Out of the Ashes
On 9/11, one emotion all New Yorkers may have shared was an urgent need to do something. Some spent the entire day wandering the city, looking for a place to donate blood, only to find the blood banks so crowded that workers were forced to turn people away.

The same energy that compelled a solitary city to embrace community—whether by volunteering or consoling a stranger—fueled a project called “Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11/01.” writer Michael Shulan first envisioned the photography exhibition at his Prince Street storefront as a way to raise money for charity. Together with friends, he announced an open call for submissions just days after the attacks. Early on, the group decided the exhibition would be democratic, with amateur snapshots displayed alongside the work of professional photographers.

Shulan and his friends produced the photos on an inkjet printer and hung them from wire with paper clips. To raise money, they sold copies for $25 each. Soon the somber exhibition became a kind of pilgrimage. Visitors from all over the city and country came to pay their respects before images of people running from a wall of ash, firefighters wiping smoke from their eyes, and “Have you seen this person?” photos taped to lampposts in the desperate search for lost husbands, sons, daughters, and wives.

Now long gone from Prince Street, “Here Is New York” is returning to the city, opening at the New-York Historical Society on September  11 and running through January 1, 2008, in commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Installed the same way they were downtown, without wall labels, 1,300 photos are accompanied by video and audio recordings of survivors, family members, and recovery workers, as well as a few carefully chosen objects collected by the museum. A fragment of airplane landing gear salvaged from the towers, a smashed clock with the hands frozen at 9:04—each is a powerful reminder of that day.

The Father of Impressionism
Among the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro always stood out. Born in St. Thomas, in what was then the Danish Virgin Islands, to a Sephardic Jewish family, he moved to Paris as a youngn man, against his parents’ wishes. There he studied under the Barbizon realists and stayed ahead of the curve by painting the countryside on the outskirts of the city en plein air.

In 1874, ready to buck the staid Parisian academy, Pissarro collaborated with Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others to form the first Impressionist exhibition. He was the only artist who would go on to exhibit in all eight of the Impressionist shows. “A core of his philosophy was to work outside of the confines of the Parisian establishment,” notes Karen Levitov, curator of “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country” at the Jewish Museum. “He was very committed to this group.”

While Pissarro is celebrated for his landscapes, he also created more cityscapes than any other Impressionist. Both sets of work were informed by his radical political beliefs—sympathy for anarchism and passionate concern about the plight of the poor.

Throughout a career that spanned several decades, the artist never fell into a rut or settled into a comfortable, easily reproducible style, as some would accuse his peers of doing. “Pissarro was constantly experimenting with technique,” says Levitov, “unlike Monet, who found a style that was profitable to him and continued to  paint in that style.”

By the time Seurat, Signac, and others were developing Neo-Impressionism, Pissarro was again a leader among the trend-setters. He also served as a mentor to younger artists such as Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. In his later years, he was such a patriarchal figure, in fact, that he became known among his peers as Herr Pissarro, or the Father of Impressionism. See this under-recognized innovator’s works through February 3, 2008.

The Met Goes Dutch
With a collection boasting five of the 35 Vermeer paintings in existence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has long held bragging rights when it comes to Dutch masters. This fall, it gets a chance to show off. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, the museum is rolling out its entire collection of Dutch Renaissance paintings, widely considered the best outside Europe.