This Artist Has Been Quietly Painting From The Top of the World Trade Center for Over 25 Years

From her perch on the 80th floor of 3 World Trade Center, Jacqueline Gourevitch enjoys a bird’s-eye view over New York Harbor, where water, sky, and concrete jungle collide. This perspective has inspired the 93-year-old for decades—first looking out from airplane window seats and, over the past quarter-century, from her numerous stints as a World Trade Center artist-in-residence.

“My work is often about clouds,” Gourevitch tells CULTURED during a visit to the space. “Sky is universal. It’s available and recognizable and also has all kinds of abstract possibilities.”

The artist, who is preparing for a solo booth at New York’s Armory Show with the Tribeca gallery Storage later this month, makes canvases that exist on the border of abstraction and figuration. She first emerged in the art world in the 1970s when she was in her 50s. At the time, painting was somewhat out of fashion, but she remained committed to the form. Her ongoing devotion to the sky as her subject, meanwhile, has been shaped by her long relationship with the WTC.

There’s a subtlety to Gourevitch’s layered brushwork that needs to be seen in person to be understood. Without the horizon or other visual context, her painted skies seemingly dissolve before your eyes. Her cityscapes, seen from above, at first appear to be a similarly disorienting patchwork of geometric shapes. You don’t know what you’re looking at—until you do, and the image clicks into place.

Before she got her studio in the sky, Gourevitch used to dream up her paintings from the window seat of airplanes. At the WTC, her viewpoint expanded. “Coming up here, my motivation was: I’ll be closer to the sky, almost like flying. But when I got up here, what interested me was the way the city looks down below,” she says.

Her aerial landscapes capture New York in a moment of flux, seen from far above as construction crews transformed the rubble of Ground Zero into a memorial and erected new skyscrapers. The complex’s owner, Silverstein Properties, has provided Gourevitch free studio space on unrented floors in three different buildings over several periods starting in 2009.

But Gourevitch’s time in the WTC actually began in September 2000, when she participated in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s (LMCC) artist residency in the North Tower. Her term on the 91st floor ended in the spring of 2001, just six months before the 9/11 attacks that claimed the lives of 2,977 victims, including one LMCC artist, Michael Rolando Richards. Gourevitch never met him, but her immediate thought, after learning of the attack, was of the artists working in her former studio space.

Memories of that terrible day, and the rush to evacuate her Tribeca loft just a few blocks north of the WTC, are a blur. “I went up on the roof and I saw some of what was going on,” she recalls. “I got on a very crowded bus and went uptown.”

Gourevitch spent almost two weeks staying with her son on the Upper West Side, returning just once to make sure she had remembered to close the windows.

During the long rebuilding process for the WTC—six new skyscrapers including One World Trade, plus the 9/11 Memorial and Museum—bringing back art and artists was a priority for Silverstein Properties. (The collapse of the Twin Towers destroyed some $110 million in art in what the Art Loss Register has described as “probably the largest single art loss in history.”) In addition to commissioning and purchasing art for the buildings, Silverstein Properties began to offer artists free studio space. The hope was that they would draw inspiration from the rebuilding effort and become part of the revitalization of Lower Manhattan.

“It was enormously interesting. I saw groundwater from below filling some of the areas that had been excavated for the foundations,” Gourevitch says, reminiscing about joining a group of engineers on a visit to the construction site. “And the activity of the harbor, seeing Ellis Island, which is where I started out in New York.”

Born to German Jewish parents in Paris in 1933, Gourevitch came to the U.S. on the eve of World War II. In 1940, she and her mother crossed the Pyrenees on foot, hitchhiked through Spain, and crossed the ocean to New York. Decades later, Gourevitch would be able to look down at her port of arrival from her studio high up in the World Trade Center.

Early in her career, Gourevitch seemed primed to become one of art’s big names. She had solo shows at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1971, 1972, and 1973. And she appeared in the first Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, alongside the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly—making her a living link to American art history.

Her mother was an artist, and Gourevitch followed in her footsteps. At just 16, she studied under Theodoros Stamos and Clement Greenberg at the famed Black Mountain College. She became an educator herself, including over a decade teaching alongside her husband, philosopher Victor Gourevitch, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. (The artist Glenn Ligon was one of her students.) Her papers are housed at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

But, despite having work in over 20 museum collections, Gourevitch has never had a solo museum exhibition. Her dealer, Onyedika Chuke, wants to change that. He staged a mini retrospective of Gourevitch’s cloud paintings at Storage last year and sold work to New York’s Jewish Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. The upcoming Armory Show booth will offer a chance to introduce her to a broader audience and represents the artist’s first time showing at an art fair.

Chuke discovered Gourevitch’s work through his gallery’s own research program. Storage offers vocational training for young people interested in the art business through its nonprofit art, A.R.T. (Application Readiness and Techniques). One of the skills A.R.T. focuses on is research, and helping Storage build a database of under-recognized artists that has grown to include 2,000 names. That’s how Chuke found Gourevitch. “We’re really trying to look for people who have not been really situated within the canon,” Chuke says.

At his first studio visit with her, the dealer was surprised that the artist didn’t mention any of her connections to famous artists, like those in the star-studded ’73 biennial. “There’s not a sense of jealousy. There’s not a sense of ‘that should have been me,’” he says. “I think the difference between Jacqueline and other people is that she really filled her life with more things than art-world accolades.”

Gourevitch’s husband died in 2020, after 65 years of marriage. The couple has two sons: Marc Gourevitch, a physician, and Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer who wrote the 1998 book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, detailing the atrocities of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

On the north side of the 80th floor of 3 World Trade Center, Silverstein Properties has curated a historical display of newspaper clippings, photographs, architectural sketches, and other documents relating to the history of the WTC. On the southeast corner of the floor, there are row upon row of colorful abstract paintings by Kerry Irvine, who also shares the space. Gourevitch has a modest setup on the southwest corner, with just a few art supplies, an easel, and a stool.

She comes to the building for inspiration, to take in the view and sketch, preparing for larger works she’ll complete at her home studio just a few blocks north. The wind and water, the river meeting the sea, the city surrounded by the natural environment—and Gourevitch still here, committing it all to canvas, capturing its evanescent, ever-changing beauty.