NEW YORK.- From March 17 through June 30, 2002, The Jewish Museum will present Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, an exhibition accompanied by extensive education programs, forums for discussion, and a major publication. At the core of this initiative is a selection of recent works by thirteen internationally recognized artists, all of whom make new and daring use of imagery taken from the Nazi era. "Obsessed with a history that they seem impelled to overcome, these artists ask us to examine what these images of Nazism might mean in our lives today," comments Joan Rosenbaum, the Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum. "These artworks draw us into the past, leading us to question how we understand the appalling forces that produced the Holocaust. These works also keep us alert to the present, with its techniques of persuasion that are so easily taken for granted, its symbols of oppression that are too readily ignored." The exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art has been conceived and organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, the Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum. "Over the past half-dozen years," Mr. Kleeblatt says, "we have seen a shared iconography emerge among certain artists who are one or two generations removed from the Nazi era. Departing from earlier art relating to the Holocaust, which has tended to focus on the victims, these artists confront us with the Nazis' faces, their apparatus of power, their notoriously effective propaganda. In deploying this highly charged imagery, the artists use the cerebral language of conceptual art. They bring the images out of the past and into the present, so that our own identities and beliefs come into play as we engage the artwork."