from the Artists' Network of Refuse & Resist
At 12 noon Saturday, September 22, over 100 artists all wearing black filed onto Union Square at 14th Street in New York City where many people have been gathering for the last 10 days to grieve and to try to make sense of what happened on September 11. A hush fell over the crowd at Union Square as the artists took their places in a semi-circle. For one hour they stood in silence wearing face masks and placards silk-screened with "OUR GRIEF IS NOT A CRY FOR WAR." The response to this performance was electric, many people coming up to take stickers, find out who these people were, and thank them. Some were in tears.
Hundreds of photographs were taken of this performance by people who saw it, including two by an AP photographer which landed on the yahoo.com homepage at 8:30 Saturday night. Within an hour one of the pictures became the "most popular" photo on the site, having been sent to other people over 400 times.
The group who organized the performance were artists in film, video, visual art, theater, dance, spoken word. They do not want their grief to be used as a justification for war, attacks on Arabs and Muslims, and new repressive laws or clampdowns.
Two more performances have been held at Times Square on September 25 and October 5.
On Friday, October 5, at 6:00 pm in Times Square, a growing group of artists staged its third performance of "Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War". The group numbered over150 people and lined both long sides of the triangle at 43rd/44th Streets. The artists wore all-black, dust masks and placards with the group's slogan, and held each other's hands in silence for one hour. Hundreds of pedestrians and motorists stopped and looked on as the major news networks on the jumbo video screens above filled Times Square with reports on the "war against terrorism". The unified silence of the artists in Times Square and especially during the news hour was stunning.
[updated 10/9/01]
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