A selection of New York City fine-art prints presented in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
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September 11, 2001. I was living on the Upper East Side in a 6th-floor walk-up. I woke up that morning and the weather was magnificent… a true technicolor day. I remember buying flowers on the way to work at VH1 in Astor Place. I went into the subway and somewhere along the journey the train just stopped. Hours passed before we got moving again, and no one knew what the F was going on. When I finally got above ground, the city was frantic. People were crying. People were running. Phones didn’t work. I went underground on this magnificent technicolor morning and came back up into a city that had been ripped apart. I remember the lingering smell of metal, chemical, bone and lifedust in the air. A horrible toxic sour smell that lasted months and years. A lot of people moved away. I stayed. I’m not sure why.
I moved to Brooklyn in 2003 and it gave me a new perspective on Manhattan. On my building’s rooftop (which I called my living room), the city became abstract. Instead of being IN IT looking up, I was looking AT IT, snaking around in front of me. A stack of living shapes. Moody boxes of light and dark. So big and so small all at once. I became obsessed with the skyline. Snapped manymany photos and Polaroids of the manic-depressive moods of the skyline: daytime. sunsets. gray rain. snow days. summer stew.
The city seeped into every crevice of my work: advertising. fine art. illustration. handmade books. visual journals. writing. public art. What began as a little postcard book for the MoMA Design Store eventually became a city block. As Lower Manhattan was rebuilding after 9/11, excerpts from my “Greatest City on Earth” series went huge- wrapping a construction site at Fulton and Nassau Streets as part of the Downtown Alliance’s public art program. Most recently, the skyline inspired a giant installation for a global law firm inside One Vanderbilt.
And I watched the city rebuild. For years, traveling downtown to a print shop I worked with, I witnessed the new tower slowly rise. Twenty-five years after 9/11, it is still utterly incomprehensible to think back at the devastation of those hours. So many lives lost. New Yorkers are resilient. New York taught me resilience. New York is a city always under construction. I guess I am too.
I finally left New York in 2015, trading concrete for grass. But New York is etched into my mind. People often ask me to make skylines of other cities. I can’t. This isn’t ornamentation. The work is built from years of swallowing New York, seeds and all.
NEW YORK: 25 YEARS brings together 25 years of looking at this crazy city from every possible angle. From inside it. Outside it. Above it. Through it. Taking it apart and putting it back together again.
