Artists Registry

My name is Bobby and I live in Northern New Jersey, working with a medical group for a number of years now. I have been keeping track of the Memorial Museum’s development through this website. I think the Museum successfully accomplishes its goals of chronicling the events of 9/11, honoring the thousands of victims, paying tribute to the heroes, and at the same time instilling a sense of healing and hopefulness for the future among the visitors to the Museum.

Recently I was reading about the three exhibitions that comprise the Memorial Museum, and The West Chamber really struck a chord with me. About 17 years ago, I was just out of college, unemployed, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was dealing with my own internal struggles. I slowly began developing this idea for a museum that would assist people who were struggling with similar feelings of being lost, loneliness, and despair. The museum consisted of 10 rooms with a painting presented in each room. However the rooms weren’t your standard showrooms (4 white walls and a ceiling). They were rooms that would be specifically designed around its respective painting. The final painting presented in Room 10 shares such a strong connection to The West Chamber. I envisioned the room built with materials that would bear a heavy industrial appearance to represent strength, power, and resilience. I created the artwork on a very heavy piece of steel (roughly 12” x 36”), which I had specially fabricated so that it would have a concave shape, thereby allowing it to stand erect on its own. Yet I always envisioned it being suspended in the air hanging from thick, steel-linked chains.

The West Chamber is described as ‘a testament to survival and determination’. If you look carefully at the close-up photo of the painting, you will see a human figure standing with its arms wide open to the world. This a human who despite his own internal struggles and tribulations, managed to persevere and triumph over evil. A person that managed to turn a negative into a positive. A person that is now stronger than ever before because of his resolve to never lose hope.

Although this painting was created about 5 years before 9/11, instead of it simply being blanketed and collecting dust in my house, perhaps it can accomplish through this website what it was created for: to remind people that it’s still a beautiful world out there.

The copy below was planned to be engraved onto a metal podium positioned in front of the painting:

How beautiful as something so frail,
so fragile, so weak, so easily manipulated,
something that everyone abandons

BLOSSOMS into something so strong and powerful,
so rich and abundant, so vibrant and energetic,
so fertile, so playful, so youthful.

Something that can only grow younger
and stronger with time.

A point that can only grow better.

Oh yes, it’s here.
It’s right here, right now.
It’s happening now.
It’s right in front of you.
It’s out there, right now.