Remembering 9/11 After 25 Years

Ian Kerrigan ’00 remembers exactly where he was on Sept. 11, 2001.  

He was meeting with fellow Peace Corps health volunteers in southern Togo in West Africa when a colleague said, “‘Hey, turn on the radio!’ 

“So we went to the local market and listened on a shortwave radio to the BBC reporters as they tried to explain what was happening back home,” Kerrigan recalls. “I didn’t see any imagery of the event until about a month later — the amount of time it took for Newsweek magazine to get to us by mail.” 

Kerrigan’s outsider perspective on that tragic day’s events help inform his work as senior vice president for exhibitions at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.  

“Many of my colleagues were here in New York City at the time. They lived through this experience,” says Kerrigan, who studied anthropology at Northwestern. By contrast “I don’t have a visual memory of this event. I was an outsider from the get-go. So I am uniquely positioned to tell the story for those who don’t have a lived memory of the day.” 

Kerrigan has had a hand in developing the memorial and museum almost since the beginning. When he joined the project in 2007, he was the second exhibitions person hired to the team.  

The museum, which opened in 2014 at the former site of the Twin Towers, tells the story of the 9/11 attacks and 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The adjacent memorial honors the people killed on 9/11 and in the 1993 bombing. “It is not a history museum but rather a museum of the human experience of a historical event,” says Kerrigan, who oversees core and special exhibitions and other programming. 

“I use an academic analogy to explain what I do,” he says. “I have 20 minors and no major. I need to know a little bit about interpretation, design, engineering, architecture — all these things. My role is to think about what topics we could explore, and how we can transform an idea into a three-dimensional story that a visitor can move through and find engaging.  

“Exhibitions people are not the curators, who have the deep historical knowledge. We bring a level of professional ignorance. We try to put ourselves in the mind of the average visitor. How do you translate all this knowledge into something bite-sized that a visitor can read and think about but not get weighed down by information overload?” 

Kerrigan highlighted two exhibits that showcase the memorial and museum’s range of interests: Comeback Season, which looked at 9/11 through the lens of sports, and Drawing Meaning: Trauma and Children’s Art After 9/11, which showcased children’s art in response to 9/11. 

“Children are witnesses to history,” Kerrigan says. “And many kids on 9/11 or in the immediate aftermath were told, ‘Go draw your feelings.’ A lot of that material ended up in our collection. It’s definitely not an exhibit for children.”  

For the 25th anniversary, Kerrigan and his team wanted to focus on aspects of 9/11 that “teach lessons about resilience and choosing how to respond when bad things happen in the world.”  

In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service, a new exhibition opening Sept. 12, features stories of people who became emergency responders, joined the military or got involved with humanitarian service because of the attacks. “It’s stories of people and what they did with their trauma and grief,” Kerrigan says. “They made a choice to do something positive because they wanted to see the world become a better place.”