Requiem For September 11th


A Public Art Project by Tatana Kellner at the Market Arcade
In conjunction with Assemblage and Ritual: The Work of Tatana Kellner.


Tatana Kellner CEPA Gallery is proud to present the world premiere of Requiem for September 11th, a 600' Public Art banner project for the Market Arcade Atrium. The artwork consists of 38 flowing white fabric banners, each 16' long and 4' wide filling the entire atrium. The artwork is culled from the NY Times "Portrait of Grief" documenting, with text and image, each of the victims of the World Trade Center. The artist is silk screen printing the 3,000 images by hand onto the material.

While there are a plethora of September 11th memorial projects being planned we believe that Tatanaís art project is unique in its process and presentation. In reviewing Tatana's proposed project through the lens of her ongoing investigations of memory and historical tragedy surrounding the Holocaust (which she experienced and survived as a child), we can not think of a more appropriate expression by a contemporary artist.

Also, that it is a public art project in a highly trafficked building adds to the power of her project. Finally, this is the only major September 11th commemorative art project being presented in Buffalo, NY.

"For the past 4 months I have been reading, cutting out and re-assembling the "Portrait of Grief" pages from New York Times. This is my way of "doing something, anything" about this national tragedy. As I read the sketches I cry and laugh and am saddened by so many lives cut short. I'm struck by the youth of the victims and their apparent normalcy. These were not captains of industry, but ordinary people aspiring to the good life. What speaks to me most are the victims' faces, mostly smiling in snapshots of happy times. I plan to transform this material into a large scale installation which will be a memorial to the victims of the September 11th tragedy. Each victim will be represented by a photograph, name and a byline describing the person. The images will be screen printed on a multi fiber fabric using the devore process, the resulting images will appear ghost like. What I hope to accomplish is to put a human face on numbers that are unfathomable to most of us."

CEPA Gallery is also proud to present Assemblage and Ritual: The Work of Tatana Kellner. The exhibit opened during Curtain Up!, September 20, 2002, with a reception for the artist from 5:30p.m. to 12a.m. and runs through December 20, 2002. The exhibition has been guest curated by Anne Ellegood, Associate Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and will occupy all nine of CEPA's gallery spaces. The exhibition will cover in detail and bring together for the first time the large format photo-based constructions, works on paper, ceramics, fabric and organic art pieces, and artist books, Ms. Kellner has been creating over the past three decades

Tatana Kellner, co-founder of Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, emigrated with her family to Toledo, Ohio from Prague in the Czech Republic in 1969. She received her an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1974 and has been actively producing large format photo-based works and artist's books since. Many of these bodies of work are based on her travels throughout Europe, the Middle East and the United States as well as the concentration camps of Germany and Poland. Over the course of the last 28 years, Ms. Kellner's work has served to document her many journeys and investigations into history, memory and loss (most notably events and family experiences surrounding the Holocaust) by employing architectural forms, religious iconography, plant forms and multi-media assemblages.

Ms. Kellner has received 2 NYFA Individual Artist Grants, 3 MacDowell Fellowships, and has participated in artist residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Canada, LightWork, Syracuse, NY, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. She has participated in over 20 solo exhibitions of her work in the US and Canada and is represented in 35 museum and university collections.

Download the accompanying CEPA publication.