At the Springville Museum of Art last week Frank McEntire installed the tenth-anniversary version of Spontaneous Memorial, the project inspired by the lives lost on September 11th that he has exhibited every year for the past eight.

McEntire’s project was inspired by the “spontaneous memorials” he and his wife Marjorie found on a visit to New York two months after the 9/11 attacks. “Altar-like memorials abutted the city sidewalks wherever we found a fire station or a fence,” he writes. “New Yorkers and visitors continually replenished the make-shift altars throughout the city offering flowers, notes, prayers, even their silence—tokens of remembrance, admiration, and grief.”

When McEntire returned from New York he felt compelled to compose 3,000 remembrances of each person killed in the attacks. After reading Portraits 9/11/01: The Collected “Portraits of Grief” from The New York Times (Edited by Howell Raines, 2002), McEntire was inspired to use the biographical sketches and photos of the September 11th victims as materials for collage. From there his ideas evolved to the point where the project became both an emotional response to the tragedy — “a meditation on the purpose and value of life” — and an aesthetic exploration of the concept of memorialization.

Spontaneous Memorial was first exhibited at Utah Valley University in 2004. McEntire has shown it every September since, adding a new element each year.

“When I work in series, I find as many variations on a single theme, or use of a particular object, as possible . . .” he says. “Spontaneous Memorial gave me the opportunity to work extensively on a single theme (memorial) over an extended period of time (eight years).”

The core of the exhibit is a partly enclosed space that functions as a shrine to the dead. At its center, a cube, inspired by the Ka’aba in Mecca, is encased in glass. On its top a triangular vase holds ashes and fifty blank tags. Price tags, with their weighty symbolic quality — the price of an item for sale, the cost of a life, the identity of a corpse in a morgue — became the base for his Portrait collages. Spatters and drips of red, yellow, gold, silver and black enamel paint serve to give “the tags a sense of abstraction in order to create emotional distance.” These are tied to a grid structure that surrounds the cube and calls to mind the fences or protective structures raised around memorials of the innocent or people of note. Finally, three hand-made music stands hold two cut-up copies of The New York Times publication and a third complete copy.

Around this contemplative core additional works have been added over the years. To an old oak roll-top desk complete with ledgers McEntire affixed blank tags, inviting viewers to comment. A wall-mounted tithing table acquired during the renovation of an LDS chapel was turned into “Message Table,” its slots filled with tags and pens for patrons to write comments and hang them on the “Fence.” A hymn board from the same chapel became “331” when its slots for holding one-digit number cards to identify hymns was filled with the “Most-wanted Iraqi” playing cards developed by the U.S. military. A nearby wooden music stand holds an old Mormon hymnal, opened to number 331 titled, “Oh, Say What Is Truth?” The paint-splattered black-and-white photos from the Portraits collages were enlarged and hung to cover an entire wall. A priest’s stole draped on a wardrobe stand became “Fly with the Angels,” a reminder of Flight 93; its title came from the words a participant inscribed on the back of one of the exhibit’s memorial tags.

During the past eight years, in addition to his full-time job, McEntire has been extremely busy with an intense exhibition schedule (over twenty-five exhibits in and outside of Utah) as well as curatorial projects (see the Doug Snow retrospective up this month, page 7). Every summer, though he returns to Spontaneous Memorial as he prepares to install it in a new location. Looking back on this he says, “I reflected on the individuals whose lives were taken each time I touched one of the memorial tags or found ways to work with the 9/11 theme—a humbling experience.”

As he installed Spontaneous Memorial for the last time McEntire says he was conscious what coverage of the event has done to its memory. “Every time I’ve turned on news channels or read a newspaper or magazine this past few weeks, there’s been 9/11 coverage. An out-of-state art dealer friend told me a year ago that she was tired of such coverage.” So, saturation, McEntire, says, was of some concern. “My interest, however, has been to explore ‘memorial’ not only as a way to remember an historical event and honor the dead, but also as a form or artistic expression in itself.” With Spontaneous Memorial, he’s accomplished all three.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.