Education is Eternal

I cannot say or truly fathom what happens after we stop living in the corporeal sense. However, just because our experience in the physical world inevitably comes to an end, it is clear that our stories do not end just because we are no longer available to tell them. Cemeteries like the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, exemplify the concept of “life after death” by providing educational programming and immersive cultural opportunities for the living and departed to connect in newly profound ways.

Green-Wood Cemetery, founded in 1838, is a 478-acre cemetery within the western portion of Brooklyn, not too far away from Prospect Park. It was established due to the need for burial spaces in New York City due to rapid urbanization, and was so well designed that it represented a naturalistic park-like landscape as much as it did a burial ground. In fact, its scenic layout was so popular that it inspired the city to put out a call for architects to design Manhattan’s Central Park (1858), as well as the nearby Prospect Park (established in 1867). Hence, Green-Wood was widely considered Brooklyn’s first public park before Prospect Park was developed.

Green-Wood is an idyllic place to go for a walk among the natural glacially formed topography, and pay homage to its interred residents who helped to shape the foundation of New York City’s cultural landscape. Learning about the past is an active endeavor that is constantly in flux. While some historical records and narratives are more readily available, others have been (pun intended) buried and lost to time. Green-Wood in particular is a place where that is apparent. Green-Wood has many well known residents who paid a premium price to have their final resting place among the lush rolling hills and vistas, but also a large population of public lots where the city’s working class citizens could afford burial plots. These plots also were where non-white individuals could be buried in an era of racial discrimination and segregation. The public burial spaces date from the mid-nineteenth to twentieth century, and are located around the cemetery’s perimeter.

One of the many ways Green-Wood highlights its past is by hosting an artist residency program. The 2022-2023 artist in residence is Rowan Renee whose installation The Perimeter Path (June 3 to September 4, 2023) fills Green-Wood historic chapel. Renee focused their residency on creating awareness around Green-Wood’s public lots, which are easy to pass over due to their plain and unremarkable characteristics. Renee researched the background of Green-Wood’s public burial plots and created new and more illuminating memorials within the chapel using marble, steel, glass and stone materials. The Perimeter Path directs our attention to how disparities of race and class impact the memorialization process. A series of narrative biographies about people interred in two of these lots – Lot 88 and 5499 – accompanies the exhibition.

One example is William Russell Johnson, a Black political activist and social reformer who became a Green-Wood resident in 1914. He was buried next to his uncle Peter Johnson who worked as a real estate agent and jeweler in Manhattan. During the late nineteenth century Russell Johnson was notable as a prominent figure within the Democratic Party, and was appointed as the leader of the Colored Democrats of the Borough of Brooklyn, a group that was affiliated with the powerful Tammany Hall political machine. He was influential in getting Black New Yorkers to register to vote and become organized around Democratic Party issues. He also was involved in several philanthropic endeavors including fundraising efforts to try and save the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. At the time of his death, William Russell Johnson had a substantial estate that would be worth more than $500,000 today. Despite all their successes, two generations of the Johnson family are interred in unmarked graves along Green-Wood’s perimeter pathway. Paradoxically, other political figures who were contemporaries of Russell Johnson, most notably the corrupt Tammany Hall leader William M. Tweed, are interred in some of Green-Wood’s nicer sections. This disparity is hard to ignore and is especially conspicuous when considering that Tweed and the other notable politicians were white.

Renee’s art installation seeks to reframe the misfortunes of the past by creating a conceptual monument to honor the unknown, displaced and largely forgotten residents of Green-Wood Cemetery. Renee’s The Perimeter Path is an eighteen-foot circular enclosure made from combining raw materials and found objects gathered from the grounds of the cemetery. Renee carved marble fragments from the cemeteries’ decommissioned storage space known as the Receiving Tomb into aesthetic forms that allude to bodily shapes and patterns that are often found on gravestones and memorial markers. Juxtaposed with these marble structures are shards of glass, formed in a kiln, within which Renee has inserted archival photographs and other documents from Green-Wood’s burial ledgers, found iron bending jigs used to repair monuments and cast concrete replicas of draped urns, a popular motif among gravestones that represents the soul departing the shrouded body for its transition into the afterlife. For Renee, this artistic and materials-based endeavor is also reflective of funerary work, a laborious job that involves repairing, conserving and refabricating memorial objects that have been damaged over time. Visitors from the public are invited to contribute to the memorial by placing stone cairns within the installation; a symbol that references the stone cairns used to mark grave sites since prehistoric times, as well as the action of putting rounded stones on headstones to signify that the departed individual was visited, mourned and honored by the presence of others. And indeed, these often forgotten residents of Green-Wood are shown respect via a prominent pathway full of empathetic displays and experiential learning.