LOWER MANHATTAN — Christopher Saucedo lost his brother, a firefighter, on Sept. 11. Todd Stone watched from his rooftop as the Twin Towers were engulfed in fire and smoke. For three days, Colleen Mulrenan MacFarlane waited for her father to return home, after he worked nearly nonstop on recovery efforts in the days after the World Trade Center collapsed.
Fifteen years after the deadliest terror attack in modern American history, Saucedo, Stone and Mulreanan MacFarlane, all artists, will showcase their responses to 9/11, in the first art exhibition ever at the National September 11 Memorial Museum.
Artist Todd Stone's "Witness," one of several paintings he created from the rooftop of his TriBeCa apartment. (Courtesy of the 9/11 Memorial Museum)
The exhibit, “Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11,” will feature the works of 13 artists, all from New York, some of whom lived and worked in Lower Manhattan, and all of whom were deeply affected by 9/11. It's slated to begin Sept. 12.
The museum, which opened two years ago, features scores of artifacts from 9/11 — both monumental, like the 58-ton steps that hundreds of survivors ran down to safety, and personal, like a handwritten note pleading for rescue, touched with bloody fingerprints and thrown from the 84th floor. But this exhibit will be the first to feature artwork inspired by Sept. 11, museum officials said.
“Artists, like all of us, struggled to comprehend the unfathomable destruction and loss of innocent life," said 9/11 Memorial Museum Director Alice Greenwald in a statement. "They responded the way they knew best – through their art. Using their chosen media and particular styles, many fine artists created works that invite an encounter with an unfamiliar reality, asking not so much that we revisit the horrors of that day but that we try to make sense of what was left in its wake.”
Several of the artists incorporate images or video from the day, one uses ash from the day's smoke clouds in his piece, another includes burnt paper that flew across the East River to Brooklyn.
Artist Eric Fischl's large scale bronze sculpture, "Tumbling Woman" depicts a woman who has fallen, or jumped from the burning towers.
Since 2001 Eric Fischl has created several versions of the "Tumbling Woman" sculpture varying in mediums and sizes. (Courtesy of the 9/11 Memorial Museum)
Fischl, who lost a friend in the attacks, told The New York Times that the emotional work was “the clearest illustration of the level of horror” of that day, but also offered some sense of hope.
“I extended the arm of the woman because I had this fantasy that if this sculpture is out in public people will reach out and grab the hand,” he said. “Almost in an attempt to connect and also maybe to slow the tumbling down.”
