Young named to jury for planned WTC memorial

By Patrick J. Callahan, News Office staff

James E. Young

ames E. Young, professor of English and chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, has been named by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) as one of 13 members of the jury that will evaluate and review entries in the International World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. Young is an internationally known expert on memorial architecture.

     Philanthropist and businessman David Rockefeller will serve as an honorary jury member.

     The LMDC announced the members of the jury April 10 and will hold a press conference April 28 in New York City when guidelines for the competition will be announced and registration will begin. The winning memorial design will be announced in the fall of 2003. The design for a new World Trade Center building complex by Daniel Libeskind was chosen earlier this year.

     Young says of his appointment to the jury, "It's a great, if daunting honor, to be asked to help choose how our city and nation will memorialize the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the unbearable loss of life there. But if we see memory itself as a living, life-affirming process that unfolds over time, then we might come to regard this memorial as a stage in the process, not its last word. I begin only with questions and look forward to seeing how our greatest artists and architects might respond to them: How to remember and toward what end? How will this memorial shape our understanding of these terrible past events even as it invigorates future life in this city?"

     Other members of the jury are Maya Lin, architect for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Martin Puryear, artist and recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1989; Lowery Stokes Sims, executive director of the Studio Museum of Harlem; Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and former president of the New York Public Library and of Brown University; Paula Grant Berry, member of the LMDC Families Advisory Council whose husband David was killed in the south tower of the trade center; and Susan Freedman, president of the Public Art Fund and director of the Museum of Modern Art.

     Also, Julie Menin, a downtown New York resident and owner of the Vine, a restaurant in the financial district; Enrique Norten, founder of Taller de Enrique Norten Arquitectos, a Mexican architecture firm, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Nancy Rosen, advisor for the New York State Council on the Arts and expert on public art; and Michael Van Valkenberg, New York City landscape architect.

     Two jury members also were appointed representing New York Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They are Patricia E. Harris, deputy mayor for administration, and Michael McKeon, public relations executive and former chief spokesman for the governor.

     Young is a leading authority on Holocaust memorialization, and was the only foreigner and only Jew on the five-member panel appointed for Germany's national Holocaust memorial. He recently authored the foreward for the catalog of the controversial exhibit, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," at the Jewish Museum in New York. Young is the author of At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000), and The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994. He has been a member of the University's faculty since 1988.