There must be as many works of art on the horrors humanity has endured as there are horrors. More, one might think, but our ever-evolving human history suggests otherwise — or, rather, a certain practice of that discipline, which excavates ever-deeper layers of unwelcome truths and insists on their recognition. To insist in this way — to witness — belongs as much to the artist as the historian.

There is, too, no shortage of thought on the aesthetics of atrocity, which is to say that Jehanne Dubrow’s step into this space is as brave as it is bold. In Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity, Dubrow grapples with questions canonized by philosophers, writers, and poets before her — Theodore Adorno, Susan Sontag, Paul Celan, to name but the most obvious few.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

I don’t remember if my parents ever told me these things were illegal to possess. But somehow I knew not to speak about the objects everywhere in our house, the dissident posters, flyers, stickers, T-shirts, and even samizdat postage stamps that had been sent unlawfully through the Polish mail as an act of resistance.

My parents were always bringing these objects home from their work at the U.S. embassy. When my father met with contacts in Warsaw or further north in Gdańsk, he often returned with illicit souvenirs stuffed into the pockets of his suit jacket. At home, he would place them one by one on the kitchen table. I would sit then and touch each item — an enamel pin, perhaps — studying the piece, trying to understand how something so small could make me feel so much. Anxiety. Fear. A pinprick of excitement. The sense that I was holding the needled shape of history.

Dark bronze. The size and weight of a medallion. Or a coin, two inches across.

On one side, carved in relief, the words: GDAŃSK — SIERPIEŃ — 1980. A city. A month. A year. And above that, a stylized, crackling image of Poland — its distinctive pentagonal shape — with a heart placed at the center of the country.

On the other side, that famous logo: SOLIDARNOŚĆ, which means “solidarity.” Five figures in the foreground hold the word aloft. And behind the word stands a crowd of people, their faces reduced to hundreds of tiny circles.

Perhaps because it is the very opposite of ephemeral — heavy and oversize in the hand — this piece refuses to be as disposable as all the other Solidarność souvenirs I no longer own. It’s displayed on a shelf in my office. It’s there when I do my own work, the little labor of writing. Sometimes I sit the medallion in the palm of my hand and think about its heaviness, how — if I grip it tightly enough — the metal leaves a pale impression in my skin.

As reporter and essayist Lawrence Weschler writes in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

It came surging forward like a crowd: the S hurrying the straggling O along, the A and the R striding confidently, the dot over the I and the accents over the second S and C reading like heads craning forward to where the C was pointing, the N holding its rippling banner proudly aloft — the red-and-white flag of Poland. The word itself — SOLIDARNOŚĆ (“solidarity”) — tapped into a reservoir of communal memories, memories of more than a century of worker activism on behalf of a socialist ideal which had been betrayed by thirty-five years of inept, corrupt state-bureaucratic practice. The word reclaimed that ideal, and the flag pegged it as specifically Polish.

The logo wasn’t trying to sell a product, like a fizzy drink or a pint of ice cream. It was an expression of a particular moment and a particular place.

This was Poland in the early 1980s. Our phones were bugged by the government. The police occasionally stopped my parents’ car, demanding to see our diplomatic passports. After the imposition of martial law in December 1981, the 7:00 p.m. curfew meant that there were many nights when my mother and father did not come home. They slept at the U.S. embassy while I waited for their return at home, the house silent and surveilled, a white stuccoed box at the end of a gravel drive. Beyond the iron fence of our property, there was an angry city, furtive complaints like the squawk of winter crows.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash explains the conditions that led to the formation of the independent trade union known as Solidarność:

The economic crisis was thus a necessary, but by no means a sufficient, cause of the revolution. The decisive causes are to be found in the realm of consciousness rather than of being. By 1980 this unique society, at once sick and self-confident, frustrated but united, faced a weak and divided power elite which no longer had the means to win voluntary popular support yet had not the will to command obedience by physical coercion.

In his book The Polish Revolution, Garton Ash calls the work of Solidarity “the first velvet revolution.” The true Velvet Revolution — a transition of power engineered without violence — took place in Czechoslovakia nearly ten years later. Solidarity was therefore “a pioneering Polish form of massive social self-organization, with the general objective of achieving, by means of peaceful pressure and negotiation, the end of communism.”

The Solidarity movement, led by a shipyard electrician named Lech Wałęsa, would eventually result in anti-Communist speech throughout the Eastern Bloc. By late 1989, less than a decade after the formation of Solidarity, Soviet rule would begin to crumble behind the Iron Curtain, knocked down the way one might sledgehammer a concrete wall.

Once, for a book of poetry about my childhood in Poland, I tried to write about that revolutionary time. Two stanzas in, there is the logo, pushing the poem forward: “one // flag flapping its red letters / into a satin tatter // because this is the century / of slivers and scraps.”

In the poem, I call this era the “beauty / of the dustbin.” The logo looks torn, as though it has been stomped on by soldiers, shredded by tanks driving down the avenues. The letters endure, despite invasion and Communist rule. “Poland is not yet lost” goes the opening line of Poland’s national anthem, a song about survival and the hope for an independent nation state. The logo is tattered by the violence of history, but its raggedness is a kind of beauty too.

It was my earliest encounter with graphic design. I was five years old. That red — almost a burning orange — flickered in my dreams. The shape of those letters, hand-drawn and sturdy, floated in front of me like an afterimage imprinted on the retina.

It was the first time I understood that text could be design. Text could be image, each letter sentient and expressive. It touched my sight and seemed to speak or to sing, to carry a fragrance, to stir all my senses.

It was the first time I understood that text could be a confrontation. It wasn’t simply that the word implied revolution, a stance against totalitarianism. It was the logo itself, rendered in sturdy, animate letters. The shape of SOLIDARNOŚĆ gave a moving body to civil disobedience.

Years later, as an adult, I would watch a documentary about the famous typeface known as Helvetica. A sans serif, all smooth lines and accessible curves, Helvetica aspires to perfect impartiality. It makes any text readable. It makes any product feel modern, slick as stainless steel. Helvetica orders and instructs. It peddles and hawks. Look — there is Helvetica on the signs in a subway, on the walls of museums, on the hoods of cars.

The letters of the Solidarność logo reject neutrality. They have none of Helvetica’s austerity. They seem to say that, in the fight against autocracy, even a typeface must take a position. The letters are biased — that is, they angle toward the viewer, demanding our action in response.

In more recent years, the iconic logo has been repurposed in Poland. In 2020, the government passed near-total abortion bans. Protesters demonstrated in the streets, the old logo remade to fight a new tyranny. Now the signs read “Wypierdalać” (Fuck Off). But the same orange red. The same furious lettering.

Meanwhile, the organization known as Solidarity no longer represents the strength of collective, progressive bargaining. Instead, as Andrew Higgins explains in The New York Times, “the union is now closely aligned with Poland’s intolerant nationalist governing party, Law and Justice.” Today, Solidarity “lobbies actively on the government’s side against gay men, lesbians and anyone else it views as insufficiently respectful of the Polish nation and its traditional values.”

Maybe this is a warning. The story says: good design has the capacity to change us. The story says: good design does not have to be used for good. The story says: any symbol can be turned upon itself.

A poster in the public square.

A banner.

A flag waving from a sharpened pole.

I want to believe that the logo of Solidarność still vibrates with righteous feeling, that it is not contaminated by these recent failures of Solidarity.

Today, when I hold the bronze medallion, I’m sent back to that kitchen of my youth in Poland. Somewhere behind me, a cast-iron radiator hums and shivers, venting brief gasps of air. The windows are iced over with December. I smell dinner on the nearby stove, cabbage and carrots, the dense scent of butter. For a moment, I am safe in that distant house of the past, but I am also terrified, aware — as I always was — of the threat that marched near our gates, what it meant to live in a nation with so much barbed history.

The letters carved into the medallion are imperfect and asymmetrical. But perhaps they still show the touch of a defiant human hand.

Jehanne Dubrow’s Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity is out now from the University of New Mexico Press.