The artistic legacy of genocide emanates from many quarters: outsiders and insiders warning about genocide or massacres in posters and paintings; images by survivors that include art created by children in the aftermath of genocide; imaginative, surrealistic, and what may be called postmodern art executed under the worst circumstances in order to convey a specific message about genocide via art. Artists, often seen as social outsiders, articulate various reasons for presenting genocidal subjects in art: witnessing; helping to commemorate or create an alternative form of memory to inform another generation of the event and its danger; use of fragmented, deconstructed visual forms instead of historical narratives as a means of telling the story; and warnings about lessons from the past that may bear on the future.

The styles of such critical artistic representation vary according to the chronological time of the genocidal event...