivity to testimony for this year’s “Sources of Tolerance” summer camp in Ukraine.

The contest is open to all secondary students, asking them to watch clips of testimony from the Visual History Archive and create artistic comic strip-style pieces inspired by the stories they heard.

The art is black and white and full color; impressionistic and starkly realistic; hopeful for the future and filled with sorrow for the past. And it was all inspired by testimony from the Visual History Archive.

Hungarian Officer for Educational Rights Dr Lajos Aáry-Tamás was so inspired by the artwork created by students for USC Shoah Foundation’s annual art project that he became the first to host a traveling exhibition of selected artworks in his own office at the Ministry of Human Capacities.

Painter David Kassan has sat with survivors of the Holocaust for countless hours during the past five years, carefully listening to their stories of pain, grief, resilience and quiet victory.