New Boise human rights education building will open next year with unique art pieces
The Wassmuth Center for Human Rights’s newest project has been nearly five years in the making and has more than doubled in cost, but center leaders are finally preparing to open it — and are ready to tell the public what will be inside.
Dan Prinzing, executive director of the Wassmuth Center, announced last week that the center plans to hold its grand opening for an education center this June.
Initially, Wassmuth Center for Human Rights leaders were told it would take $3.2 million to build an education center next to the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. However, skyrocketing construction costs caused the project cost to jump to $6.3 million, according to Prinzing. The project has raised 97% of those funds through donations, just $160,000 away from its goal.
“In 2019, we started a capital campaign,” Prinzing said at a public event in front of the memorial on Oct. 22. “And then there was an international pandemic. And all of a sudden, (there were) supply chain issues, cost escalation, project delays. But through it all, what we have so experienced is a community that has embraced a project funded by individuals, businesses, and foundations.”
Prinzing said creating a place to educate and advocate for human rights and dignity was worth the extra cost and wait.
“This, as far as we’re concerned, really is the true Idaho,” Prinzing said of the project. “Maybe we’ve got a reputation that we fight upon occasion. But the recognition, the value of human dignity and diversity, how we come together as a community — that is really the purpose behind the building.”
He also detailed some of the 21 art pieces that visitors will be able to find inside the education center. The artists were all inspired by the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is carved in stone at the memorial site.
The art installations will include a mobile made up of of 500 glass wings, a tribute to Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died in 2020, a mosaic symbolizing “the power of education to break through the darkness,” and a six-foot “popsicle sun” that represents a local boy who died in the Treasure Valley.
Another planned permanent exhibit will allow visitors to feel like they’re asking questions to Holocaust survivors through Dimensions in Testimony developed by the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation. Video images of survivors would appear to answer the questions, using footage drawn from lengthy interviews about their experience.
The education building will be named The Philip E. Batt Building after former Governor Phil Batt, who died in March.
“He said of all the honors he’d ever received in his lifetime, this was the one that mattered the most,” Prinzing said.
