What we have learned: Art, Place and Mass Trauma. A conversation with Clifford Chanin, Miguel Arraiz and Todd Stone.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED: ART, PLACE, AND MASS TRAUMA

Thursday, October 29, 2026

THE QUESTION

What have artists, architects, and institutions learned, over twenty-five years of working with places of mass trauma, that can help others living through grief, loss, and rebuilding?

This is the question at the center of a conversation between Todd Stone, whose paintings have documented this site since the morning of September 11, 2001; Miguel Arraiz García, the architect who designed the Burning Man Temple 2025, a structure built each year to hold the grief of thousands, then burned to the ground; and Clifford Chanin of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, whose institutional work has shaped how this site's story is told to the world.

THE SETTING

The 80th floor of 3 World Trade Center, home to Top of the World, Silverstein Properties' exhibition on the history of the World Trade Center's rebuilding, and a natural extension of Witness Downtown Rising, Stone's exhibition of one hundred paintings on the 71st floor. Together the two floors already tell the arc of destruction and rebuilding in image and artifact; this conversation would bring the people who made that story into the room where it hangs.

THE EVENT

A public conversation among Stone, Arraiz García, and Chanin, on Thursday, October 29, 2026, exploring what art, architecture, and institutional memory-keeping have taught each of them about carrying grief forward without erasing it. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum would join as a program partner, leading outreach and audience-building; Silverstein Properties would partner as venue host on the 80th floor, where Top of the World provides the historical frame for the discussion.