As opening day for the memorial pools and museum at Ground Zero draws very near, it’s still unclear what art will be at the site aside from artifacts related to the attacks (and the performance art-like ballet of years and years of ongoing construction). But a sculpture by former Warhol superstar Isabelle Collin Dufresne, aka Ultra Violet, could be the first original piece in the 9/11 Museum’s collection.
Dufresne tells the Daily News that her palindromic design, inspired by Robert Indiana’s iconic “Love” sculptures and spelling the numbers nine and eleven in roman numerals “IXXI,” is being considered for the Lower Manhattan museum’s permanent collection. A three-foot mockup in her Chelsea studio shines in her trademark dark pink-magenta, but were the piece chosen for the museum she’d want to “to have it 10-feet tall.”
Alice Greenwald, director of the memorial museum, has been considering the sculpture for its collection since seeing a version of it on display at a reception given by the French ambassador in Dufresne’s honor months ago.
Of course the large-scale sculpture couldn’t possibly be ready for the 9/11 Museum’s opening ceremony on the ten-year anniversary of the attacks next month—especially if it’s made of Corten steel like Indiana’s “Love” sculptures. But versions of “IXXI” will be on view at the Queensborough Community College of the City University and New Jersey City University.
This is absolutely hideous on so many fronts. Exploitation by a washed up celebrity anyone? Nothing says “mourning” like capitalizing on other people’s pain. On top of that it not only rips off Indiana, it rips off the 9/11 memorial designed by Pentagram for the Port of New Jersey.
She’s hideous, anyone who would pay and display this is too.
On a more poetic, patriotic, prophetic note is a play
“Utopia Rescheduled”
done at a theater across the street form WTC
St John’s Students writings were done along with the theater director’s there