Painting

From her rooftop, self-taught artist Lola Sáenz, who has resided in the East Village since 1993, watched the Twin Towers burn and fall. Within 24 hours of the attacks, Sáenz had created a painting and left it at Union Square, where New Yorkers were congregating to console one another and share memories. As she continued to process the tragedy, particularly her experience of witnessing people falling from the fire-engulfed floors of the Towers, she created the homage Falling Leaves. She recalled the visceral horror of watching “a symphony of people dancing, flying, crying, dying, and burning into ashes.” Rather than commemorating those realities, however, Sáenz elected to depict the goodness and compassion of humanity in extremis, with the figures in her work reaching out to grab hands with one another.  

Sáenz grew up in El Paso, Texas, and moved to New York in 1990. During her artistic career, she has frequently turned to urban life as her subject matter and rendered it in a bold palette, with varying degrees of abstraction.