PHS Students Remember 9/11 with Art Projects

Eleventh grade Peekskill High School students in Ms. Brown’s Creative Crafts art class recently completed one of their first projects of the new school year and helped to memorialize the events of 9/11 in doing so. The mixed media collages, which were constructed as collaboration between students, were made from red, white and blue recycled fabrics and hung in the high school lobby alongside hand drawn pictures.

The inspiration for the projects came from the Stitches of Hope project which commemorated the events of 9/11 by piecing together a number of flags, including one that once hung at the Twin Towers .

Brown noted that artist Costa Vece, who happens to have art work on display locally at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Arts was also a driving force behind the class project.

“Vece uses scraps of fabrics to create flags, and other images, which is similar to what we’re doing here” Brown said. “He also talks a lot about homeland and cultural identity, which I thought would be appropriate for the project since we have a lot of students from other countries in the class.”

While many of the students in Brown’s class say they did not remember the events of September 11, Brown shared her recollection of the day with them and said she hoped the project would instill a sense of resilience in her students.

“We as a nation have such resilience,” Brown said. “And that’s also a large part of what this project is about.”