Events & Programs

While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember.

-- From The Collective Memory by Maurice Halbwach

We continually relive and reshape past experience, which in turn shapes the way we perceive and understand the world and ourselves. Memory is intensely personal, intensely powerful. Who can forget where we were on September 11, 2001? It's our generation's equivalent to the Kennedy assassination, or Pearl Harbor. But just like those earlier momentous events, our personal and collective memories shift as the event moves further into the past.

In this exhibit you're invited to discover one person's memorabilia, gathered from the blocks surrounding Ground Zero. Missing posters, notes left at Union Square Park, articles and pictures from newspapers, personal photographs, poems, and other items. The exhibit offers a visual presentation of life in Manhattan in the days after 9/11: through the keen eye of Al Herter.

What 9/11 means, in the end, all depends on the vast conversations we continue to participate in, effectively shaping, creating, and re-creating conceptions and memories of that day.