The Art of the Forgotten

by Jay Blotcher, November 30, 2011

There are many ways to describe Melinda Hunt’s 20-year effort to draw attention to the forgotten souls of New York City’s potter’s field: a multimedia installation, a crusade, an obsession.

Since November 1991, the Peekskill-based artist’s work regarding the urban burial ground on Hart Island has taken numerous forms: a film, a book, a data registry, a photo archive, and, most recently, a speech delivered to the New York City Council demanding better documentation of people in city hospitals.

Hunt’s latest effort to memorialize nearly one million men, women, and children is an exhibition of ink-and-photography pieces. “Shades of New York: An Exhibition of The Hart Island Project” opens December 6 at Westchester Community College’s Center for Digital Arts in Peekskill.

The show’s images of human figures, rendered in black ink and splayed across black-and-white photographs of Hart Island’s desolate landscape, are unrelentingly stark. That is intentional. “This is such a dark story,” Hunt said, “and I haven’t really told the dark side of the story at all.”

The result is akin to the medical examiner outlines of corpses on city streets. For Hunt, this exhibition is yet another way to illuminate a social phenomenon that began during the Civil War and has continued through present-day: the perfunctory municipal burial of the indigent, the friendless, or simply those subsumed by Manhattan’s daily chaos.