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CNN Live Sunday

Artists Recovering from 9/11

Aired January 13, 2002 - 18:25   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: The September 11 attacks in New York left a lot of groups working to recover from a loss of business. That includes people responsible for entertainment, performers and artists. As CNN's Brian Palmer reports, there's a major effort to help them recover too.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRIAN PALMER, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice-over): Artist Monika Bravo once had a studio in the World Trade Center.

(on camera): We're standing in the middle of one of your pieces. What is it?

MONIKA BRAVO, ARTIST: This is an interactive, an installation, and it's called "A-Maze," and it's just a virtual labyrinth.

PALMER, (voice-over): On September 10, the day before the attack, she shot these time-lapse views of New York City from a vantage point that disappeared hours later.

BRAVO: I taped for around seven hours, and that was the only thing I saved. Everything else I left in the studio.

PALMER: Bravo, who now works out of her Brooklyn apartment, got financial help from a variety of groups, from corporations like American Express to the Red Cross and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Others have been less fortunate.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The sound of the plane hitting was so loud it shook my bones. As I bent over to hide from the flying debris, I knew instantly it had been terrorists, even before the first news crews arrived.

PALMER: Documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson and her husband Farrell Brickhouse live and work a stone's throw from the Trade Center site. They were evacuated and stayed away for weeks, and are still trying to recover, financially and emotionally.

FARRELL BRICKHOUSE, PAINTER: It's kind of hard to sometimes, to talk about your own problems when people have lost so much, and we haven't lost anybody that we loved in that building.

PALMER: But they have lost the lifestyle, and livelihood, they spent years building in this downtown community, 10 years for Peterson, more than 25 for Brickhouse, a painter. Brickhouse marks each day he works on a calendar, with a dollop of paint.

BRICKHOUSE: Here's September 11, and since that point in time, you can see, there's just been no marks made.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If I don't make a documentary, I don't have anything to sell. There's nothing there.

PALMER: Peterson and Brickhouse are fighting the economic and emotional pressure, with the help of other artists and arts organizations like NYFA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, which has organized seminars and benefits to help artists.

TED BERGER, NY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS: You need institutions having exhibitions, which attract people to the city, but September 11 has demonstrated that we are really part of the emotional and spiritual core of the people of the city and the country.

PALMER: NYFA will also be giving out upwards of $5 million worth of small grants to individual artists and arts groups. Money from foundations and corporations, and artists themselves, organizing to support their own.

Brian Palmer, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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