Picturing 9/11: Peace, Love, and Understanding

I spent today, the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, at a party—my niece’s ninth birthday party. Her birthday is 9/9, but there was a chance that she would have been born on that first sad anniversary. (I swear that my sister willed herself into labor to keep that connection from happening.) And, yet, I still make the connection each year in my mind. For me, children stand at the center of the events of September 11^th and their aftermath—the children who lost fathers and mothers, the children never knowing a world without a “War on Terror,” and the children, such as my two sons, who only know 9/11 as a quasi-national holiday too unthinkable to be explained. I decided to wrap up this series on “Picturing 9/11” with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The 9/11 Peace Story Quilt, a collaborative work by artist Faith Ringgold and the children of New York, because that work says so much about what 9/11 is about and what the future of our remembrances should be. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Picturing 9/11: Peace, Love, and Understanding."

[Image: Faith Ringgold and young New Yorkers (ages 8-19). The 9/11 Peace Story Quilt (detail), 2006. Fabric and acrylic. Three panels, 72 x 50 in. each (approx.). Commissioned by the InterRelations Collaborative, Inc.]

[Many thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials from the exhibition The 9/11 Peace Story Quilt, which runs through January 22, 2012.]

Picturing 9/11: Introduction to a Series

The idea that a decade has passed since that beautiful Tuesday morning when everything changed seems impossible to me. I can still see the stunning blue sky beneath which a whole country scurried like ants when a giant foot has upset the anthill. The events of September 11^th live on in the films and still photos that document the human tragedy, but it is the artwork that those events have inspired that help us make some fragile sense of that epic insanity. For the rest of this week, I will be profiling the exhibitions that several New York City museums have staged to commemorate the event in different ways. The tag line of Picture This is “Looking at art leads to thinking about life.” That idea has never been truer than during the week ahead of us. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Picturing 9/11: Introduction to a Series."

[Image: Janet Cardiff (Canadian, b. 1957). The Forty Part Motet (2001). Reworking of “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui,” 1575, by Thomas Tallis. 40-track sound recording (14:00 minutes), 40 speakers. Dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Rolf Hoffmann, 2002. (c) 2011 Janet Cardiff.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above.]