September 11, 2001.
You know, it’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years. I can still remember that morning clearly. I got up around 7:00 a.m., turned on the television, and the Today Show was showing the World Trade Center with smoke coming from the upper floors. At first, honestly, I thought I was watching a movie. How many times had we seen buildings on fire or skyscrapers being blown up in movies? Heck, we’d even seen buildings destroyed in Independence Day. Then I saw the second plane hit, and I realized this wasn’t Hollywood. This was real.
I remember staring at the television, trying to process what I was seeing. It almost looked like something stuck on replay because it was so unbelievable. But I still had somewhere to be. I was getting ready for my sociology class at the community college, so I went to class.
When I walked to class, I saw men and women, young and old, crying and scared. Everyone was trying to understand what was happening and what might happen next. We watched the news and the towers collapse, and nobody really knew what to say. Looking back now, there is an incredible irony in that moment. I was supposed to be sitting in sociology learning about people, society, and communities, and instead I was watching all of those things unfold in real time.
What a sociology lesson that day was.
One of the things I remember most was how strange the world became outside that building. There were no airplanes in the sky. The skies were completely empty, and everything was unusually quiet. I even remember noticing how strange it seemed that the birds and insects weren’t flying. After all the chaos we were watching on television, that silence felt almost surreal.
We thought the world had stopped that day.
Nearly 20 years later, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic gave us another completely different version of that feeling. Suddenly, streets were empty, schools and businesses were closed, events were canceled, and people were staying home. In 2001, we looked up and saw an empty sky. In 2020, we looked around and saw empty streets. The events were completely different, but both moments showed us how quickly the world we consider normal can change.
Maybe that’s why September 11 still resonates with me as an artist and educator.
Artists have always documented the world around them. We don’t simply create because something looks beautiful. We create because we see something, experience something, feel something, or have something we need to say. Art can capture a moment in time and preserve emotions and experiences long after the moment has passed.
Think about how much of what we remember from September 11 comes through images: photographs, television footage, drawings, paintings, memorials, and other forms of visual storytelling. Those images became part of our collective memory. They help tell the story to people who weren’t there.
That’s also why I believe art education is about more than learning how to draw, paint, sculpt, print, or design. It’s about learning how to look at the world, interpret what we see, and communicate what we experience.
Sometimes art tells us what happened.
Sometimes it tells us how people felt.
Sometimes it simply makes us stop and look.
What I couldn’t know that morning was how far the consequences of September 11 would reach. Some of the young people from that day eventually served in the military. Some went to war, and some never came home. At the time, we couldn’t have known that. We were simply trying to understand something none of us had ever experienced before.
Twenty-five years later, I think about that classroom, that television, those images, the empty sky, and the silence. I think about the people sitting around me, trying to understand a world that had suddenly changed.
For younger generations, September 11 will be history. It will be a date in a textbook and something they learn about in school. But for those of us who lived through it, it wasn’t simply a date.
It was waking up and turning on the television.
It was thinking, This has to be a movie.
It was seeing the second plane hit and realizing it wasn’t.
It was going to sociology class.
It was watching people cry and trying to understand what was happening.
It was watching the towers fall.
It was looking up at an empty sky.
And it was wondering what would happen next.
Years later, we would experience another strange moment when the world seemed to stop during the pandemic. Different circumstances, different kind of crisis, but once again we learned just how quickly our normal lives can change.
As an artist, I know memories can fade. As an educator, I know stories can be forgotten. That’s why we create. That’s why we teach. That’s why we document. And that’s why we remember.
Some lessons come from textbooks.
Some come from classrooms.
And some are lessons we live.
September 11, 2001. We remember.
— Mr. DW
Mr. DW’s Artroom
