Holocaust Museum Houston

The O'Kane Gallery is collaborating with the Holocaust Museum Houston to exhibit photographer Mark Seliger's black and white images
of Holocaust survivors alongside a selection of hand-crafted butterflies that have been given to the Holocaust Museum Houston in memory of
children who were killed during the Nazi era. Mark Seliger is probably best known for his celebrity portraits including more than 100 covers photographed for Rolling Stone magazine, but he is also author of When They Came to Take My Father, a book of photographs of Holocaust survivors including accounts of their experiences during the war. Seliger is a native Texan whose interest in the Holocaust began with visits to Three Brothers Bakery in Houston where he met the Jucker brothers, the bakery's owners who themselves survived the concentration camps. Seliger's black and white photographs of survivors like the Jucker's, capture the complexity of their lives, at once full of painful memories but also unveiling a human nobility.

While Seliger's photographs depict individuals who survived the Holocaust, the hundreds of butterflies on exhibition are a selection from
more than one million collected through the Holocaust Museum Houston's Butterfly Project, begun in 1995, and remind viewers about
the children who did not survive. The butterflies are crafted in a variety of materials including fabric, wood, paper, and even colored glass and
celebrate the diversity of personality and spirit of the children they memorialize.

The O'Kane Gallery exhibition serves as a complement to UHD's Common Freshman Reader for 2017, a book by Jennifer Teege entitled, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past. Teege, who was adopted at an early age, later discovered that her biological grandfather was a notorious commandant in a Nazi concentration camp. The gallery anticipates Teege will join us at the exhibition reception on September 15th.