Artist Naoto Nakagawa was mixing paint in his lower Manhattan studio when he felt the building shake. Upon learning that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, he rushed to the building s roof and proceeded to witness the escalating catastrophe that destroyed the Twin Towers, claiming almost 2,800 innocent lives, including hundreds of first-responders.

Just a week before the disaster, Nakagawa had begun his painting, inspired by star-shaped moss he had encountered while walking through a Hudson Valley forest. After September 11, his vision of the artwork was transformed. Now, he perceived the moss as shining stars representing the souls of the victims killed on 9 11, with the subtle but visible horizontal bands of red, white, and blue on the canvas evoking the American flag. By year s end, he reworked his nature study into an elegy for the human toll of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.