Wall Of Faces

Reviewing a memorial? Yep. I’m gonna do it.
I think there’s a very noble sentiment behind this memorial and after Googling a bit of the back story, this giant installation along Naperville’s Riverwalk (that was one of the nation’s first ⁹⁄₁₁ memorials built) made a lot more sense.
Backstory: Naval Commander Dan Shanower, was a Naperville native, who died in the attack on the Pentagon on September 11^th. The memorial is titled. ‘Freedom Isn’t Free and contains excerpts from an article of that same name that Commander Dan Shanower penned.
A portion of the memorial is really well done, with an eternal flame set atop a sculpture made with 100-​pounds of rubble from the Pentagon after the attack, a steal beam from one of the Towers and granite from the area where Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania. There’s an imprint of Commander Shanower’s boot on the memorial and a garden surrounding the area. It’s tasteful and delivers the Freedom Isn’t Free message more than merely describing it could.
The back half of the memorial unfortunately doesn’t do the rest of the installment justice. In fact, it kind of mars it. It’s a 48-​foot long cement retaining wall with 140 very strange faces sculpted by children from one of Naperville’s grade schools. At first glance, the monument plaques looks like it reads ‘wall of feces’, which is very incorrect. You’d think they could of come up with a better name for it… or at the very least a better font to type it out in. The faces on the wall look like you would imagine a 2^nd grader would mold a piece of clay to look (sort of) like a face, which would be cute if it was your kid and they were making like, a potholder or coffee mug or something, but to be permanently showcased for public display? No way, Jose. The faces, and I’m just gonna blurt it out here, are sad and creepy and look oddly like pop culture characters drawn by Mike Judge (think King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead). It’s not fitting to the idea behind the whole memorial and it so poorly executed that it makes you wonder if the person who funded the project had a wife who taught an elementary school art class and wanted to promote her kid’s work. The wall is just strange and for what it’s in memorial of, it deserves to be better.
It’s a valiant effort, and I think the memorial would have been a million times more meaningful if they’d just left it at the eternal flame and statue with a blank wall behind it, or with the names of those who lost their lives that day instead of a very random array of clay faces sculpted by children.