For two hours almost every night, Chattanooga artist Jennifer Lewis sits down at her dining room table to resume a task that is both tedious and spiritual.
Using acrylic pens in assorted colors, she draws the Star of David symbol over and over again. Each star takes two pen strokes and consists of two overlapping triangles.
It takes about 10 seconds to draw each star, and Lewis counts silently in her head until the tally reaches 100. Then, she says “one hundred” out loud to signal her family that she is taking a short pause. If family members need to ask her a question, the polite thing is to wait until one of these breathers.
The Star of David symbols, which represent Jewish identity, are applied to an 11-inch-by-17-inch card stock. By layering the stars, Lewis said she can get 20,000 on each canvas. Her goal is to produce 300 boards with 20,000 stars on each one by the end of 2025. That’s 6 million stars, which will register immediately with some as the approximate number of Jews who died in the Holocaust.
“I realized I didn’t know what 6 million looked like,” Lewis said.