It is a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust, the murder of some 500,000 Roma and Sinti people,

members of a long marginalized and often persecuted minority in Europe.

One way into that history is through the work of an artist who survived it herself.

Jeffrey Brown reports now for our Art and Action series,

which explores the intersection of art and democracy as part of our canvas coverage.

Auschwitz, 1944, Ravens and Smoke in a Dark Sky.

A tattooed forearm floating in space.

The letter Z for the German word for gypsy, used as a derogatory term. The works and actual

serial number of Chaya Stoica, who survived the camps as a young girl, and many decades later

in her 50s turned to art as a way to remember the horror, honor her fellow Romani people,

and warn the world of continuing threats of right-wing nationalism.

Stoica died in 2013 at age 79, a writer, artist, and activist, who says Rutgers Professor Ethel Brooks,

herself of Romany Heritage and chair of the European Roma Rights Center, became a hero to many in her community and beyond.

She was there to say, no, we are, we have this history and we have each other.

We have beauty and we have art and we have stories that should be shared with each other and with the world is just, it's everything.

Chaya Stoika making visible at the drawing center, a museum in New York, is the first major U.S. exhibition on the artist,

with more than 60 paintings and drawings made between 1992 and 2011.

Not documentary in style, but acts of memory and imagination,

based on her own experiences and stories she was told.

Stoiko was self-taught, often working at her kitchen table in Vienna.

But says exhibition curator Lynn Cook, she developed a sophisticated style of contemporary artmaking.

She restlessly experimented with processes and materials and invented new vocabularies

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