 I watched them build the World Trade Center as a kid in 69, 70, and when I visited them with my father in April of 1969, we saw home of the future World's Tallest Building, but rather than a towering building, it was a very large, deep hole in the ground, and we were disappointed. But then we could watch it grow and rise from Brooklyn and Flatlands where I grew up. For a couple of summers, I watched the cranes carrying the two towers up higher and higher. My mother had four boys in nine years. Paul is the oldest, born in 1962. Number two, born in 1964. Stephen and Gregory were just 16 months apart. Stephen was born in 68, Gregory 69. Four boys, all born in the 60s. Two firefighters. Gregory was a firefighter. My brother Stephen became a firefighter following Gregory. I'm an artist and artists live in New York. But I grew up in a family of blue-collar firefighters and regular people. I didn't know at the time, but I think I left New York to become an artist, which is very counterintuitive. I didn't leave to leave New York. I left to leave my family, who loved me too much to let me be an artist. They wanted me to be a sensible fireman or an electrician or a plumber or something useful, something that existed in their mind for what a vocation could be. And then September 11th comes, and I've had a studio practice for more than a decade by then. I was able to fall back in love with it and get back here and be, I guess, to be part of it as the artist I am. And not have my mother hand me an application for the fire department. I knew Gregory worked a lot of five, which is straight down 6th Avenue and it's the line of sight of the two towers. Stephen worked for ladder 13 and he survived, all of his firehouse love guys, and Gregory worked for ladder five and all the guys from ladder five, 11 of them, died that day. I think New York needed people to love it because it was down and out post September 11th. In our community, the only way to the head of that event, you weren't allowed to go to ground zero and hang out, the only way to get to that event was through Greg's house to sit in Greg's living room. To knock on the door and say, hey, can I come in and talk to you guys? Everybody wanted to check in on the whole thing, needed to, I guess, get close to the event that was consuming everyone's thoughts. Since I was there, and since it's a sculpture, I even brought home small bits of steel with plans of using to make some sculptural thing. I guess since all that was available to me, it's the last thing I wanted to do. And in the end, I made the least physical works of art I'd ever made, those large sheets of blue paper. I mean, I never thought about why too much except it seemed like I didn't want to compete with all the steel and concrete that had been negotiated in the building and the collapse of the building. It didn't seem like the right voice for the artwork. The three or four pieces in this exhibition are the World Trade Center as a cloud, and they show this ethereal, dreamlike, impossible moment of the World Trade Center before September 11th, after September 11th. They show it as an idea, as a dream, as a thought. I'm proud that my artwork is at the September 11th Museum, and that seems hopeful that the family is still standing and that our brother's memory is enlarged and pushed forward.