NY artists show 9-11 refuge work
TRUCHAS, N.M. (AP)
Issue date: 9/13/02 Section: Features
Scores of New York artists sought refuge after 9-11 in New Mexico, finding in its clear light and wide-open spaces a place to work and heal. Carolyn Dechaine found something else too, a new home.
Dechaine spent three weeks this spring at the Santa Fe Art Institute, which for seven months after the terrorist attacks provided free living and work space to New York artists.
"It was a gift," recalled Dechaine, at 27 among the youngest of the 131 artists who took part in the program.
Unhappy in New York, increasingly claustrophobic on the subway and anxious about another assault, the installation artist decided to make a permanent move. She left her apartment on the edge of Harlem and her job in an architect's midtown office for a tiny village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
"I have a feeling here like things are possible, like I have space," she said.
One of her first tasks is to create an installation for a show opening Wednesday at the Santa Fe Art Institute. The show will feature works done by artists when they were in the emergency residency program.
"To make something is the antithesis of watching something destroyed. This is where they restored themselves," said Diane Karp, the institute's director and the program's creator.
The artists contributed works for the institute to sell, to help defray the $50,000 debt that was incurred sheltering them.
Hanging near Karp's desk is a huge drawing entitled "Falling" by Peruvian artist Grimanesa Amoros, one of 11 she completed in Santa Fe.
Amoros describes the drawings as a response to what she witnessed on 9-11.
the towers, amorphous yet painfully recognizable shapes falling down and the clouds of white dust."
Video artist Monika Bravo has contributed a film of the city and the skyline she made Sept. 10 from the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center during a thunderstorm. She edited it while she was in Santa Fe.
Bravo was one of 15 artists in World Views, a program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council that provided studio space in the trade center. One of them perished in his studio on Sept. 11. Eleven of the others participated in the Santa Fe program.
Dechaine recalls the residency as therapeutic. It felt safe, she said.
"People talked about what had happened, and what their stories were. ... I think everybody certainly took very seriously listening to each other's experiences and kind of bonding together, huddling together," she said.
Dechaine, whose installation work explores the relationship between the environment and the interior self, didn't leave her fears behind in New York City.
"The other morning I woke up and I looked out the window and this whole hill was dotted with cows. And then I looked more closely, and I said, 'Those cows are bulls' and I wondered, am I safe?"
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On the Net:
Santa Fe Art Institute: www.sfai.org
AP-CS-09-09-02 1258EDT
Dechaine spent three weeks this spring at the Santa Fe Art Institute, which for seven months after the terrorist attacks provided free living and work space to New York artists.
"It was a gift," recalled Dechaine, at 27 among the youngest of the 131 artists who took part in the program.
Unhappy in New York, increasingly claustrophobic on the subway and anxious about another assault, the installation artist decided to make a permanent move. She left her apartment on the edge of Harlem and her job in an architect's midtown office for a tiny village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
"I have a feeling here like things are possible, like I have space," she said.
One of her first tasks is to create an installation for a show opening Wednesday at the Santa Fe Art Institute. The show will feature works done by artists when they were in the emergency residency program.
"To make something is the antithesis of watching something destroyed. This is where they restored themselves," said Diane Karp, the institute's director and the program's creator.
The artists contributed works for the institute to sell, to help defray the $50,000 debt that was incurred sheltering them.
Hanging near Karp's desk is a huge drawing entitled "Falling" by Peruvian artist Grimanesa Amoros, one of 11 she completed in Santa Fe.
Amoros describes the drawings as a response to what she witnessed on 9-11.
the towers, amorphous yet painfully recognizable shapes falling down and the clouds of white dust."
Video artist Monika Bravo has contributed a film of the city and the skyline she made Sept. 10 from the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center during a thunderstorm. She edited it while she was in Santa Fe.
Bravo was one of 15 artists in World Views, a program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council that provided studio space in the trade center. One of them perished in his studio on Sept. 11. Eleven of the others participated in the Santa Fe program.
Dechaine recalls the residency as therapeutic. It felt safe, she said.
"People talked about what had happened, and what their stories were. ... I think everybody certainly took very seriously listening to each other's experiences and kind of bonding together, huddling together," she said.
Dechaine, whose installation work explores the relationship between the environment and the interior self, didn't leave her fears behind in New York City.
"The other morning I woke up and I looked out the window and this whole hill was dotted with cows. And then I looked more closely, and I said, 'Those cows are bulls' and I wondered, am I safe?"
———
On the Net:
Santa Fe Art Institute: www.sfai.org
AP-CS-09-09-02 1258EDT