As a tribute to 9/11, I donated a piece of art to Ground Zero in New York City in 2002/2003.

The piece donated is shown below.

More pictures related to our trip for the donation of this piece can also be found here.

Here is the story about the 9/11 Art Memorial…

On September 11, 2001, I was horrified and shocked as I witnessed along with the rest of the planet the World Trade Towers collapsing in Manhattan, New York; planes crashing into the U.S. Pentagon; and most importantly, the thousands of innocent lives which were snuffed out in an instant.

I felt as though I needed to do something as an artist that would be cathartic and healing for us all to speak to this dark time in history. An idea began to grow inside my creative inner vision place deep within my mind and soul. I shared my vision with some of my art students who immediately wanted to share in my idea.

I then made a canvas 40″ x 60″ and drew out the Manhattan Skyline, highlighting the towers which were prominently reliefed with acrylic frisket in the center of the art piece to add some three demensionality and visual drama to it. Next, we printed off the 9/11 victims list from the CNN Memorial Website. This list contained all 2800 victims names, most with a photo, age, and where they were killed. The print out for the victim’s list was approximately 2-3 inches thick. The canvas and list were left in the back of the art room at Heritage Christian School in White Rock, British Columbia.

For the next several months, anyone, mostly art students, could paint victims first and last names radomly onto the canvas in either red, white or blue paint. The names had to be random in order to represent the way the victims fell indescriminately to their deaths. The way we kept track of which names were done was as a name was painted, their name was crossed off with a highlighter marker. As time passed the names overlapped into a blur of letters and colours… again symbolic. When we got down to the last 400 to 500 names on the list, I took creative control back on the art piece. I then began to purposefully paint the names into the pattern of the American flag with their appropriate colours. The last 50 victim names randomly left on the list were painted into the top-left corner to become the stars in the flag. After one year, the 9/11art memorial was completed.

Our next task was to find a meaningful and appropriate home for the painting. After a month of phone calls to a wide variety of leads in New York where we received mostly polite disinterest, we finally got a tip from the Manhattan School Board. It turns out that there was a high school, the New American School of Business, which did not get very much press and was only 100 meters from Ground Zero! I spoke with the school principle and administration who expressed interest in our art memorial. I then flew to New York to have a preliminary meeting to establish suitability and to make arrangements. The stories from the people at the school about the 9/11 events were almost surreal. Thank God the safe and timely evacuation of the school that day resulted in no fatalities from their school…although they all had to stand in Battery Park, South Manhattan, only a few blocks from Ground Zero, and watch the Towers come down around them with debri and dust covering them all. In the spring of 2003, myself, my sister singer/song writer, Ruth Ann Springle in Toronto, and four of my students, flew to Manhattan and made a presentation of the 9/11 art memorial to the school. At the presentation, Ruth Ann performed an original song that she wrote titled, “Freedom is Not Free”. It was a profoundly moving and powerful moment in the presentation. I told my students as we looked into the vast cavernous void where the towers once were… “remember this moment gentlemen, you are now witnessing and a part of, history.”

The 9/11 art memorial now recides at the New American High School of Business… steps away from the South-East corner on Trinity Street below Ground Zero in Manhattan, New York.