Without question, the events of Sept. 11th prompted an emotional outpouring, so it is only fitting that those emotions spilled out onto the medium that perhaps expresses them best: art, and more specifically, photography. As a result, museums around the country -- and for that matter, around the world -- are putting together commemorative exhibits for the anniversary of the tragedy.
One particular group spearheading the movement for commemoration has been the American Association of Museums, a national service organization that strives to maintain high quality museum programs to best serve the public. This particular initiative is entitled "Celebrate America's Freedoms: A Day of Remembrance" and was designed to enhance each museum's role as not only a venue for the display of art, but as a "steward of the nation's stories." Although such a role might normally be thought to apply to the nation's history museums, the exhibitions being developed by art museums around the country have heeded the call of the AAM in addition to the demonstrated need of the public.
Impacting Charlottesville and local students most directly is the exhibit being developed by the University of Virginia Art Museum. The exhibit features a digital photograph of the Memorial of Light taken by Roger Sayre, as well as photographs by Patrick Witty and Adam Woodward. In addition, the exhibit will feature poems written and submitted by University faculty members and students from various departments.
Although most exhibits at the University Art Museum are planned over a year in advance, this particular exhibit will be executed at a relatively low cost to the museum. Not only will the museum show the images and work of those touched by the disaster, but it will also, according to Curator Suzanne Foley, "offer a sanctuary" for those who would like a quiet place to reflect.
Ironically, the University Art Museum also will showcase an exhibit later in the year entitled "Disasters in the Sky," a collection of prints from H.C. Westermann featuring images such as a B-52 crashing into the Empire State Building. The exhibit was arranged to come to the University long before the events of 9/11, and in a nod to the sensitivity of the subject matter, the museum will not be selling note cards or other souvenirs emblazoned with images from the series.
Refreshingly, the vast majority of the artwork in response to 9/11 is being displayed and sold for little to no profit. One particular exhibit, "Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," sells reproductions of the photographs displayed, but all net profit goes to New York charities. The exhibit, currently being shown in Berlin and New York, will open in early September in almost 20 other locations, among them Washington, D.C., where the images will be displayed continuously on the Ellipse and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Among other themes of photography exhibits around the country are "Americans by Choice: Photographs of Arab Americans in New York" in Allentown, PA; "The Backlash of September 11th" in the Fine Arts Center Galleries at the University of Rhode Island and "Out of the Clear Blue Sky" in Connecticut. Other museums around the country have chosen to commemorate the events without an explicitly 9/11 exhibit, be it through hosting an orchestra on museum grounds for a free concert, constructing floral memorials or hosting a more general exhibit, such as the Kress Gallery of the Georgia Museum of Art, which is showcasing a series of paintings representing freedom in its many forms.
Regardless of the approach that they take, art museums around the nation are choosing appropriate but intensely expressive exhibits that will certainly offer something for everyone -- be it to gaze, to ponder or to reflect.
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