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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

About the exhibition

This exhibition explores some of the ways in which the Holodomor was depicted during the 20th century, particularly though art. The artistic depiction of genocide is challenging. Should horrors be depicted directly and graphically — with skeletons or dead bodies? Or should the approach be more understated, providing the viewers or readers with just enough to allow them to create the images of horror in their own minds? This exhibition explores the extremely varied approaches that artists over more than seven decades have used to tackle the Holodomor. The exhibition also includes period primary sources that shed light on the Holodomor as a historical event, how it was portrayed in the press, and how Ukrainians in the diaspora responded to it.

We make no attempt at scholarly history or to summarize the extensive scholarly and popular literature that now exists on the topic. Instead, the historical content of this exhibition focuses on primary sources and other materials that are in the permanent collections of the UHEC. For those interested in more historical detail, there are a number of recent books in English that deal with the Holodomor and its broader context. We particularly recommend Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder and Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. For a more general overview of Ukrainian history from ancient times through the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, we recommend the concise and very readable presentation in The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy.

This exhibition also does not attempt to cover Holodomor commemorations or monuments, despite the fact that these are topics to which the UHEC has a special connection. Since either topic could easily be the subject of an entire exhibition in its own right, we have chosen to not cover those topics here in order to keep the scope of the exhibition within realistic bounds. There has been considerable scholarly work on these topics, among which are articles and a monograph by Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek.

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