Truther Art Enter the 9/11 Museum Collection

The latest addition to the collection of the National September 11 Memorial Museum is a work of art inspired by the 9/11 Truth movement, which suspects that the US government was involved in or somehow behind the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As reported by Newsweek, the Village Voice commissioned the piece from illustrator Anthony Freda in 2006 for an article (cleverly titled “Fakes on a Plane”) about the Truther movement. Though the artist initially planned to poke fun at Truthers in the illustration, he found that some of their claims couldn’t be so easily dismissed. “At the onset I was hostile to these ideas,” Freda admitted to Newsweek, “but by the end of my night of research I said that these are serious people with questions that haven’t been answered.”

Freda, who donated the artwork to the museum, does not consider himself a Truther, but the collage clearly questions the accepted narrative about the events of 9/11. A man surveys a web of images displayed on a blackboard, with lines of string suggesting connections between the CIA and Osama Bin Laden, who is labeled as a “patsy” in handwritten chalk scrawl. “We need a Pearl Harbor” says a text drawn next to an image of Dick Cheney, while the Twin Towers burn in the center of the frame.

The original “9-11 Questions” by artist Anthony Freda is now owned by the 9/11 Museum, though it is not clear whether its curators intend to ever display it in public.

“I didn’t go into this willingly or easily, but when you’re presented with all the evidence, you can only stick your head in the sand so long. The more I look into it, the more the evidence becomes reinforced. It just gets stronger and stronger, and you can’t tear it apart.”

Ref:
https://www.911memorial.org/visit/museum
https://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-01/film/fakes-on-a-plane