Staten Island Painter Speaks About Commemorating 9/11

NEW YORK—Sarah Yuster is a Staten Island painter known for her portraiture and landscapes. Two of her paintings hang in the Smithsonian. Her work, especially her landscape painting, is intimately connected with her home borough.

Her paintings “The Firefighter,” “Lower Manhattan,” “Staten Island, September,” and “Victory Boulevard at Dawn” comprise her “9/11, Staten Island and New York Fire Department Commemorative” project and a tale of how Staten Islanders experienced the tragedy that shook New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Epoch Times asked Yuster about her work and her memories of 9/11.

Her brother survived the attack on 2 World Trade Center and told her afterward: “The firefighters kept everyone calm, guiding and assuring us that we would be fine.

“I tried to remember the face of each one as he passed us going up. They had to know they might never come down, even if you couldn’t see it in their eyes. … I felt that someone should look at their faces because it might be the last time anyone did.”

The Epoch Times: Your brother’s words about remembering the face of every firefighter were very powerful. Who is the firefighter you painted? Could you speak a bit about your process of painting this?

Sarah Yuster: My brother Jared’s quote … was so pivotal in my decision to “do” something within the realm of my ability.

The firefighter is Ed Ellison. He was a battalion chief. At that rank, they wear white helmets. When I contacted him, explaining that I wanted him to pose for me as a representative of the … [Fire Department of New York], he wore an older helmet from his days before promotion.

I asked Ed because he is seasoned, intelligent, and has a face that reflects experience and pathos. I took pictures of him in a professional photographer’s studio because I wanted specific lighting. I work from life (sketches and notes) photographs, memory, and imagination.

Epoch Times: As an artist, how do you feel responsible for affecting the way the general public understands and how it digests such a tragic and historic event? What sort of role might an artist feel she has in helping people work through their confusion surrounding an event of this magnitude?

Ms. Yuster: The prominent sentiment was an acknowledgment of our communal trauma, its aftermath, and collective long view.

Hometown examination has long been a focus of my work, almost always starkly personal. “Staten Island, September” is different. It’s an attempt to put our experience as Staten Islanders—our collective pain, our emotional processes regarding 9/11—into a singular image.

This borough lost over 270 people on September 11, nearly 80 of them first responders, so many from my immediate neighborhood.

I’d have been remiss in avoiding such a life-changing event—at least some aspect of it.

The culture of Staten Island’s North Shore is stamped by our hilltop vista of lower Manhattan. So many relatives, friends, and neighbors worked downtown and in the WTC. We have a proportionately large number of firefighters among us.

My children’s coaches, their friends’ fathers—so many of them were lost shortly thereafter.

Epoch Times: On your website, you list the power of a painting as one of the motivations that spurred you to the commemorative project. Could you elaborate a little on this power?

Ms. Yuster: Years of commuting to Manhattan had imprinted the view of the skyline rising over the harbor, seemingly an optical illusion depending on the vantage point.

I decided to make an ambitious painting back in 1985, while in my mid-20s, hoping to snare that moment of solid urban reality gilded by magic.

The response to the initial painting, “Victory Boulevard at Dawn,” has been persistent, arcing from celebration of a much-loved vista at the time it was newly exhibited, and now, to mournful soliloquy.

It’s been humbling to understand that so many are moved and affirmed by this particular image, connecting to the degree that they have. While Ground Zero was newly smoldering, daily calls and e-mails came from people asking me for reproductions. I was stunned. It took a while to comprehend the reasoning.

Epoch Times: In “Staten Island, September” there are three memorials: the lights where the twin towers stood, the “Postcards” memorial illuminated in the foreground, and your canvas from where you’re standing. Do you have any comment about how the three relate to each other?

Ms. Yuster: Masayuki Sono’s “Postcards” is a perfect memorial. It has grace and strength at any time of day, from any perspective. Pairing that monument against a nighttime sky with the Towers of Light is an enveloping sensation—nearly unbearable when standing among a throng of people who have lost loved ones.

I chose to give distance to both, and to give them distance between each other, not unlike the edifying space of 10 years.

This is what I believe so many of us feel: a knowledge that we endured a tragedy together and one from which there is no choice but to recover.

I think that it’s difficult to define the grief that exists as empathy for those who suffered the most. If you lived here, you’d comprehend how absolutely palpable it was. The constant drone of bagpipe music from nearby funeral homes was our soundtrack for close to a year.

Yuster’s most recent work, “Staten Island, September,” will be on display at The National Lighthouse Museum on Staten Island in a multimedia exhibit commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on Sept. 10, 11,17, and 18.