Art, essay contest winners

Kaitlin Troy’s sculpture, “Perpetual Outcast,” won first place in the high school division of the Spokane Community Observance of the Holocaust Visual Arts Contest. She is a junior at Gonzaga Prep.

Here is her artist statement:

‘Perpetual Outcast’

This sculpture depicts a man standing behind a fence, crestfallen. He is trapped inside the barbed wire cage of a concentration camp. The wire in the fence depicts the words, “The devil in human form.” This was a label given to the Jews by Franz’s mother in the “Poisonous Mushroom,” a story published in the 1938 children’s book Der Giftpilz. The book was written by an anti-Semite, Julius Streicher, who wrote the story as a piece of propaganda to teach children the so-called evils of Jewish people. I wanted to show how this kind of propaganda directly affected the Jews and ultimately helped to force them into the devastating life most lived in the concentration camps.