Healing the Heart: Private Emotion/Public Expressions

LIBERTY, NY — The Liberty Museum is hosting a photography exhibit by Jonathan Hyman and Michael Pinciotti, commemorating the five-year anniversary of 9/11, through September 23. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, August 26 from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at the museum.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the American landscape was transformed by public acts of mourning, memorialization and patriotism. At the attack sites in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, people created makeshift memorials with signs, candles, flowers, pictures of the dead and other tokens of remembrance. Over the five years following September 11, 2001, artists Jonathan Hyman and Michael Pinciotti, working independently, recorded myriad public memorial displays and artistic responses to the attacks.

During the course of executing what will prove to be a five-year documentary project entitled “A New Americana: Visual Response to 9/11,” Jonathan Hyman has taken over 15,000 photographs (digital and film), covering territory from New York City to Maine to Virginia and across parts of the Midwest. His images depict a range of subjects and artistic styles: huge murals painted by graffiti artists, farmhouses painted with gigantic American flags, firefighters with elaborate memorial tattoos and all types of art on automobiles and trucks.

Pinciotti, who lived in New York and worked downtown at the time of 9/11, was engaged in a more focused, yet no less consuming project of his own. His one-year project entitled “Flags of New York,” focused on the variety of ways and the various contexts in which everyday New Yorkers hung, presented, and reconfigured the American flag over the course of one year, post 9/11. He walked the streets day after day, taking over a thousand photographs of the fleeting and mostly temporary heartfelt and idiosyncratic ways people expressed their emotions