Telling the Story of 9/11

As senior vice president of exhibitions at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Ian Kerrigan, M.A. '05, helps shape how millions of visitors experience one of the most defining events of the 21st century.

/ / by Lisa Conley-Kendzior

The Human Experience

Seven stories below ground in Lower Manhattan, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum sits within the original footprint of the World Trade Center.

Visitors descend into a cavernous space anchored by remnants of the towers themselves: massive steel columns, twisted and scarred, that could pass for abstract sculpture anywhere else; a rusted portion of an elevator motor, one of nearly 100 that powered the North Tower; and a segment of the 360-foot transmission antenna that once topped it, now resting as a tangled lattice of metal.

Deciding what belongs in the space—and how it should be experienced—is central to Kerrigan’s work. As senior vice president of exhibitions, he oversees how these artifacts are selected, arranged and contextualized, guiding not just what visitors see, but how they move through the story.

“We’re not a history museum,” Kerrigan, M.A. ’05, says. “We’re a museum of the human experience of a historical event.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in the museum’s Memorial Exhibition, where walls are lined with portraits of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Inside the room, visitors search for names at interactive tables, listening as family members and friends share stories of the people they lost. Nearby, personal artifacts—a pair of bongos, a tambourine, a sparkly jacket a flight attendant loved to wear when she was off duty—are displayed and rotated regularly to reflect the breadth of lives remembered.

“We try to connect visitors to the individuals who experienced the event,” Kerrigan says.

An Unexpected Path

Kerrigan didn’t set out to do this work—not exactly.

He studied anthropology at Northwestern University before spending two years in the West African country of Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer, an experience that deepened his interest in culture, storytelling and how people understand the world around them.

He went on to George Washington University, where he earned his master’s degree in anthropology, focusing on the representation of non-Western art in Western museums.

But what interested Kerrigan most wasn’t just how museums functioned; it was how those experiences were created.

“I realized I didn’t want to study museums,” he says. “I wanted to be a practitioner.”

The turning point came during his final semester, when a guest speaker from a design firm introduced the field of exhibition development. The inherently collaborative process brings together curators, designers, educators and project managers to build immersive experiences.

Weeks later, a job posting from that same firm appeared.

“That just worked out,” Kerrigan says.

He joined as a project manager, learning how to translate ideas into physical space—how to take a story and build an environment around it that people could move through, interact with and understand.

In 2007, he joined the team developing what would become the 9/11 Memorial Museum, years before it opened to the public in 2014. Part of that work took him to a vacant hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where thousands of recovered artifacts from the World Trade Center site had been stored.

“We were making decisions about what would be meaningful to help tell the story,” he says.

Walking through the space, Kerrigan helped identify objects that might one day be displayed, marking them with small yellow tags.

He still keeps a box of the unused yellow tags in his desk.

Behind The Exhibits

Exhibitions may feel intuitive when visitors move through them; behind the scenes, they’re anything but.

Some take a year. Others take four.

Each begins with a central question—what story needs to be told and how it aligns with audience interest—and expands outward from there: objects, archival audio, oral histories, photographs, digital media, all layered into a physical environment shaped by light, materials and scale.

In one of the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s central spaces, those elements come together in a single installation.

A wall of nearly 3,000 blue panels—each hand-painted a slightly different shade by American artist Spencer Finch—stretches across the room, representing the lives lost. At its center, a quotation from Virgil’s “The Aeneid” forged from recovered steel reads: No day shall erase you from the memory of time.

Behind the wall, outside the confines of the museum, sits the repository of unidentified and unclaimed remains, placed between the footprints of the North and South towers.

In another gallery, the museum turns to a different kind of record: how children made sense of 9/11 in the days and months that followed.

Colorful drawings—some detailed, others abstract—line the walls. In some, the towers burn beneath a bright blue sky. In others, figures hold hands or flags fill the page. Some depict what happened; others reflect how it felt.

Most of the works were created in classrooms or at home, part of an effort by teachers and parents to help children process an event they were still trying to understand themselves.

“Kids are witnesses to history, too,” Kerrigan says.

Those children are now adults—many with children of their own, encountering the story for the first time.

A New Generation

As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the museum’s audience is shifting. For a growing number of visitors, the attacks are no longer a lived memory but a chapter in a history book.

“I think there’s a lot of interest in wanting to know more,” Kerrigan says.

On any given morning, school groups move through the galleries, pausing before the twisted steel and the wall of blue panels. These students are trying to grasp the scale of a day that predates them, and for Kerrigan, the goal is to provide a framework for making sense of it.

“We’re trying to help people understand not just what happened, but what it meant,” he says.

Kerrigan still makes a point, when he can, to walk through the museum while it’s open—watching where visitors linger and listening to the low hum of their conversations.

He isn’t looking for big reactions. The moments that stay with him are usually the quietest:

A memory shared.

A question asked.

A story passed on.