Art Projects

Ceramic memorials are not popular in American cemeteries, though common in pockets of Italy and Eastern Europe. When they occur in large groupings here, they are almost always an indicator that what is being memorialized is a community of immigrants.

The Grove Street Cemetery lies on the outskirts of Boston, well past Roxbury and the older Jewish neighborhoods that don’t exist anymore. The Grove Street Memorials make up a small percentage of the total monuments at the cemetery, occurring only in a few congregations and groupings dating from approximately 1920 to 1945.

Many were damaged by age and vandalism. It is this destruction that drew me to these unexpected memorials and why I chose to share them. The beauty after violence intrigued the modernist in me, and the process of re-creation spoke to my intellect. Often heartbreaking, the show presented close crops of these small reminders of the loved ones now gone.

Found in several slide carousels at a thrift store in Rainier Valley, there are over a thousand images in this set taken by a very well-traveled husband and wife. Sorted by trip and dated, there’s nothing to indicate what their home life was like. China, New Zealand, Europe, Morocco, Canada all came under the gaze of their camera.

For this show, I presented the majority of the images as pairs and trios. Some obviously taken seconds apart, others with a more liberal sense of story telling. Would our photographer have selected the shots I did to tell their story? Unlikely. However, I’d hope they’d have been delighted to have someone appreciate many of the lovely images they shot.