Certainly, many of us will spend a lifetime trying to deal with our memories of September 11th and trying to make sense of such tragedy. One way that people are coping with their memories and pain is certainly through art, and there is no more poignant place to experience this art than through the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Opening tomorrow with an exhibit entitled Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11, viewers will see the work of 13 New York City-based artists.
As Alice M. Greenwald, the director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum explained, “We thought, there needs to be another way in to remembering, and we realized that art is another way in. It gives you that immediacy of the emotional truth of that moment, and you see through another person’s eyes and through their artistic practice, how they struggled with the very same emotions that all of us felt.”
The exhibit is in addition to the museum’s permanent exhibitions that tell the story of what happened on September 11th and commemorates all of the people who died.
This art ranges quite broadly in form with paintings, sculptures and videos.
American painter and sculptor Eric Fischl, for instance, is displaying a bronze sculpture entitled “Tumbling Woman.” Three members of the performance art company Blue Main Group made “Exhibit 13,” a four-minute video that includes all sorts of papers, letters and business forms that blew out of the World Trade Center into their rehearsal space in Brooklyn.
The exhibit is the first major exhibition that the museum is hosting and it opens to the public tomorrow.
