Nazi propaganda will be touring the country in 2013 to educate the country about biased political messages in the media.
Heather Sealy Lineberry, senior curator and associate director of the ASU Art Museum on the Tempe campus, was invited to a panel at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., last month to help design the traveling exhibit.
The traveling exhibit will come out of the Holocaust museum’s permanent collection titled “The State of Deception, The Power of Nazi Propaganda.”
The exhibit has been part of the Holocaust museum’s permanent collection since January 2009, and the museum management is redesigning the project so it can travel across the country, Sealy Lineberry said.
In order to prepare the collection for the road, it will have to be condensed for the museums at which it will be displayed. The collection currently fills a 500,000-square-foot space.
The exhibit features paintings that depict Hitler as a messiah, and even a children’s board game that encouraged the extermination of the Jewish people.
It also includes videos documenting Hitler’s rallies and pages from anti-Semitic coloring books. These artifacts demonstrate how propaganda can be used to shape public opinion.
The exhibit probably won’t be ready to travel until 2013, but hopefully the exhibit will come to Phoenix when it’s finished, Sealy Lineberry said.
She said she was invited out to the panel because the ASU Art Museum has featured challenging and contemporary subject matter that explored societal issues in the past.
Sealy Lineberry was able to add to the discussion about how the exhibit can be redesigned to fit the needs of museums and audiences because of her experience at ASU.
Curators from The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Field Museum in Chicago, and others were also present.
The exhibit is part of a 10-year initiative by the Holocaust museum to educate the public about propaganda.
This exhibit has been well received by the public in Washington, D.C., and Sealy Lineberry said the management of the Holocaust Museum wanted to bring the exhibit across the country “where the conversation can continue to build.”
Joanna Wasserman, the education initiatives manager at the Holocaust Museum, said she wants the exhibition to help people recognize propaganda in politics.
“We want people to think critically about the world around them,” Wasserman said.
The initiative will also include an online course for journalism students. She said very often the emphasis of journalism education is on technical skills, but finding the truth behind the propaganda is a responsibility journalists need to be aware of.
Wasserman said she hopes this course can be a resource for students across the country.
Steven Luckert, the curator of the collection, said the Holocaust Museum is in the very early stages of planning the exhibit, and the details of the new exhibit hadn’t been determined.
Luckert said the traveling exhibit idea received an enthusiastic response from a cross section of museum curators who attended the panel in October.
He said the propaganda education initiative is relevant and needed to help people recognize language of inclusion and exclusion between groups that can have very negative consequences.
“Propaganda is still a force in our own society,” Luckert said.
Reach the reporter at mary.shinn@asu.edu
Want to get the latest ASU news in your inbox every day? Sign up for our new e-mail newsletter.
