Wings of Witness

Pull tabs from soda cans were elevated to a humanistic, historical, and educational importance through student efforts. Under the guidance of history teachers Kevin Daugherty and Jane Fisk, eleven million tabs were collected in 1996-97 by public school children from the Mahomet-Seymour Jr. High, Mahomet Illinois to represent the numbers of persons murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Six million tabs were collected to represent the numbers of deceased Jews. Additionally 5 million tabs were collected to numerically represent the other murdered minorities, including political dissenters, gypsies, pacifists, disabled persons, homosexuals, as well as others who tried to help the persecuted.

A few months after the collection began, Eva Mozes Kor, survivor of Dr. Joseph Mengele's experiments on twins, visited the students and contributed 119 tabs, each representing a member of her family who was destroyed. Kor dropped the tabs, one at a time, into the 890,000 that the students had already collected. With added conviction the class intensified their efforts, posting their collection on the internet in response to their awareness of Holocaust denier web-sites. Syndicated press coverage fueled national awareness of the tab collection. Millions of tabs began arriving. The students met their goal eventually receiving 11 million tabs from all 50 states and eight countries. At a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration, students poured out 6 million tabs in the gymnasium, surrounding the mound with the added 5 million in shopping bags. National and local news media brought this most important school effort into the homes of millions of TV viewers across the nation. At the end of the school year the tabs were sent for recycling.

I learned about this soda tab collection, just after completing a memorial to honor holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, commissioned by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. I felt that the tabs, the dynamic experience of the students who had collected them, and the noble efforts of thousands of tab contributors, had taken on the significance of needing to be preserved through an artistic work. Robert Silverman, then Executive Director of the Champaign - Urbana Jewish Federation, asked the recycler to hold up the recycling of the nearly 5 tons of tabs. In response to my interest in using the soda can tabs as the source material for a massive memorial sculpture, Kevin Daugherty, Rob Silverman and the CEO of the recycling plant, Lou Mervis, made available to me these numerical representations of tragically lost lives. After five months of being challenged by the tabs I invented a soda tab feather made from tabs, aluminum wire, and a two foot aluminum rod, that students could build with me in workshops.

Since 1997, approximately 45,000 participants from 23 states and Canada have constructed soda-tab feathers for WINGS of WITNESS. The project creates a network of many thousands of students linked together through art and hope, constantly enlarging.  Workshops with students are continuing until the all of the millions of collected tabs have been formed into the sculpture's components.

After the first million tabs were converted into feather structures in workshops, I created a site specific method of assembling the feather structures into wings. This process also involves students and communities. The feather structures are laid out in overlapping rows by volunteers, according to a placement guide drawn on plastic sheeting, formed as a massive butterfly. The Butterfly shape is a reference to a poem written by young Pavel Friedmann who was a prisoner at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, and perished at Auschwitz.

"Wings Of Witness" at the William Bremen Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, 4/99

Each time the WINGS of WITNESS assemblage sculpture is exhibited, newly made feathers are added, enlarging the single butterfly. The sculpture-in-progress is a touring exhibition traveling to museums and cultural centers across the country. It is accompanied by a sign-in book of pages containing the signatures, collected under their school's name, of the many thousands of participants. WINGS of WITNESS will have been created by more than fifty-thousand participants, when completed.

WINGS of WITNESS was first assembled as a work-in-progress in 1998 at the MSJH school by the students and community that collected the tabs. It was subsequently exhibited September 1998- February 1999 at Yeshiva University Museum, Manhattan. The following presentation was April-May 1999 at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, where nearly one thousand students constructed feathers during the week of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Containing over one and a half million tabs, the butterfly spanned nearly forty feet across the gallery. This tragic number represents the number of children murdered during the Holocaust.

In the summer of 2000, the massive butterfly was spread on the side of a mountain slope in Simi Valley, California at The Brandeis Bardin Institute, by the counselors-in-training, campers and institute staff.

From September through November 2000 WINGS spanned the changing exhibitions gallery at Holocaust Museum Houston. In June 2001 WINGS of WITNESS was spread in a meadow at historic Ida Lee Park, Loudoun County Virginia, then in 2003 went on to grace a meadow on Long Island Sound at The Nassau County Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center, Glen Cove, NY. In 2005 the wingspan of the massive butterfly traversed the sculpture garden of the Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester County NY. Similar to other installation sites, WINGS of WITNESS was accompanied by a gallery exhibition with a project photo chronology, and a selection of Schrier’s related works of art. Prior to its exhibition at each of these sites, Schrier conducted workshops where several thousand additional area participants made feather structures that have been added to WINGS of WITNESS.

Please see Photo Metamorphosis for dramatic visuals of youth and adult participants and the development of WINGS of WITNESS.