9/11: A Memorial, Sculpted Through the Female Form

Think Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia — but make it New York — that’s the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. St. John sits in the Upper Westside of Manhattan, serving as a freeform space for nondenominational prayer and community events, like its annual Poet’s Corner. Meredith Bergmann, a poet by passion, a sculptor by trade, developed a reputation at these Cathedral Poet’s Corners for her work with her hands. In honor of the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the day 2,996 people died from the hijacking and crashing of two commercial aircrafts into the World Trade Center, Bergmann was invited to display in the Cathedral the bronze sculpture she shaped right after this tragedy.

9/11: A Memorial is a statue of a nude, young woman with short hair, closed eyes, and arms in front of her face. Two jets have flown into her hands, “embedded like the stigmata of Christ,” the artist described on the phone this week.

The figure sits on a steel and glass reliquary, which, in Christian tradition, was usually a piece of container that held the relics of saints. After the collapse of the Twin Towers, Bergmann said an unknown person brought some pieces of clean rubble to the church as an offering and “they were stored away in the cathedral crypt for a decade.”

Bergmann arranged the wreckage in her memorial’s reliquary to represent the Twin Towers. “The pieces looked visceral — there was one with red paint on it that kind of looks like a heart, there was a fragment of fabric, women’s lingerie, probably from the Victoria’s Secret store on the concourse,” she said.

Unlike most other 9/11 memorials, Bergmann’s sculpture uses the body of a “tough, strong, potentially maternal young woman” to convey New York City’s resiliency after 9/11.

Much of Bergmann’s art in the past has centered on themes of female empowerment and the fragility of women’s rights. “I wanted to make a work of art that would stand up to the Taliban and defend the image of women as standing for a state or a county or a concept like the Statue of Liberty.”

The nudity of Bergmann’s figure is meant to convey that “the nude body is more than a naked person — it becomes a kind of emblem of the human being as a beautiful animal and a thinker, no shame involved.” The sculptor was excited to include the recovered Victoria’s Secret lingerie in the reliquary because she saw it as another emblem of Western feminism and the sacred feminine.

“The fact that it was women’s lingerie kind of went with my whole message of women — being life-affirming, sustaining and absorbing trauma for their families and their community, and being protectors, which is traditional in Catholicism,” she said.

9/11: A Memorial continues to shine under a stained-glass window on the southeastern side of the church, ten years after its installation in 2011. It is clear Bergmann’s sculpture still means something to the community, from dozens of guest books beside the sculpture filled from cover-to-cover, to the foot traffic that still pays mind to this art piece a decade later.

Janet Abraham, a next-door neighbor to the church and longtime visitor, brought her friend to the Cathedral to show her Bergmann’s sculpture. “It’s very subtle, but the eyebrows are furrowed a little bit. It’s not a non-issue. Taking everything this person has to just absorb the impact, the pain, the evil, channeling it away from the space within herself is really important,” she ponders aloud, surveying the art piece. “She could just shut it out, but instead is leaving room for love, for understanding, for community.”

Bergmann takes pride in knowing this memorial sculpture is housed at the St. John Cathedral, noting, “at least when I was in art school, back in the seventies, nobody was looking at monuments on the street. They were not well cared for.”

She said that even if people aren’t necessarily studying her sculpture for hours, she knows people are appreciating it much more at the Cathedral. “I’m just so happy to have a piece in there because people go and look at it and are moved by it. That delights me. That’s really so special.”