9/11 in Art: Your Reflections

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is just a few weeks away, and Studio 360 is curating a list of cultural works that reflected on the tragic events. We asked you: what would you add to the list? You responded with books, movies, songs, and poems, with suggestions ranging from Rufus Wainwright to John Adams.

Liza from Philadelphia was moved by Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Love Unpunished, a play set in the evacuation stairway of one of the World Trade Center towers. The show “personalized the fear and bravery of people escaping the towers,” Liza says. “It was incredibly moving and subtle and beautiful.”

Many of you found comfort in music following 9/11. Molly from Maine suggested the song cycle Elegies, by the musical theater composer William Finn. She describes the work as “a celebration of life through stories of death … and has the ability to, without falling into sappy emotional manipulation, accurately demonstrate how it feels to look to the future after the anguish of loss.”

Tish from Florida remembers listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and hearing the phrase “planes crashing into buildings.” “On first hearing, I was annoyed at having it repeated endlessly and thought, yes, yes, we know,” she recalls. “But the combination of the grief in the actor’s voice who did the reading and my own memories of seeing that moment on TV, over and over and over and… Now think it was sheer brilliance.”

Spike Lee’s film 25th Hour had a particular impact on Sid from Brooklyn, because it was filled with “stark reminders … that these New York characters are living, struggling, existing in a new world, one that is immeasurably changed, but continuing to move just as quickly and harshly and beautifully as it always had and always will.”

As you reflect on 9/11, is there a movie, painting, poem, or other work that’s helped you reflect on the event?

Tell us — and see suggestions from other listeners.