Local Artisans Reflect on Holocaust in New Exhibit at Schlow Library’s Reopened Gallery

Personal vignettes, poetry, paintings and woodblock art come together to tell our community’s story in a poignant exhibition this month titled, “Reflections: Americans and the Holocaust,” at Schlow Centre Region Library’s reopened Betsy Rodgers Allen Gallery. 

The exhibit includes 15 works by local artisans created in response to “Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries,” which is an educational initiative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the American Library Association. The traveling exhibition comes to Penn State’s University Libraries from Jan. 29 through March 10 at Pattee and Paterno Library on the University Park campus. 

Curated in partnership with the Art Alliance of Central PA, “Reflections” marks a return to in-person gallery access for Schlow Library visitors for the first time since March 2020. In its call for entries, the partners asked local artists to submit works that considered the traveling exhibition’s examination of “the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war, and genocide.” 

The poetry and art exhibit will be on display during Schlow’s normal operating hours through Jan. 30 in the first floor Downsborough Community Room. Like the library, 211 S. Allen St. in State College, the gallery is free and open to the public. 

Complementing the exhibit is a poetry reading event at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 11, in Schlow’s Zoom room. Admission is free with advance registration requested.