How it started

At the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001, I was living in NYC and was working on a series of animal paintings: the animal alphabet.   When I got back into my studio, a week afterward, I wondered what the hell I was doing --working on such lightweight material when there was so much serious material out there.  Serious issues to be dealt with.  It seemed, at the time, that the very act of making art was a ridiculously frivolous pursuit and I felt a little rudderless.

Then I realized that maybe artists and other creative people could help strengthen America's defenses and sent a letter off to Homeland Security.  (Which at that point was a brand new office with none of the associations that it has now.)  Nothing came of the letter, but I still felt good having sent it.

Then I started thinking about and making art about the attacks.  About New York and America and the world.  And our place in that world and where we had been and where we were right then and where we were likely to go.  Art about my feelings about the attacks.

After I'd made a couple of pieces, I had the idea of organizing a show of work about 9/11, a big group show in which different artists would contribute pieces they'd made about the attacks.  I spoke to a couple of artists I knew and asked them to participate.  I told them of the pieces I'd made or planned and explained the idea of the exhibition.  Both of them said the same thing: the show would be more interesting if it traced the feelings and thoughts of just one artist: me.  I listened.  And got busy making art.

In the midst of this, I ended up at a party at my friend Andy's house. Andy is an "idea man", a beautiful mind, and he had an idea to create an installation at the offices of his company, Kate Spade, about the attacks. Many of these pieces are ideas I came up with for that installation that never happened. Props to Andy for encouraging this body of work.

That art became this exhibition, "After the 11th", which was exhibited at Bridgewater Fine Arts in Soho in August and September of 2002, on the one year anniversary of the attacks that changed everything.