LINDA ZACKS

NEW YORK: 25 YEARS - A collection of New York City works presented in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
Prints coming September 2026.

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 down into the subway and somewhere along the journey underground the train just stopped moving. Two long hours passed before we got moving again. When I came above ground, it was utter mayhem.

The thing I remember most was the lingering smell of metal, chemical, bone and lifedust in the air. A horrible toxic sour smell that lasted months, even years.

I moved to Brooklyn in 2003. A profound thing Brooklyn gave me was 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. That perspective embedded itself in my mind.

I made cityscape-inspired images. Snapped manymany photos and Polaroids of the manic-depressive moods of the skyline: daytime. sunsets. gray rain. snow days. summer stew.

The skylines kept turning into other things. 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 skylines inspired a giant new installation for a global law firm inside One Vanderbilt.

And I watched the city itself rebuild. For years, traveling downtown to a print shop I worked with, I watched 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. One thing I can say: New Yorkers are resilient.

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.