Galleries Devoted to Liberty and Art

May 20, 2005
Galleries Devoted to Liberty and Art
By ROBIN POGREBIN

With the public focus on the Freedom Tower at ground zero, now being redesigned, and the memorial, a bristling issue for families of the 9/11 victims, it is hardly surprising that few people have a clear idea what the International Freedom Center at the site is supposed to be.
Until recently, even the officials planning the center were fuzzy about what it might constitute. But this week, with the unveiling of the design for its future home, they finally detailed their plans.
Relying on varied exhibits and multimedia presentations, the Freedom Center will foster "conversations on freedom" in a building to be shared in an odd-couple arrangement with the Drawing Center, an ostensibly more hip organization in SoHo devoted to works on paper.
Paula Grant Berry, the widow of a Sept. 11 victim and the vice chairwoman of the Freedom Center, said the terrorist attacks would be a springboard for the center's meditations on freedom in the United States and abroad. "It will look at 9/11 in the way 9/11 affected the world," she said.
Visitors to the center - it hopes to attract 1.5 million to 2 million a year - will enter a main lobby with rotating exhibits before heading to any of three 100-seat theaters for a multimedia orientation. Officials say they anticipate that visitors will stop at the center before or after viewing the ground zero memorial and seek to make a connection between the two places.
"At the most basic level, they will ask, 'What is this Freedom Center doing here?' " in relation to the events of 9/11, said Peter W. Kunhardt, president of the documentary film company Kunhardt Productions, who founded the center with Tom A. Bernstein, the president of Chelsea Piers.
Visitors will then set off on a grand concourse called the Freedom Walk that winds around the building's perimeter and highlights significant moments in history through a collage of images and sounds. The center's galleries, or halls, are to be devoted to specific topics. In a Gallery of Nations, for example, each of the 82 countries that lost citizens on Sept. 11 will contribute one item for display. These could range from artifacts to national treasures to artistic tributes, center officials said.
The center also plans Freedom Sites evoking the cause of liberty, like a former gulag in Russia, which will be set up with other groups promoting freedom around the world. Freedom Hot Spots will focus on places around the world where people are campaigning against human rights abuses. The Challenge Galleries will emphasize what the planners view as current or historical challenges to freedom, like India's caste system. The center plans to feature the stories of ordinary people - slaves who resisted their masters, shopkeepers who risked all to fight the Nazis - as well as more prominent figures.
"We're not trying to be comprehensive," Mr. Bernstein said. "We're trying to keep our stories small and focused so people can relate to them and be engaged."
A Freedom's Future space will be devoted to public service. Lawyers would be invited to volunteer with Human Rights First, for example, or doctors and nurses with Medical Missions for Children or CURE International.
The Drawing Center, meanwhile, is to vacate its current home on Wooster Street in SoHo and reopen in expanded quarters: its space will triple, from 10,000 square feet to 36,000. Asked whether its identity would change at the site, Andrea Woodner, chairwoman of the Drawing Center board's steering committee on the project, said: "We're not radically revising our mission at all. We're trying to more fully realize it."
The Drawing Center and Freedom Center were among four cultural institutions chosen for the site last June after a competition. (A performing arts center designed by Frank Gehry is to be occupied by the Joyce Theater, which now presents dance in Chelsea, and the Signature Theater Company, an Off Broadway group on West 42nd Street.)
While some relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have questioned whether the Drawing Center belongs on the site's memorial quadrant, Ms. Woodner said, "Arts and culture as an expression of life going on is one of the most healing things you can do."
It will occupy far less space in the 250,000-square-foot building than the Freedom Center, but Drawing Center officials said they were satisfied. "We haven't been compromised," Ms. Woodner said.
In their design for the building, the architects of the Norwegian firm Snohetta kept the two institutions distinct, with separate entrances and circulation patterns. Catherine de Zegher, the executive director of the Drawing Center, said she believed the tenants could comfortably coexist. "They are more an ideological institution," she said. "We're more an arts institution, and the languages we speak are very different."
"It's a yin-yang situation," she added, "where you live together in a building and you try to be compatible."
The Drawing Center starts with a public gallery that features a small amphitheater as a gathering place and offers a taste of its programming at no charge. Visitors can then pay admission to enter the galleries on the second level. The third level will contain administrative offices.
"It's a kind of filtering," Ms. de Zegher said, adding, "The higher up you get, the more you have to be focused."
The expectation is that the new site will draw substantially more foot traffic than the current SoHo space, and the Drawing Center hopes to make the most of this potential new audience. "We want to encourage people to come in and see what we're about," Ms. Woodner said.
The Freedom Center's creators, meanwhile, have sought to emphasize that their institution has no partisan identity. "We're filmmakers," Mr. Kunhardt said. "We're journalists who want to explore freedom in accurate and meaningful and exciting ways." He added, "We tried to be above politics as we did our research."
Mr. Bernstein said the center plans to emphasize questions rather than answers. "Our ambition is not to tell you what to think," he said. "It's to make you think."
As for the emphasis on freedom, Mr. Kunhardt said: "This is not a word to shy away from. Freedom will be a word everyone will use with great pride."
To program the center's evening activities, the Aspen Institute has helped organize a consortium of universities that will each be allotted 5 to 10 evenings for lectures, conferences and other programs.
The center is to share its 400-seat main auditorium with the TriBeCa Film Institute, which will use the stage for its annual two-week TriBeCa Film Festival as well as year-round programming. The auditorium will also be available at no cost for community events in Lower Manhattan.
To be sure, the center is still very much a work in progress: everything is subject to change, the organizers say. In drafting its plans, the creative team sought feedback from advisers including Kenneth T. Jackson, an American history scholar at Columbia University; Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; and Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Richard J. Tofel, previously the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is the center's president and chief operating officer.
The center now plans to enlist artists and designers to map out the visitor experience. Focus groups are also planned, possibly in cooperation with America Speaks, the nonprofit group that conducted the "Listening to the City" program on ground zero at the Javits Center.
"At the end," Mr. Kunhardt said, "we will be at the point of making concrete decisions about what should go in the building."