Mary Miss has lived in New York, a city of strangers constantly crossing paths, since 1969, and the flow of the city has shaped her work. In her 2002 proposal Moving Perimeter: a Wreath for Ground 0, she explores how to integrate separate paths into a pattern. 

As Miss passed through the Ground Zero checkpoints, she saw the new reality of post 9/11 New York: Large areas had become inaccessible, the border around them periodically shifting. Thousands of people started tracing that border, transforming Ground Zero into a fluid pilgrimage site, a wreath of mourning. Working with architects Victoria Marshall and Elliott Maltby, Miss recognized the perimeter of Ground Zero as a site for a collaborative installation. 

Small interventions would appear at first: ∞ painted at key intersections, existing barriers and fences painted blue. Then new moveable forms would be introduced: fragments of fencing, seating, plantings, and blue lights – whose presence would become apparent as the area of exclusion diminished in size. The site was a density of moveable pieces, a coalescence of separate parts. 

Those structures would define a space to mourn, a wreath for flowers, candles, and notes. These tokens, our public shrine, would invite us to mourn together and at the same time introduce color and life, while the moving perimeter would allow for visual access to the reconstruction, transforming mourning into recovery.