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Keith Mayerson’s 9-11 was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, America Is Hard to See, in 2015, which was visited by then President Barack Obama Official White House; Photo: Pete Souza

The 11 September terrorist attacks in New York and outside Washington, DC, changed life in America irrevocably. As well as having long-ranging consequences for the country’s politics and national security—the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, after all, because the Taliban refused to turn over the Al Qaeda leaders who were behind the attacks—the events elicited artistic responses that reverberate to this day. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, The Art Newspaper asked several artists to reflect on that day, and what impact it had on their work.

‘Not all art is therapy’

The painter Keith Mayerson, who was living downtown in SoHo and teaching at New York University at the time, remembers heading to lead a freshman drawing class soon after the planes hit, “overwhelmed with shock”, and found his students equally bewildered. “I told them that ‘not all art is therapy, but I don’t know what else to do but go out and draw this,’” he says. “We walked briskly to Washington Square Park, in clear view of the towers, and just as my students got their sketchbooks out, the first tower fell.”

“For several years, I would paint 9/11 via allegory: Jimmy Stewart barely hanging on in [the film] Vertigo; the King Kong remake from the 70s, where he fell from the towers; Spiderman trying to save them all,” Mayerson added. “But I had persistent nightmares of the people falling and jumping from the towers for years.” It took around six years for the artist to directly paint about the day, drawing on images from newspapers his father had saved. The 2007 work 9-11 showing the One World Trade Center tower on fire, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, “was the hardest painting I had ever done in my life”, Mayerson says. The piece was included in the museum’s opening show in its new home downtown in 2015, America Is Hard to See, which was visited by then-President Barack Obama. Mayerson has since created a new painting, based on an official photograph of the world leader standing solemnly in front of the original, “with all the feelings and emotions that I felt about this crisis, and how it has gone on to effect America and world civilisation, the wars and the missteps, and the reorganisation of our politics and ideology”.