University New Yorkers remember Sept. 11 with exhibits and crafts

NEW YORK — They vowed never to forget and created ways to remember.

A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, University students from New York memorialized the victims by creating abstract artistic symbols in a museum's exhibit and reestablished patriotism by stitching and embroidering a quilt.

Ryan McDonald '05 and his sister Tara, 17, who attends school in Manhattan, created a "heartfelt remembrance" quilt with the help of women at the local Franklin Square Senior Center in their native Stewart Manor, Long Island. KidsBridge, an organization Ryan founded to help young people obtain grants for their community service ideas, obtained sponsorship for the project.

The McDonalds are just two of hundreds of people in the University community touched by the Sept. 11 attacks.

To make sense of confusion and anger over the attacks on her city, Tara stitched patches representing the 50 states with mothers of firefighters and police officers who were working at Ground Zero on Sept. 11.

Quilting, which Tara called "a quintessentially American art form," seemed like the perfect way to unite a whole community, she said.

Their project's primary goal was to create awareness of the unity that grew from the tragedy. As the pieces came together, they made sense of the events, creating a concrete memorial from their grief.

"Out of the ashes of September 11, we were taking what were disparate 50 states and sewed them together in unity," Ryan said. "An ordinary person can't prevent a tragedy from happening, but you can let people know how it makes you feel. We wanted to make sure people can always remember the unity that resulted from tragedy."

The quilt is a rainbow of colors. Each state's flower was first sketched and then sewn on mint green and yellow squares. The seniors citizens embroidered sunflowers and irises with gold and lavender floss and outlined them with tiny pearl strands. They sprinkled Hawaiian hibiscus with fuchsia sequins.

The reverse side of the quilt pictures the Statue of Liberty in front of the Capitol Building. An American flag flies in the background with the words "liberty" and "justice" bordering the patriotic images.

Ryan and Tara hope to display the quilt in the Museum of the City of New York.

Rather than creating her own memorial, Melissa Galvez '05 spent her summer in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal interpreting an artist's Sept. 11 exhibit for ferry patrons. After the experience, Galvez said the artist's approach was unsatisfying and almost inappropriate.

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"It's close enough to the tragedy that people still need to memorialize," Galvez said. "But it's not far enough in the future to intellectualize the event this way."

As she answered questions about the exhibit, Galvez found that though the work was filled with "solemnity and spirituality," other memorials seemed "more genuine."

The exhibit, by Irish artist Alastair MacLennan, featured a long white table with a wreath of white flowers in the middle, a piece of old, rusted iron and a white patent leather Mary Jane shoe.

Galvez prepared the most striking article featured in MacLennan's exhibit — a stack of papers listing the names of all the Sept. 11 victims.

"He wanted a thick stack to show the magnitude of the amount of people," Galvez said.

MacLennan made his exhibit a performance piece by handing out strips of paper with the names of victims to ferry patrons. While the artist walked meditatively around the table handing out slips of paper, Galvez remained to the side explaining the concept behind the table. She kept a journal on the varied reactions she got from passersby.

"Some were annoyed and disgusted that we were capitalizing on this tragedy," she said. "There should be something sacred and untouchable about it, but there's this thick stack of papers." Though Sept. 11 memorials span the city — ranging from homemade crafts to abstract art — Jessica Nagin '05, only has to walk down the street from her Bank Street brownstone — five minutes from the Ground Zero — to find an array of memorials.

Her usual spot for hailing a cab, in front of St. Vincent's Hospital, has become the Wall of Hope and Remembrance. Once in a while, she stops to look at the hundreds of faces on posters of "Missing" people now yellowing with time and encased in plastic.

"The saddest part is the individual stories," she said, reading a flier about one woman who was pregnant when she was lost.

But uptown is a different world, she said. When Nagin arrived home last year for the Jewish holidays, she found the downtown area blocked off by military guards and her backyard covered in gray soot and ash.

A walk down the street, Nagin passes the St. Vincent's memorial, several makeshift memorials in bus stop kiosks, and a series of hand-painted tiles hung up on a chain link fence. She stops to read the heart tiles. About a dozen are dedicated to the memory of small children lost in the attacks.

"This is the kind of stuff that gives me the chills," she says.

Though Nagin herself has coped over the past year by turning her attention away from Sept. 11, she avoids gazing at the skyline and never tunes right to the news. She nevertheless appreciates the emotion behind every tribute she sees.

"Anything is appropriate," she said when hearing about the variety of projects her classmates were involved in. "What's more important is the emotion behind the artwork, not the form the memorial takes."