New York, New York, USA

Plane crash 2001

We lost the buildings and so many, many people. When a student at Pratt in Brooklyn, I visited the top of the World Trade Center and heard the buildings sing as the wind whistled through the steel skin structure. A sound combination of nature and man made and left to occur with or without audience. Darlene B.

Two weeks after 9/11, I was at an AICA symposium in Zagreb.The theme I believe was “Images of Power/ the Power of Images”. Well, all of the speakers from the US or UK had cancelled and the organizers were panicking about too many missing speakers, so I volunteered to give an impromptu talk about the Power of the Absent Image. I had gotten fascinated with how images of the twin towers vanished from commercials and postcards almost immediately.  Kim L.

Also requested by BDW.

The World Trade Center was a complex of buildings in lower Manhattan, notable for including the Twin Towers (World Trade Center 1 and World Trade Center 2) which were the tallest buildings in the world, at the time of their completion in 1973, with 110 floors each. The lead architect for their construction was Minoru Yamasaki. The entire complex contained over 430 companies, typically employing around 50,000 people, with an additional 140,000 passing through daily. On February 26, 1993, Al-Quaeda-affiliated terrorists exploded a truck filled with explosives in the underground parking garage of the North Tower ripping a 100 ft (30m) hole through the building and killing six people and injuring over a thousand. On September 11, 2001 Al-Quaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two Boeing 767 jets into the towers which led to their collapse two hours later, killing 2,606 people. The painting is based on an uncredited framed souvenir photograph that I bought on Canal Street after the attack.