Artists Registry

ARTIST'S STATEMENT - STEVE SANDBERG

My name is Steve Sandberg. I was a New York City elementary school teacher for 35 years. In June of 2002, I retired.

For 20 years, I had been a special eduction teacher at P.S. 224 in East New York, Brooklyn. Working with children that have special needs has, indeed, been challenging.

My school overlooked the Belt Parkway; a view of the downtown skyline was often quite visible on a clear sunny day. At 8:30 AM on September 11th, the Twin Towers could easily be seen by anyone who ventured to the third floor of my school. Then, everything changed! The Twin Towers would soon be in flames, and by the end of the day -- NO MORE!

On that fateful Tuesday morning at about 9 AM, radio reports echoed throughout the school. Fear engulfed all -- from children to adults. Was this the beginning of the end?

By the close of school on that September day, the once proud twin structures that seemed to stretch endlessly to the sky, would be gone forever. The memory of that day still haunts my very being.

Although I did not know anyone personally who perished on that black Tuesday, thousands of other people like myself "died" that day. I am still trying to come to grips with that event.

About a month after the September tragedy, I suddenly felt compelled to express my feelings artistically on paper. I am not a trained artist. My use of art would simply be for designing pictures that I would employ in creating original word search puzzles for student use. Now I would begin drawing 9/11 pictures! They would employ the numbers nine and eleven in different configurations and guises. In some ways this is similar to a composer creating an entire symphony on the basis of a single musical theme that is transfigured throughout the different movements. In my case, the 9-11 served as a continuing "leitmotif". Schoolwide writing assignments based on the drawings soon followed. Students were encouraged to let their feelings go, both verbally and in print. Initially the pictures created were only black and white. Over the past few years, after "revisiting" the body of work, this artist has felt compelled to colorize many of the images.

My work has appeared at an art show in LaGuardia College commemorating the first year anniversary of "the event". Recently, pictures have been displayed at the Flushing Town Hall in their Vibrations 2004 Exhibition.

My wife and I moved to Bushkill, PA in 2005. I had thought that my artistic "compulsion" had finally ceased and that I had come to terms with the event and it's aftermath. This has still not been the case. Eight years later, the images are still coming. In 2008, The Pocono Record ran a headline story of my tale. Recently in early September of 2009, the TV station WBRE in Scranton, Wilkes Barre, ran an interview story of my displayed artwork that appeared in an exhibition at the Main Street Jukebox in Stroudsburg. The story now appears on YouTube. To this day, the impulse to create new images has still not abated.