RE:MEMBER

Family Grail, 2011, Rae Padulo

Memory is a tissue-thin enterprise at best.  And even though there are photos and newspapers and video and web pages to freeze our thoughts and feelings about people and places, it is never exactly as it happened or how we remembered it to happen.  It is filtered by our human-ness and consciousness and all the gathered experiences that we use to reference our memory. And it is because of this that there will always be a million interpretations of a single event.

There are few events in history that are as seminal or collective to United States history, certainly modern history, as those that occurred on September 11th, 2001.  Ask any American and they will tell you exactly where they were when they heard about the attack on the Twin Towers.  I bet right now you're placing yourself in that memory.  You know exactly where you were, what you were doing, who you were with.  I remember I was feeding our then 2 year old son breakfast.  I remember it was milk and cheerios and cantaloupe.  I remember we were moving to Princeton that day.  I remember there were boxes piled up everywhere and I was freaking out that we were totally unprepared for the movers, that I didn't know a soul in Princeton, that we couldn't afford the house we bought, etc, etc.  And I remember, after watching the Twin Towers fall into gigantic clouds of dust, thinking how small I was, how stupid my anxieties had been up to that moment, and how everything I knew to be true was changed.

All over the U.S. and abroad, there will be events marking this fateful day.  Princeton is sharing its thoughts through a yearlong collaborative investigation into the arts and cultural memory by partnering up with arts and cultural organizations throughout the Princeton community and University. This series of events is called Memory and the Work of Art, Remembering 9/11.

Re:Member opening, 9/10/11

Today opens a members' exhibit at the Arts Council of Princeton entitled Re:Member, one of the events in conjunction with Memory and the Work of Art.  There is some nice work here, worthy of a visit to the Arts Council's first floor gallery.  For more information go to www.artscouncilofprinceton.org  At the top of this post is my small contribution.

You can find out more about the schedule of exhibits, concerts, performances and lectures on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001 at www.princeton.edu/memory