Curated by Peter Eleey

In 2003, the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp received a FedEx package from Ellsworth Kelly containing a belated proposal for Ground Zero: a green trapezoid collaged on an aerial shot of the site. “Like Piet Mondrian in the 1940s,” Muschamp wrote, Kelly had “transformed Manhattan into the musical state of mind we intuitively know it to be.” But the emotional pitch of that music, he noted, was perhaps “too high for the city to bear.” Ten years removed from the horror of the attacks, “September 11” presumes an audience prepared to look on almost forty artists’ works, including Kelly’s, that frame––or have been reframed by––that traumatic moment, from Diane Arbus’s 1956 photograph of a newspaper floating above a Manhattan street to Thomas Hirschhorn’s 1997 sidewalk shrine to Mondrian. The works in this exhibition have everything and nothing to do with 9/11, obliquely shadowing an event that remains impossible to adequately picture.

— Eric Banks