Breaking News comes to Keene State College
Award-winning artist Mary Bernstein will install her exhibit, Breaking News: A Look Back, in the balcony of Keene State College’s Mabel Brown Room in the LP Young Student Center to mark the events of September 11, 2001. The exhibit will be on display from April 5-13.
Bernstein, from Amherst Mass., responded to the national trauma of 9/11 not as an artist or as a journalist but as a regular obsessed citizen, combining a collection of bits from the mainstream media with her own personal narrative. This 2001 work, called Breaking News, consisted of 53 double-sided paneled headline stories containing a diary on one side and a painting on the other. The public and private work encourages the viewer to be reminded of his or her own personal experience during this charged year.
In 2006, for the five-year anniversary of 9/11, Bernstein created Broken News as a re-look at her original work. The exhibit looked at the stories of 2001 and found 11 categories that resonated with the headlines of 2006.
In the Keene exhibit, the artist will show part of her original Breaking News, with references to Broken News, the five-year re-look. She invites the audience to look back at the original Breaking News archive and reflect on the many stories and themes that have determined current events both domestically and globally. We can examine these stories and ask ourselves: What has changed and what persists? What decisions and actions have brought us to this day?
The work will be exhibited as part of Keene State College’s 9-TEN-11 Project and will coincide with the 22nd Annual Mason Library Lecture on April 6, when Dr. Kerry Fosher, a KSC alumna and security anthropologist, will talk about her work helping military personnel understand the culture within the regions in which they work.
