Uncovering Souls Buried in Unmarked Mass Graves

Ghostly figures drawn in gray charcoal appear to float over black and white photographs of mass unmarked graves on New York City’s Hart Island in Peekskill resident Melinda Hunt’s studio.

Some of Hunt’s eerie figures are drawn sideways, floating over the graveyard, upside down or have their backs to the viewer. All are missing their faces. They represent the thousands of indigent and anonymous buried in the city’s potter’s field over the last 140 years.

The paintings are part of Hunt’s “Shades of New York Exhibition” to open at Westchester Community College Center for the Digital Arts on Dec. 6. The show is an artistic manifestation of what has essentially become Hunt’s life work, The Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization which seeks to assist families gain access to information, visit and make visible thousands of people who disappear into the City’s public burial ground.  

Hart Island, located on the western end of the Long Island Sound, is the final resting place for more than 850,000 people. More than half are infants, all interred in long dirt trenches filled with more than 1,000 babies, or between 150 and 162 adult bodies, each. The Island has served as Civil War prison, a tuberculosis hospital, a workhouse, a jail and a missile base.

For the last 140 years it has served as a mass cemetery run by the New York State Department of Corrections, which Hunt said treats the buried as prisoners.

“I think it is a stark reminder to us of the inequalities in life and how those inequalities continue even after life and into the death experience,” states Columbia University Historian Kenneth T. Jackson in Hunt’s film Hart Island: An American Cemetery released in 2007.

“By default it is run by the department of corrections and their job is to lock things up," Hunt said. "My job is to make it visible."

The Canadian-born artist has spent the last 20 years creating art that helps expose and identify some of the island’s anonymous dead. In 2007, she filed a freedom of information request for the records of 50,000 burials from 1980-2007. Those records, and subsequent requests, generated an on-line database of burials through 2010 and completed in July 2011.

Over the last few years, international news coverage of Hunt’s database have brought forth dozens of families from around the world hoping that Hunt can help them find long lost loved ones.

"The people buried there did not commit any crimes," she said. "The family should not have to go through this (to find them)."

Throught her work helping families, Hunt has now created the ink sketches for her upcoming exhibition based off of photographs that family members in search of a child, husband, mother or other relative have provided her with in hopes of locating their missing loved one.  

"I tried to match each person with the composition of the photograph,” Hunt said, pointing to a drawing of a teenage boy who committed suicide. He is drawn as a figure riding his skateboard over a sideways photo of the cemetery.

“Through the powerful ink representations, I hope to make an invisible 101 acres and one-tenth of the population visible,” Hunt said.

Hunt started her work with Hart Island in 1991, when the AIDs and crack epidemics in New York City got her wondering what becomes of the victims with no family who were lost to AIDS and drugs.

It was an issue close to her because Hunt had friends who died of AIDS. “Aids disproportionally hit the artist community in New York City,” Hunt said.

In 1991, Hunt and Joel Sternfeld went to the Island to re-photograph areas that Jacob Riis, the artist and journalist known for capturing the lives of immigrants and New York City’s poor (“How the other half lives”), had originally photographed in 1888.

Hunt gathered information about the process of mass burying from the only witnesses to the daily burials, prison guards and inmates from Riker's Island.

In 1997 Hunt created an installation for New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum featuring photographs, burial and archival records and tiny coffins holding blankets embroidered with the names of infants buried on the Island. This is when Hunt realized how difficult it is for families to visit their loved ones buried there.

Soon after Hunt and Sternfeld’s book, Hart Island was published in 1998, the island became closed to media and the public. Over the next 13 years, Hunt completed a film about the Island, continued to uncover names and records, and began her current exhibition while in residence at the Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony last year.

Her work goes beyond helping families find lost loved ones buried on the Island. She is working to make the cemetery accessible for families and visitors and change the way it is run. In late October Hunt testified before New York City’s Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice Service on the need to improve public access to the island and for better recordkeeping.

“The fact is that we are denying very basic rights of citizens to perform a universal ritual of visiting a person's grave," Hunt said at the hearing, according to the Huffington Post’s Christopher Mathias.

Mathias reports that the council said it will go on a fact-finding mission at Hart Island and one council member said she would be willing to consider turning the Island over to the Parks Department. Read the full article here.

Hunt remains dedicated to helping uncover the souls buried in unmarked graves, and using the database and her art to help families find closure, healing and to remember their lost loved ones.

At Hunt’s WCC exhibit there will be individual drawings in addition to the ink sketches on display that the artist hopes people will purchase to donate to the families.

Visit Hunt’s exhibit, Shades of New York: An Exhibition of The Hart Island Project, between Dec. 6 and Jan 14, 2012 at Westchester Community College’s Center for Digital Arts in Peekskill, NY. The opening reception is scheduled for 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 6 with a public talk by Hunt at 6:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public. The Center for the Digital Arts is located at 27 N. Division St. Peekskill, NY 10566. For information contact Lise Prown 914-606-7304  http://www.sunywcc.edu/peekskill

To read more about the families and story behind The Hart Island project visit the website here, read this Associated Press article from Oct. 30, 2010.

Click on the video above to see a news report from 1978 that shows video for the Island.

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