THE BUTTON PROJECT

Bristol Holocaust & Genocide Center, Fall River, MA

2026

1,500,000

The Button Project tallies 1,500,000 Jewish children, murdered during the Holocaust 1933-1945. The counting is bracingly literal. 1,500,000 buttons / 1,500,000 lost children

This Project evokes the Auschwitz Museum, which also tells the story of the Holocaust with quantity. In Poland, there are stacks of suitcases, piles of eyeglasses, and a crush of cooking pots. In the museum, there is also a mountain of 110,000 shoes. The loafers are dusty, cracked, and tragic. This ghostly collection includes 8,000 children’s pairs. The shoes of Auschwitz lie on top of one another in a heartbreaking, overwhelmingly-huge mass. Their sheer volume offers a window into the scale of the genocide: six million Jews, three million Soviet prisoners of war, two million Poles, 500,000 Romani, 300,000 Serbs, 300,000 people with disabilities, and on, and on. I have been there; I have seen it. The Button Project continues this arithmetical memorialization. It is a reminder that these numbers are more than statistics.

The Button project is personal. I am a father to three young Jewish boys. It could have been us. The memorial is an admonition that this evil didn’t happen a long time ago in black and white photographs. The genocide happened in modern Europe, with contemporary cruelty, at industrial scale. This tragedy is real; the world let it happen.

The metaphor of the button, an intimate, often overlooked object, presented at such a large scale, is staggering. 1,500,000 children is a tragedy at a number that we cannot fully fathom. The limitation of our imagination makes that much suffering impossible to conceptualize. The Button Project, with its mournful grace, affirms our commitment to peace and the sanctity of our children.

THE BUTTON PROJECT

For the Button Project, I will present the 1.5 million buttons with unvarnished clarity. I will build almost indestructible cases to display the button at their full breadth. I will commission 12 double sided laminated glass panels at 96”” H x 48“’ W, with a stainless steel frame around the outside. The glass panels will sandwich a 1/2” gap, filled with buttons. They will cover their maximum surface area. The buttons will create vertical screens, dot patterns, that show the full scale of the loss. The stainless steel frames will contain air vents to allow moisture to escape from the glass case.

I will install the glass cases around the edge of the courtyard. This installation will delineate a location for quiet reflection. My intention is that with shafts of sunlight passing through the buttons, or snowflakes falling gently in winter, that the buttons will be beautiful. I want this work to have an incongruity between the upfront grace and the underlying horror. J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship at the MFA has this same dichotomy. It draws us in with a rainbow palette and then turns us with images of human suffering. With the Button Project, I hope that the loveliness of the buttons and elegance of the courtyard make us feel the absence of the 1,500,000 children that much deeper.