OUT OF THE RUINS - A NEW YORK RECORD. Lower Manhattan, Autumn 2001

Soon after the attacks of September 11th, artist Jean Holabird, who has lived just four blocks from the WTC for 27 years, started to record the wreckage visible from the perimeter of Ground Zero. Driven by instinct, she was determined to chronicle the ruins before they could be carted away. The result is Out of the Ruins, a hauntingly powerful collection of paintings accompanied by poignant fragments from enduring works of literature by Milton, Shelley, Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Frank O'Hara and more. The poetry and prose speak of loss and bereavement, survival and defiance, disbelief and acceptance, and finally, love of New York City. This book draws on years of the artist's practice of her craft, the proximity of the subject matter to the artist's life, and a strong sense of civic duty and history.

Adult/High School-Holabird has lived four blocks from the World Trade Center site for more than 30 years. As an artist she had already been sketching and creating watercolors of the Twin Towers before September 11, 2001. After the attack of that day, Holabird chronicled the cleanup from various sites in the neighborhood, trying to come to terms with what she observed. As she worked, and then arranged the art chronologically, pieces of poetry and prose ran through her mind. The result is a scrapbook of 65 full-color glimpses of the ruins interspersed with selections by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. The excerpts and entries are, by turn, sobering, solemn, provocative, probing, hopeful, celebratory. There is comfort in the cumulative effect of so many voices that have confronted despair and darkness. Many of the images conjure up the spiritual quality surrounding a bombed-out Cathedral. The act of reading (and rereading) and studying the scenes offers a quietly paced opportunity for introspection. Not a first purchase, but a fresh and uplifting one.
Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Painter Holabird, a TriBeCa resident since 1975, has long painted downtown scenes: traffic on Church Street, office buildings rising up before a blue sky. After the Twin Towers collapsed, she took sketches of Ground Zero's twisted metal, cranes and American flags, turning them into delicate watercolors almost childlike in their rendering of the new and devastated landscape. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot (Dust in the air suspended/ Marks the place where a story endedand others are interspersed with Holabird's paintings, emphasizing the human emotion evoked in her studies of wrecked architecture as well as her own odyssey toward acceptance.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.