This painting is by Berta Golahny (1925-2005), a professional printmaker and painter who produced hundreds of works over her long career. She studied under Ossip Zadkine at the Art Students League, Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa, and several teachers at the University of Chicago. Blending abstraction and realism, she created series concerning childhood, the cosmos, the Big Bang, Genesis, and the Holocaust. A fascination with creation (the scientific account of the creation of the world, the biblical account, and human imagination) and with the simultaneity of joy and suffering run through her work. Some of her work can be seen at www.golahny.org.

About this painting, between May and October 2003, Golahny wrote:

"This is my painterly reaction to the catastrophic event that changed our relationships in the world. The analogy made here is to the Shoah [the Holocaust] -- then [too] lives were forever changed in an instant. The painting’s right has 9/11 images that are almost life-size figures; they are recent. These were inspired by photos in the NY Times. Small, less distinct figures of darker hue fill the left -- history. The players serve the striving metaphor. While we cope with the past and the present, we strive to continue our creative lives. For a long time I have been intrigued by basketball players. Their reaching for the net with the ball is a powerful metaphor of life’s goals and the struggle to achieve them. I saw the 9/11 tragedy as a continuation of man’s inhumanity which had its first (and, I would pray, its last) climax in the Shoah. As the Shoah figures developed, the atmosphere of the painting became depressing, and I turned to basketball for some measure of optimism. At first, the ball was realistic -- then gold leaf was applied. Finally, with just a hint of gold in the ball it became more abstract and served to highlight the striving metaphor. This painting was part of the "Unity Of Being" exhibition in March ‘03 at Bentley College, Waltham, which also featured the work of Sherry Autor and Judith Jaffe. The painting was also at University Place, Cambridge, with the Cambridge Art Association."