Creating Emotional Healing

When asked by Otis College of Art and Design to participate in an unusual memorial for the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, Ryan Handt decided to pay homage to the skyline of New York, his hometown.

The 19-year-old Otis photography major sanded the sharp edges of a small wooden block, one of 1,400 the college had given to students, faculty and staff as part of the project. He affixed a black-and-white picture of the World Trade Center so that it looked as if it had been burned onto the wood. He scrawled initials to the right of the towers that could have been a title for his piece: “W.T.C. R.I.P.”

And when his block was united Friday with hundreds of others decorated with emotional images of that terrible day, Handt sat in a corner and cried. “I didn’t expect people to do this,” he said.

The blocks were assembled into what the school called a giant wooden quilt, which will be on display at the Westchester campus until the end of the month.

Otis distributed the 5 1/2-inch squares last week with an invitation from college President Samuel Hoi to “use this block as a vehicle for your voice. Paint it. Sculpt it. Or leave it blank. Take this opportunity to express your feelings.”

They covered their squares with a range of media--paint, photos, newspaper clippings, flowers, crystals and poetry--and images that included flags, crosses, butterflies and candles.

Firefighters from Los Angeles Fire Station No. 5, a few miles from the campus, brought a square they had assembled at the school’s request. It featured a photograph of their firetrucks and a small metal band with an inscription honoring New York City firefighters.

Amber Baker, 22, a fine arts major, glued recent newspaper headlines onto her square and covered them with dark paint. Putting together her piece, she said, gave her a way to express her own anger about the events of Sept. 11: “It helps to use art to assess how you feel.”

Maithy Tren, a 20-year-old digital media student, had created her image on a computer. The result was a psychedelic throwback to the poster art of the 1960s. Tren described it: “A pink rose emerges from the chaos. Something good happens from it, and everything afterward is better.”

As students waited to attach their blocks together using metal S-hooks and eye-hooks, they huddled in the school’s quad, showing off their work, admiring the craftsmanship of the pieces already on the wall. Some were surprised by how many of their classmates had responded to Hoi’s request; others were upset that they had not had enough time to create work that would properly honor the dead.

But faculty member Jeff Earner, who conceived the quilt project, promised that it would be a work in progress and that more squares would be added in the coming days.

Paulette Maki, a middle school English and history teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, was one of the few members of the public who came to view the assembled quilt Friday. Among her favorite pieces were a cartoon Perseus holding up a Medusa-like head of Osama bin Laden and the red, white and blue handprint of a 2-year-old child under the words “These are the hands of the future; let our children grow in peace.”

“The arts are extremely healing,” Maki said. Seeing the wooden quilt, she added, “was important to my own healing.”