Art, healing and hope: Wassmuth Center opens up a new education center in Boise
After five years of work, the Wassmuth Center opens it's new Philip E. Batt Education Center.
Broadcast on:
11 Oct 2024
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The new education building covers 6,000 square feet and cost $6.4 million to build.( The Wassmuth Center for Human Rights)
Nestled between the Anne Frank Memorial and the library in downtown Boise sits the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. It was founded 22 years ago to build the only memorial on U.S. soil dedicated to Anne Frank.
Since then, the Memorial has continued to expand, and Thursday it opened a new 6,000 square foot education center.
(upbeat music) From the studios of Boise State Public Radio News, I'm Chema Cottet, this is Idaho Matters. Nestled between the Anne Frank Memorial and the library in downtown Boise, since the Wasmus Center for Human Rights, it was founded 22 years ago to build the only memorial on U.S. soil dedicated to Anne Frank. Well, since then, the memorial has continued to expand, and today it's opening a new 6,000 square foot education center. Arjulie Luketta took a tour of the new building ahead of the grand opening, which is this evening, so let's tag along. - I'm Christina Bruce Vennian, and I have the great fortune of being the executive director here at the Wasmus Center for Human Rights. Back in the 1980s and 90s, when the Aryan Nation compound was up there nearby in Hayden Lake, Bill Wasmuth was one of the people that formed a coalition of community members who eventually were able to shut down the Aryan Nation compound through bankruptcy. They bombed his home, he survived it, he got louder, and then he went on eventually to create a Northwest coalition against malicious harassment, so that's where the name Wasmuth comes from. The architects, or said architects designed the building, and they were very intentional about the idea of hope and light and not getting bogged down in the darkness of things, and so you'll see a lot of those features. - We like to talk about the art of human rights as another way of connecting with people on the ideas and the issues, so in the building we have 28 unique art pieces that were done by mostly Idaho artists from different backgrounds, and you'll see them kind of all throughout, so the idea is just how are the other ways that we can be thinking about. These topics that can sometimes feel really heavy, but also that there are a lot of ways to engage with them. We have this mobile here, this piece right here, Transcendent Justice was done by Benjamin Victor, he's a local sculptor, but he is the youngest sculptor to have four pieces already in what's called the Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. And he's doing work all around the country, and this was his way of sort of reimagining the traditional blindfolded skills of justice kind of thing, so coming around the corner here is kind of tucked unfortunately in a hallway, but is a timeline of the history of human rights in Idaho, so another really interesting opportunity to engage with what our own history has been in Idaho, as well as the reason that the building is named after Philip Bat, who was the former governor of Idaho, was his work around starting the Idaho Human Rights Commission working on rights for farm workers and other things, and so this is something that we're already building programming around as well, 'cause I think it's, especially nowadays, really important to be understanding our history and where we've been and how that can inform where we go in the future. And then we'll go ahead and head up the stairs. So this popsicle sun is really about six feet wide, six feet tall, and what would be the rays on the sun are represented by a multicolored popsicles, like the kind we would buy in the summertime, and this young boy that is in this art piece right here, his name is Isaiah Anderson, and he's a really good example of how even at a young age, we can be the light in our community. He was one of those kids that just from early on really understood what it means to take care of our neighbors, to be welcoming, to be kind. Unfortunately, he passed away at six years old, but his family asked us to honor him in some way in the building, and we have a coloring book that features several stories about him, but when we were working on the coloring book and the parents had sent us some little stories, and one of his favorite things was to make sure they always had popsicles to share with people, and Stephanie Inman, who's the local graphic design artist, had this really lovely vision of sort of his favorite saying which was be the light and the popsicle sun, so this is a piece that we're really excited to have in the building and I think embodies just a good reminder of we can all do our piece. This is a multi-use flexible space, and we're really grateful that we have both the art and the technology to really be able to do a lot of our education and training, both in-person and virtually as well, so we have a variety of programs really for learners of all ages, so we do everything from programs for young children, kindness camp, compassion crew, we have a program for high schoolers called Wausmith Youth Leadership Program, we have a Human Rights Education Fellowship, we do programs for the community, and then we have a conference room in a library and that has a big collection of books that just are in a variety of interesting and heavy topics often, so. And then this room is something that we're still building programming around, but this features a technology that was created by the USC Show of Foundation, so Steven Spielberg started that foundation after he did the movie Schindler's List, and this is the one space in our building that is really dedicated to the Holocaust, we do Human Rights Education, which of course includes that, it is not only limited to the Holocaust, but it remains a really powerful example of the worst of what can happen, and so in this room, and again, this is still a little bit under development, but we have this, you can see the screen, this technology that features a life size, a person appears on the screen, and they are either a survivor or a liberator, and you have, there's kind of the speaker up here, and if you stand in that circle in the carpet, you can ask them questions and interact with them. We also have a model called the spiral of injustice, some of you might be familiar with that, but the spiral is one way of looking at how a community or a nation or a world can go from really down spiral to sort of the worst of what we can do, and so that spiral looks like a tornado, and the top level is language, and that's where it starts, right? It's how we begin with othering, how we talk about other groups, and then if we don't interrupt the spiral, at that point, it can continue to avoidance, discrimination, violence, and elimination. So those two ideas of dignity, and then the spiral of injustice, and kind of what it takes to interrupt that spiral, those are a lot of the way, that's a lot of how we focus on, kind of rather than a specific, it's really more about how do we give people the information, how do we learn from history and connect it to today, how can that lead to informed action? So there are a lot of ways that we approach this, and again, education is our core mission, so we have, for better for us, a rich landscape of material we know to draw from. - That was Wasmus Center for Human Rights, Executive Director, Christina Bruce Benion, taking our Julie Lucetta on a tour of the new Philip E. Bat Education Building in Boise. The new edition was funded by 650 donors, and it cost more than $6 million. It opens its doors to the public tonight at 5.30, and everyone is welcome to drop by. Thanks so much for listening to Idaho Matters. Boise State Public Radio and Idaho Matters are members of the NPR Network. It's an independent coalition of public media podcasters. You can find more shows in the network wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jamak Adet, we'll see you tomorrow. 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