GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — After her son, Alexander, was killed along with 269 others in the 1988 Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, artist Suse Lowenstein spent the next 15 years capturing the anguish of women whose relatives died in the terrorist attack.
Having experienced the grief herself, she created 76 larger-than-life-size figures of nude women grimacing, tearing at their hair, crying in rage or collapsed in agony at the moment they learned of their loved one’s loss.
Lowenstein, who lives in Montauk, N.Y., on the far eastern tip of Long Island, has the massive sculpture, called “Dark Elegy,” on display in her backyard garden.
Visitors, including children on school trips, stop to visit from time to time. But she yearns for her artwork to have a more public home.
The Germany-born artist and her husband received $10 million from Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy’s government as compensation for their son’s death. She said she’s willing to use it to cast the sculpture — now made of synthetic stone over a welded steel armature — into bronze so it can be shared with the world. She estimates it would cost about $4 million to bronze the artwork, which is about 65 feet in diameter.
“It just needs a home,” she said this week. “These are the actual victims of terrorism, created by someone who was part of it. I am not someone looking into their grief. I am in it.”
