Human Family: Works on Paper by Otávio Roth

Kean University Galleries and Collections and the Human Rights Institute are pleased to announce a solo exhibition in the Human Rights Institute Gallery, Human Family: Works on Paper by Otávio Roth, on view September 22, 2026, through December 4, 2026. The opening reception will be held on Monday, September 28 from 5:30 – 7:30 P.M. in the Human Rights Institute Gallery. The Human Rights Institute Gallery, located on the first floor in the Nancy Thompson Learning Commons, is open to the public Monday through Friday 10:00 A.M. – 4:00 P.M. 

For the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate the myriad of self-determination statements it has inspired globally. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was the international community's response to the atrocities committed during World War II. In 1978, Otávio Roth created a series of woodcut prints on handmade paper illustrating all thirty articles of the UDHR, commissioned by the United Nations, where they remain on display. Roth’s work as an artist and educator emphasized the importance of a plural society, seeking to represent the collective as well as individual characteristics “of all members of the human family,” to borrow from the UDHR’s preamble. Eventually he created children’s books in multiple languages, illustrating the articles for the youngest members of society. All thirty prints, documentary photographs, and a participatory art installation called A Árvore [The Tree], that grows as students add their own paper leaves, will be on display. 

Otávio Roth (1952-1993) was a pioneering papermaker and printmaker in Brazil. He studied at the School of Advertising and Marketing (ESPM), São Paulo, and at Hornsey College of Art, London. In 1979, Roth founded the first papermaking workshop in Brazil. That same year, Roth was honored with the APCA Award for Best Engraver by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics. Notably, Roth's portfolio of 30 woodcut prints of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is on permanent exhibition at the UN headquarters in New York, Geneva, and Vienna. Roth also received several awards for children's literature, as an illustrator and writer. He collaborated on several publications with the writer Ruth Rocha, including an adaptation for children on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.