http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/nyregion/curating-9-11-relics-one-page-at-a-time.html 2016-09-05 09:42:41 Curating 9/11 Relics One Page at a Time An official volume produced by the National September 11 Memorial Museum offers an armchair tour of the museum in Lower Manhattan. === Summer unofficially ends on a Monday that is meant to glorify organized labor, but in New York, the day’s festivities focus more on Most New Yorkers have yet to visit the This official, coffee-table-format book makes the museum’s unique mission and evocative location more accessible. Edited by Alice M. Greenwald, the museum’s director, it tastefully and candidly presents highlights from the collection and explores the challenges in curating it. It is arguable It is both a memorial and a celebration of survival, courage, endurance and resilience, made all the more poignant because, unlike so many other museums, it is site specific. Like visitors to Pearl Harbor, where sailors are still entombed and where oil still bubbles to the surface from the submerged battleship that is part of the Because the museum is at “the nexus of the void, at a site of memory,” Ms. Greenwald writes, “we knew from the start that this placement would intensify our visitors’ encounter with authenticity.” Readers are reminded of the missing-persons posters; the Lady Liberty statue festooned with memorials that stood outside a firehouse in Midtown Manhattan; Milton Glaser’s “I ♥ NY More Than Ever” poster; the Also pictured is a meteroite-like mass of building elements and other components fused by the pressure of the collapsing towers that “concretizes the unknowable.” Many items are photographed (and displayed at the museum) in the states in which they were found. “In the context of artifacts salvaged from ground zero, the dust encrusted on them is comparable to a passport stamp, attesting to their journey through 9/11’s torment,” Jan Seidler Ramirez, senior vice president for collections and the chief curator, writes. “As collection curators, conservators and exhibit planners, our obligation is to safeguard, not sanitize, that evidence of woe.” The “after” story is glowingly recounted in