Fourteen works of art - student-created, national award-winning works from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards - were on loan to an international investment firm on the 21st floor of 1 World Trade Center. On September 11th, these works were buried under the mountain of rubble that had been the World Trade Center towers.

While the loss of 14 works of art was small compared to the loss of life, it was still meaningful to the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and to the young artists who created the works. We were relieved when the potentially difficult conversations with these students, to inform them that their artwork had been lost, became an unexpected source of inspiration. These talented young artists, from as close as Willow Street, Pennsylvania, and as far away as Buellton, California, reminded us that the power to create is stronger than the power to destroy.
Following the devastating tragedy, students turned instinctively to creative expression. Some of these young artists and writers documented life in New York City in the days and weeks that followed--the blockades, the ever-present rescue workers, the overnight invasion of American flags, or the nomadic trek of displaced students. Some turned inward to create stunning self-portraits, capturing a significant moment in their young lives in pencil, acrylic, collage, poetry, or essay. Others explored questions about the nature of patriotism or wrestled with the issues of cultural tolerance. Some students used their creativity to take action-like the young woman who designed and sold nearly 500 t-shirts and raised more than $5,000 for the United Way's 9/11 relief fund.

The ARTifacts project was the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers' contribution to the recovery effort. Our curatorial panel reviewed more than 2000 works of art and writing submitted by students mostly from the NYC Metro area. We chose work to represent the range of artistic responses by students of all ages created since September-from work by "first-time" artists to more sophisticated work by students with previous training.

What does this work mean about the young artists and writers included? How did the creative process help them in their own recovery? We asked a group of colleagues to review the work and reflect. This group included mental health practitioners, an artist and a writer. Their comments appear in the Reflections section. We invited Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf of the Annenberg Center for School Reform at Brown University to, in addition to serving on the curatorial panel, interview a few of the students whose work is included in the exhibition and to provide some context and commentary from her perspective as an educational advocate and innovator.

The exhibition was organized by themes that emerged during the selection process. They follow a linear progression onward from September 11th from "Weirdo Dayo" (an appropriate title borrowed from a young writer) to "What Makes America Great." A coda, "From ARTifacts Come Acts of Art," concludes our curatorial efforts with some rays of hope by featuring a group of poems by students from Morristown, New Jersey. After learning that works from The Scholastic Art Awards were destroyed in the attacks, they worried that this minor story might be forgotten among the thousands of bigger stories from that day. To honor those works, they wrote poems to the "lost art" and asked us to forward them to the young artists whose works were destroyed-a phoenix of creative hope arising from the ashes.

We believe that like a Michelangelo statue locked inside a block of Carrara marble, creativity is latent in every human psyche. The imagination needs only to be unleashed to make it visible. We believe that all of our children deserve the opportunity to acquire the skills that will unlock their unique forms of expression. The students who submitted work for ARTifacts had access to a "first-aid kit" of creativity to assist in their recovery. Imagine if all of our children had equal access to this restorative manna.

From ARTifacts come acts of art. These young artists and writers have created an honest, moving, and beautiful memorial to the tragic events of September 11th. We can draw comfort from their resilience, inspiration from their creativity, and hope from their ability to envision a better world.

B.J. Adler, Executive Director
Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
April 15, 2002
The ARTifacts exhibition and publication are made possible by financial support from Command Web Offset; Scholastic Inc.; Manugistics, Inc; The New York Times Company Foundation 9/11 Neediest Cases School Arts Rescue Fund; The Starbucks Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of individual donors.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.