For further information, contact Randy Fader-Smith, LaGuardia Community College, at (718) 482-5060 or Louise Weinberg at (718) 706-0545

PRESS RELEASE

Mnemonic:  A 9/11 Memorial Exhibition
to open on September 11, 2002, at the Atrium Gallery at LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, NY, and on the Internet at http://www.licweb.com/mnemonic

Mnemonic:  A 9/11 Memorial Exhibition will open with a reception from 4 to 6pm on Wednesday, September 11th, 2002, and will run through November 11, 2002.  The Atrium Gallery is located on the second floor of the “E” building of LaGuardia Community College, 31-10 Thomson Avenue, at the corner of Thomson and Van Dam (two blocks west of the current home of the Museum of Modern Art.)  To reach the Atrium Gallery at LaGuardia Community College, take the #7 to 33rd Street (five stops after Grand Central).  Walk two blocks west on Queens Boulevard to the college.  The exhibition is open during school hours for viewing.                           

The exhibition is comprised of digital prints of works by artists made in response to the events of 9/11/01 selected from entries submitted for the website, and runs concurrently at http://www.licweb.com/mnemonic where all entries are being shown.  Works in the exhibition are in all 2D media including photography, oil, pen and ink, acrylic, encaustic, drawing, collage, mixed media, marker, digital and watercolor.  Artists have responded internationally from Scotland, Japan, and Australia, and in this country, from Philadelphia, Chicago and Rockford, IL, Foster City, CA, Boston, MA, Silver Springs, MD, and Cookeville, TN, as well as the tri-state area.

Having an open call for entries for an exhibition so fraught with emotional subject matter can be a risky proposition.  The curator, Louise Weinberg, says, ”The works became more and more personal as the deadline drew nearer, making this show powerful and beautiful.  They are about the anguish of death as well as the power of community and spirit.”  The exhibition provides an entire range of responses to the harrowing events of 9/11.  Artists not involved personally present abstract works that attempt to come to terms with the horrors of loss and mass destruction.  Other works are more purely patriotic and represent an attempt to show support for the human losses and for the remaining who bear the wounds.  And still other works, the most poignant, arise out of personal contact with loss.  A Long Island City artist, Roxana Alger Geffen, took this year to try to come to terms with the death of her father in the North Tower on September 11th, and submitted a painting of her father’s funeral.  Her statement reads, “I have spent the last year sorting out my private griefs but also thinking about the experiences I have shared with others:  my family, New Yorkers, Americans.”  Elizabeth Riley, of Manhattan, submitted a collage based on an installation of men’s ties she was collecting from her artist friends.  An email from a colleague’s husband dated September 9th is part of the work.  In it, he tells her where each tie came from that he donated.  He died on the 11th in the plane that went into the Pentagon.  Linda Pomponio, a student in LaGuardia’s art department, submitted an eerie group of black and white photographs, from an exposed roll that she inadvertently reached for as she viewed the towers going down from her window on 14th Street.  The towers are exposed behind close up portraits taken of her young cousins in 1996.

All works in the exhibition have been printed on 11 x 17” paper and are available for sale for a set price of $50 a print.  Each exhibiting artist has agreed to either donate 100% or 50% of the selling price to The New York Times 9/11 Neediest Fund (the only 9/11 fund that has disseminated virtually all funds they’ve collected thus far.)

Mnemonic:  A 9/11 Memorial Exhibition was conceived by Louise Weinberg, independent curator and visual artist/photographer, and is being realized in collaboration with Kenny Greenberg, techno-artist and owner of Krypton Neon.  

This exhibition and website is being produced with the support of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, Public Access New York UNIX (Panix.com), VIP International Relocations, LTD, LICWeb.com and LaGuardia Community College.

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