Created: Aug 30, 2011 Last Updated: Aug 30, 2011
Flint Gennari: A CITY BURNING: Flint Gennari's "City Burning," photograph appears in the collection "9.11...NYC...The Days After." (Courtesy of Art for Healing NYC)
NEW YORK??I was angry, I was depressed. I didn't want to call anybody. I didn't know who to call or what to do. I just buried myself in my studio for like a week, and I wrote poetry and I did art,? recalled Loren Ellis, as she sat in her Upper West Side gallery nearly 10 years after the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Ellis founded a nonprofit organization called Art for Healing NYC. One of the organization's projects has been to compile art created by New Yorkers from all five boroughs, all walks of life, and all skill levels into an intimate little package?a book called ?9.11...NYC...The Days After.?
One piece that struck Ellis as particularly powerful, and which is featured as a photograph in the book, is a bronze sculpture by Meredith Bergmann from Manhattan.
A woman stands nude, her hands held up in front of her face, her eyes closed?an airplane penetrates each of her hands.
The images range from a woodcut print of a rescue dog, to a photograph of tourists wearing masks that protect their lungs from the harmful dust, to a still shot from a film showing a Native American in front of the burning buildings.
Sarah Yuster of Staten Island is one of the featured artists. Her portrait of a firefighter was inspired by the words of her brother, who survived the attack on 2 World Trade Center.
?The firefighters kept everyone calm, guiding and assuring us that we would be fine. I tried to remember the face of each one as he passed us going up; they had to know they might never come down, even if you couldn't see it in their eyes. ... I felt that someone should look at their faces because it might be the last time anyone did," he told her.
Yuster chose battalion chief Ed Ellison because ?he is seasoned, intelligent, and has a face that reflects experience and pathos.?
Staten Island has a proportionately high number of firefighters among its inhabitants, losing 80 first responders in the calamity. Yuster remembers the bagpipe funeral airs that played a constant soundtrack in her neighborhood for nearly a year.
THE DAYS AFTER: Artist and Director of Art for Healing NYC Loren Ellis sits in her gallery, holding a book she helped compile of art produced in reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Tara MacIsaac/The Epoch Times)
While the buildings were ?newly smoldering? says Yuster, she received requests en masse for reproductions of her landscape painting from 2009, ?Victory Blvd. At Dawn.? The scene captures a happier time; looking out from the Staten Island vantage point onto a peaceful, quiet dawn and the twin towers standing tall on the horizon.Her most recent work, ?Staten Island, September,? will be on display at The National Lighthouse Museum on Staten Island in a multimedia exhibit commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11 Sept. 10 and 11, and Sept. 17 and 18.
It shows the blue towers of light that beam up from the World Trade Center site as a tribute each year on the anniversary 9/11. In the foreground is the Postcards Memorial on the shore of Staten Island, which pays tribute to the hundreds of men and women who never returned to the borough.
The bagpipes that haunted Yuster's days also reached the home of her fellow islander, poet Marguerite Rivas, who will curate the exhibit at the Light House Museum. She lived near a church at the time and would hear the pipers tuning their instruments to ?Amazing Grace? as she wrote in her poem Witness.?Amazing Grace bagpipes make everyone wince.
Empty firefighters? helmets are placed
beside the Easter candle,
and borrowed coffins, flag-draped,
are borne upon brave shoulders,?
Next...A Poet's Tale
Source: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/arts-entertainment/an-artists-response-to-911-tragedy-60968.html
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