The September 11, 2001, tragedy altered the lives of millions. For some, it was activism. For others, silence. For Steve Sandberg, a retired educator and eye witness to the destruction of that morning, it brought about a quiet though strong act of expression in art.
His portfolio, Images of Infamy, is more than an artistic set of pieces it’s a personal accounting. Drawn in the aftermath of the attacks, the pen-and-ink works are both memorial and musing. But perhaps most importantly, they’re a lasting record by someone who didn’t simply sit at home, viewing the events on TV he witnessed them firsthand, in real time, with a classroom of children.
A Witness’s Response
Sandberg’s work is seriously informed by the emotional turmoil of that day. There is no objectivity between artist and subject. He was there emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and that presence is felt in each line, stroke, and caption.
The art in Images of Infamy merges patriotism with grief, symbolism with jagged clarity. Each work reads as a diary entry from a mind attempting to make sense of the unsensical. Some pieces call to mind religious iconography, others are militaristic or bluntly nationalistic. But all share a common thread: their unflinching honesty.
No agenda here. Only witness. Only memory.
The Role of Symbolism
Much as Picasso depicts Guernica or Käthe Kollwitz produces the haunting visions, Sandberg employs abstraction and metaphor to lend shape to emotions that cannot be represented literally. The two towers, for example, might not always be seen in their conventional shape but they are always missed.
Other recurring motifs are eyes, wings, smashed crosses, American flags undergoing transformation, and numbers (9 and 11) integrated into the geometry of his paintings. These are not haphazard icons. They are the vocabulary of the artist a visual lexicon in which sorrow and outrage are expressed.
His paintings raise questions, but refuse to insist on answers. It recognizes the horror of the tragedy without insisting on a single explanation.
The Healing Power of Making
For Sandberg, Images of Infamy was a labor of love and therapy. He recalls growing “obsessed with the numbers 9 and 11” after the attacks, as if the trauma would not release its grip until it had been translated into something tangible.
Producing each work became an act of healing. And in sharing his work with the public, Sandberg created an invitation for spectators to do the same: to confront their emotions, meet their memories, and create space to reflect.
An Invitation to Remember Differently
In a society that tends to reduce 9/11 to slogans and soundbites, Sandberg’s Images of Infamy provides something unusual: time. Space. Stillness. It encourages viewers to pause from scrolling, sit with unease, and acknowledge the richness of emotion that the day still conveys.
No showmanship here. No message of a political sort. Only art from one who witnessed the smoke himself and never really was able to get over it.
And perhaps that’s the idea.
Final Thoughts
Steve Sandberg’s Images of Infamy is a pen-and-ink testimony. It’s not a made-up account or a speculative hypothesis. It is a numinous repository of memory, symbolism, and emotional reality constructed by one who survived the event and could no longer bear it silently.
In this work, Sandberg reminds us that remembering is not always accomplished through speeches or ceremonies. Sometimes, it is through a slowly drawn, carefully thought out line on paper.
Images of Infamy is now available on Amazon: