Artist Spent Six Years Researching All 343 FDNY Firefighters Killed on 9/11 and Painting Their Portraits on Burned Blocks of Wood

After 9/11 turned 343 firefighters into a number, artist Dawn Howkinson Siebel spent six years trying to give them their lives back.

Twelve days after the attacks, The New York Times published a two-page spread containing photographs of all 343 FDNY firefighters killed on September 11, 2001. Siebel saw the faces and thought that somehow, someday, she could do something with them. Several years later, she found the form: individual portraits painted on blocks of wood that had been burned with an acetylene torch. The project that became Better Angels: The Firefighters of 9/11 would consume thousands of hours of research and painting over six years.

Now, for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Genius Books is publishing Better Angels in book form, bringing together Siebel’s 343 portraits with the stories of the people behind them.

The book does something the traveling exhibition could not. It lets people take the memorial home.

It is also the most complete presentation of Better Angels, bringing the full portrait project together with the stories and research behind the faces.

For years, people could encounter Better Angels only when the exhibition came near them. The book allows readers to return to these firefighters whenever they choose, not simply when the portraits happen to be hanging in a museum, convention hall ,or memorial space.

Siebel began with the tiny official FDNY photographs reproduced by The New York Times. They identified the right firefighters, but they did not always show what those men looked like by September 2001.

Some had gone silver since their departmental photographs were taken. Some had grown mustaches. Some had been promoted but had never updated photographs that still showed them wearing the black hat of a firefighter instead of the white hat worn by higher ranks. Siebel later learned that the round insignia on the front of the hats also differed according to company assignment, another detail that had to be corrected as better reference photographs became available.

She also changed two portraits deliberately: one firefighter had not been looking into the camera in his source photograph, so she painted him looking at the viewer; another was photographed in a helmet rather than his uniform hat, so she painted the hat instead.

But the larger transformation was artistic.

Siebel estimates that roughly the first 250 portraits were repainted, some more than once. Only portraits among roughly the last 50 were likely to have escaped repainting because by then the reference images were better and her own skill had developed.

“Better Angels made me a better painter,” Siebel said.

When the exhibition returned to her possession after its national tour, she repainted another 84 portraits one final time. 

The result was not simply 343 paintings.

The longer Siebel worked, the harder it became to see 343 as a single thing.

During the exhibition’s 2011 stop in Florida, Siebel watched a woman and her husband slowly study every portrait on the wall.

The woman told Siebel she had worked on the 81st floor of the North Tower. During her descent, she and a friend stopped from exhaustion on the 44th floor.

A young firefighter was climbing in the opposite direction.

He stopped.

He gave the two women several breaths from his air mask.

Then he told them, “Now get up and get out.”

The woman continued downward. Her friend remained behind to rest.

She told Siebel she escaped the North Tower with about five minutes to spare. Her friend did not survive.

Ten years later, standing before Better Angels, she was searching the wall for the firefighter who had stopped on his way up to help her.

In tears, Siebel remembers the woman saying, “I wish I knew which one he was.”

Siebel does not know the woman’s name and has no independent record of the encounter. She presents the story as something the woman told her directly at the exhibition.

The biographies collected in Better Angels make the same argument in hundreds of smaller ways.

These were firefighters, but firefighter was not the totality of who they were.

They were fathers, brothers, husbands, carpenters, cooks, mechanics, musicians, coaches, and practical jokers.

Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell surfed with his sons. When they learned bagpipes and snare drum, he took up the bass drum so he could practice and march with them. He also ran a construction business. The only thing of his recovered from the ruins was one of his tools.

Firefighter Peter Brennan had a thick black mustache that did not appear in the official FDNY photograph Siebel originally used. His brother Vinny, a retired FDNY firefighter, later helped Siebel understand what Peter had actually looked like.

Firefighter William Mahoney was a cabinet maker, a baseball player and a former NYPD scuba diver. For luck, his wife’s name was written inside his glove, and he insisted that everyone in the family touch his bat before he played.

Deputy Chief Raymond Downey was already famous within the fire service. He had helped establish the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue network, served as FEMA operations chief at the Oklahoma City bombing site and received five individual Medals of Valor during his FDNY career. When Better Angels toured, Siebel says his was one of the portraits firefighters sought out most often.

The book contains hundreds of such details.

That accumulation is the point.

History remembers what happened to them.

Better Angels asks readers to remember who it happened to.

One hundred paintings into the project, Siebel realized she could not complete an undertaking of this size alone.

In 2009 she approached the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. The partnership ultimately helped turn Better Angels from an unfinished group of portraits into a national exhibition. Siebel says the NFFF did not join the project until it received permission from the FDNY. Her manuscript credits the Foundation with helping obtain better reference photographs and supporting the national tour.

In August 2010, then-FDNY Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano formally expressed both his own support and that of the Fire Department of New York for Better Angels, which the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation was preparing to present.

Cassano wrote that FDNY was proud to participate in the effort to remember the 343 members of the department who died that day.

The original plan was to open the national tour in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. Funding prevented that particular exhibition from happening, but the project went forward elsewhere with FDNY and NFFF support.

Better Angels first appeared publicly in June 2011 and traveled around the United States during 2011 and 2012. Exhibitions included national fire-service conferences, the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the World Financial Center in New York. Later exhibitions included the Colorado Springs Fire Museum, Springfield Museums in Massachusetts, the Corazón de Trinidad Creative District, and the Museum of Friends in Colorado.

Guy McLain, former director of the Wood Museum of Springfield History at the Springfield Museums, encountered Better Angels during its extended Springfield exhibition.

“Finding a proper response to the horrible events of 9/11 that somehow help us heal and come to grips with our emotions and loss is an extremely difficult process,” McLain wrote. “Art can help, but that art must find a balance between analysis and lament.”

He described Siebel’s portraits as a memorial that allows viewers to connect with the firefighters as people while confronting the scale of the tragedy.

Siebel herself began the project knowing only one firefighter.

By the time Better Angels traveled the country, she had met hundreds.

She also discovered something she had not understood when she began: She was far from the only person who had responded to 9/11 by trying to make something constructive from it.

“At the most basic level, Better Angels was an attempt to create something positive out of something so terrible,” Siebel said. “In that, I was not alone.”

The scale of her response was unusual.

So was the promise implicit in it.

Not some of them.

All 343.

Better Angels: The Firefighters of 9/11 by Dawn Howkinson Siebel combines all 343 portraits with the firefighters’ stories, historical context, a World Trade Center site map, and material documenting the wider human cost of September 11.

The hardcover and paperback editions are published by Genius Books and are currently available for order at:

And will be available on Amazon soon.

Dawn Howkinson Siebel lived in Manhattan for 22 years before moving to Colorado. Her final 17 years in New York were spent in Greenwich Village within sight of the World Trade Center. By September 11, 2001, she was living in Colorado. Twelve days after the attacks, seeing all 343 FDNY photographs together in The New York Times planted the idea that eventually became Better Angels.

Her Better Angels portraits have been exhibited around the United States in museums, government buildings, national fire-service events, and memorial settings.

Available media materials include high-resolution images of the full Better Angels installation, individual portraits, book-cover art, photographs of previous exhibitions, historical television and radio coverage, and interview material.

MEDIA CONTACT
Steven Booth
Genius Books
steven@geniusbooksinc.com