As a reporter on organized crime for the Philadelphia Daily News, Kitty Caparella has spent decades staring gangsters in the face, and she’s got the pictures to prove it. An artist as well as a journalist, she has made Mafia dons the subject of her lithographs as well as her news stories.

After 9/11, Caparella at first found it difficult to return to her art. Eventually, she began working on a project that focused, again, on faces -- in this case, news photos of the men who executed the attacks. The result -- a deceptively demure-looking handmade book covered in white silk and decorated with a teal blue Middle Eastern tile motif (right) -- unfolds to become a red swastika comprised of three-inch-square portraits of the terrorists with a view of the WTC ruins at its center.

"The surprise of it," she says, "is almost like that day... that clear blue day [of 9/11]. You're looking at this beautiful book and all of a sudden it's horror."

The book packs such a powerful wallop that it has been selected for an upcoming exhibition at the Library of Congress, where it will also become part of the Rare Books Collection. It reflects not only two semesters of work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, where Caparella has been a student for many years, but also her longtime fascination with criminal groupthink, from MOVE to the Mafia.

Like most artists and performers here and elsewhere, Caparella needed time before she could respond to 9/11. And like them, she discovered that the issues that had interested her before the attacks continued to do so -- but within a new, unexpected context.

Deborah Block, program director for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, says that there were fewer proposals this year for 9/11-inspired performances than she'd anticipated. She suspects that the time frame had something to do with it: Application deadlines for the 2002 Festival came only a few months after the attacks. "It was still too raw for people."

Thaddeus Phillips, the local actor/director/puppeteer, found his subject only after applying for a Fringe spot. Under the auspices of an Independence Foundation fellowship, he took a trip to Morocco in July to pursue a pre-9/11 interest in Arabic culture, and later visited his girlfriend in Colombia. By the time his travels were over, he'd decided to do an epic performance piece about airport security, The Earth's Sharp Edge, inspired by his own experiences. Officials in both America and Colombia detained him for hours, suspicious of his Extreme Islam textbook and long denim overcoat (which was mistaken for a Muslim prayer coat).

Phillips also found himself inadvertently raising suspicions in Northern Liberties, where The Earth's Sharp Edge is being staged through Sept. 14 in a former church space. "We wrote the title of the show in chalk on the church in Arabic," and rumors began to spread around the neighborhood that a fundamentalist mosque had moved in. He had the writing removed.

New York-based Fringe performer Jessica Reeves-Cohen has long been interested in testing the boundaries of public spaces. But in the aftermath of 9/11, she's noticed a marked change in reactions to her piece Questionable Behavior. During the piece, she changes into a traffic-cone-orange dress (which she brings to the site in an intentionally suspicious-looking bag) and proceeds to drape herself and the dress over public property while under the surveillance of security cameras.

When she performed Questionable Behavior in an arts festival in Edmonton, Alberta, in August 2001, says Reeves-Cohen, "People felt, yeah, surveillance is invasive. It's good to play around with it." Performing in Philadelphia this past week, however, in spaces like the Bourse, the Liberty Bell plaza and the U.S. Mint, she sensed more uneasiness. "It's not as OK to question security and authority now."

Interestingly, she was hassled by authorities in seemingly inverse proportion to their power. The security guard at the Bourse was vehement about not letting her perform. The park rangers at the Liberty Bell plaza stopped her too, but they were more polite about it, at first asking Reeves-Cohen's husband Ian Machell, who was videotaping, to make her cease. But the U.S. Mint, which one might expect to be a bastion of federal uptightness, yielded "the most fun interaction I've had with security people," says the artist.

Several federal police officers came out of the Mint to watch as she crept along the sides of the building on Sunday, the long train of her orange dress winding itself around and over police cars and (almost) the officers themselves. Afterward, the officers chatted amicably with her -- "It's all about freedom of expression," said Senior Officer Kenneth Thompas -- though it was clear from the moment she'd approached the building that the surveillance cameras were watching every move she made.

The minimalist paintings of Barry Goldberg celebrate and explore color; his is not the kind of work that openly references current affairs. Yet Ovda & Caldera, the Goldberg work currently hanging at Larry Becker Gallery in Old City, carries an almost mystical connection with the events of last September.

The painting of two horizontal, slightly different black rectangles was halfway completed on 9/11. Not long after the attacks, Larry Becker saw the painting and remarked that the yellow band around one of the rectangles reminded him of the bands on the back of firefighters' jackets, a symbol that had only just taken on weight. Goldberg resisted the association, but returned to it as he realized that the shapes also had another, even more obvious connection to 9/11: They resembled the footprints of the World Trade Center Towers. The title, which he chose upon completing the painting, widened the parallel: Ovda and Caldera are oblong craters on the planet Venus.

"It's not something I thought of prior or even as events unfolded," says Goldberg, but it occurred to him later that the "jet fuel burning down through the earth" left the earth with craters, too.

"We glimpse our ideas when we least expect them," he says. "They could come from dreams, any kind of stimuli. Then it's up to the artist to act as prism."

While it remains to be seen how many artists will respond directly in their work to the events of 9/11, its impact was unavoidable. We will be seeing its effects through the prism of paintings, plays and other media for years to come.

"There are people blatantly responding and others who don't know," says Larry Becker. "We're all affected and it just seeps in."