Being chief curator of a disaster not yet parsed by history is a curious, close to unprecedented assignment. Possibly that best explains why Jan Seidler Ramirez, curator of the nascent memorial museum at ground zero, stashed a fiberglass Statue of Liberty, the unbuilt museum's first major acquisition, in her office kitchen under lock and key.
She holds the only key and is, she said, "very mean" about sharing it with World Trade Center Memorial Foundation colleagues anxious to commune with the coffeemaker. Kitchenette as temporary crypt, kitschy statue as museum collectible -- go figure.
Extraordinary
PHOTO: EPA
This is no ordinary collection of artifacts, and beauty is not a prerequisite. Ramirez, a museum veteran -- he was previously a curator at the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, the Hudson River Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- is 55 and blessed by a freckly effervescence and the ability to pull off the same hairdo she wore at 16.
Ramirez is comfortable in the world of "Dumpster Provenance." She is not slumming it, she is deadly serious.
Instead of Rodin sculptures, the stark and homely 60 tonne Last Column from the south tower, with its eerie totemic graffiti, will anchor the exhibition. Instead of Picasso, she collates mutilated cell phones and bloodied watches; the pockmarked lump of molten metal that resembles a meteorite is, in fact, eight congealed floors from the wreckage.
Ramirez approved the meteorite for the museum after being assured by forensic specialists that no DNA could have survived.
"The etiquette quagmire we face in everything we do here has been challenging, to say the least," she said. "This is an on-site institution where, for 40 percent of the families of Sept. 11 victims, this is the last known corporal place where their loved ones existed. So a certain membrane of condolence surrounds it.
"It's not the World Trade Center History Museum, it's the World Trade Center Memorial Museum. But memory without history is potentially dangerous. Condolence is a mission. Understanding is a mission," she said.
She was hired, in April, to stock the museum with symbolic artifacts that retell the sorriest and, truth be told, scariest story in the city's recent history. Naturally, that body in her kitchen is no ordinary Lady Liberty. Soon after Sept. 11, the statue was deposited on a Midtown sidewalk outside a firehouse that lost 15 men in the catastrophe, an anonymous gesture of sympathy that yielded a shrine.
By the time passers-by, tourists and patriots finished affixing tiny messages and mementos to the statue, only her face was visible.
In the winter of 2001, she was moved to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, and when plans to close the Intrepid for renovations were announced, Ramirez made a strategic move and secured the statue for the museum.
Amazonian
Sure, the actual museum is not expected to open until 2009, but at the end of this week, the statue, an Amazonian 2m high, will be liberated by Ramirez and installed in the foyer of the foundation's headquarters at 1 Liberty Plaza until the museum is ready to receive her.
"She'll be our greeter," said Ramirez, more energized than intimidated by the challenge of creating a museum from scratch; she describes the US$510 million memorial and museum budget as "a diet, but not a starvation diet."
"People with collectibles are beginning to find us," she added.
Ramirez is two dozen objects into a collection that may eventually include about 30,000 artifacts.
"A museum is always brutally reductive in anything it does," she said.
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