Artist Joan Benefiel is a committee’s choice to create the next sculpture at the Clinton Presidential Center to take the place of a sapling from Anne Frank’s chestnut tree originally dedicated to her in 2015.
Benefiel’s unnamed prototype features a large chestnut tree branch “violently broken off” to symbolize the horror of the Holocaust. She said she hopes to have the community vote on a name for the piece.
Inscribed on the tree is a quote from Frank: “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.”
Figuration Studio is Benefiel’s artwork space in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Benefiel said she only wished her husband, Jeremy, could have been in Little Rock to celebrate because it was “a partnership and a collaboration for our studio together.”
“Our family is really excited,” she said. “As artists and people in general to get to do a project like this, to get to do something that really means so much, is everything for us as artists. So we’re thrilled.”
Benefiel’s husband is Jewish, and she said their children are “old enough now” to be “curious” and “wanting to learn” about their heritage.
“It’s just been such a great opportunity for us to start to have those conversations,” she said. “Which is just like a little example of, I think, what it will be for all kinds of folks, all kinds of families and people of all ages, so it’s really meaningful.”
Her sculpture will be enclosed by five 10-foot-tall etched glass panels. One is dedicated to Frank, one contains excerpts from President Bill Clinton’s second inaugural address, and the rest convey messages from three other violent, discriminatory acts — the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Central High crisis and the internment of Japanese Americans in Arkansas during World War II.
The Sculpture at the River Market committee, the Clinton Foundation and the Sisterhood of the congregation of B’nai Israel will fund the artist’s work and installation at an undecided location at the William J. Clinton Library and Museum.
Jane Rogers, president of the committee, said the sculpture should be available at the center for visitors by next May.
“An absolutely wonderful piece of public art was chosen to convey the important message from Anne Frank,” Rogers said. “It shows an extension and good things happening at the end of a dark period. And I think that speaks to each one of the items, or each one of these situations on the panels that are already there at the Clinton Library.”