Artists Registry

In September of 2001, after teaching an early class at M.S. 216, Marc walked the hall to the teachers’ lounge to relax before the next art class would come storming in. He entered the lounge to discover a strange maudlin atmosphere unlike anything he’d experienced before and smelled a faint acrid scent of smoke that could be seen coming from the west through the room’s window. His colleagues in the room briefed him in the next few minutes about the reason for the shock that transformed the atmosphere in the staffroom. At that time, however, there were more questions than answers. Those shock waves soon impacted the school as well as the denizens of the city and, indeed, the entire national population. The students needed something to help understand what had happened and some constructive way to address the pain.

From January to May, over 200 of Mr. Josloff’s art students worked collaboratively in class teams to bring to life seven complete panels, designed by Marc Josloff from photos found in news publications, portraying the 9-11 Tragedy in all of its stages, from the attack to the reaction, the destruction, the emergency response, the feelings of loss, the grieving and ultimately the healing of the country. It was all executed without any paint; rather tens of thousands of tiny fingernail size pieces of paper, torn from discarded magazines, to provide the needed colors and tones for the image cells each student was assigned. Every student was responsible for aligning with the other 9”x 12” cells that adjoined his/her cell on each side. So this was a massive exercise in teamwork conducted by 11, 12, 13 and 14 year olds comprised of every ethnic group in the melting pot of Queens. They labored for several months with a common goal of making a memorial artwork that would live on as a reminder of what we all endured and how we all responded as a society… along with the hope that it would never happen again.