Cemeteries are spaces where ritual and reflection converge, where commemorations of life coexist with contemplations of human mortality. At Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a new pair of installations by artist Jean Shin question how ritual and reflection mark the cycles of time, shaping what we carry with us and what we leave behind.
Set in a meadow overlooking the cemetery’s brownstone neo-Gothic gates, ‘Offering’ (2026), unveiled to the public on April 18, is a site-specific regenerative earthwork that pays tribute to trees that have spent their entire lives in Green-Wood. The installation was informed by tumuli, artificial burial mounds of earth and stone found around the world. Shin was particularly inspired by the kind of round, hilly burial mounds found in traditional Korean burial practices, which she talked about Hyperallergic are “so strikingly different than walking around an American cemetery.”
Green-Wood’s vice president of education and public programs, Harry Weil, said he engaged Shin for an installation at the meadow because of her practice of using found materials. “I really wanted to think about ways we could challenge ourselves as an institution to create something large-scale – for us at least – while also using and being inspired by the raw materials of the cemetery,” he said. Hyperallergic.
When she first visited the site after the assignment, Shin said she saw a number of “elder trees” – a red oak and a pin oak – that needed to be demolished near the end of their lifespan because they were either too damaged or had structural defects that posed risks to visitor safety. This inspired her to “honor them and give them a proper burial,” she said. A similar spirit lay behind her previous work, “Fallen” (2021), at the Olana State Historic Site, where she laid a felled hemlock to rest in a leather shroud.
“I just wanted everything to have a ceremonial nature,” Shin said, adding that the work offers a way to celebrate the trees “as part of our lineage, rather than treating them as something else that is no longer useful.”
With ‘Sacrifice’, Shin also sought to translate the sense of ritual embedded in funerary practices into a permaculture methodology. In the meadow, the artist worked with the cemetery’s grave diggers to excavate a long trench in front of the tree, stretching more than thirty meters, emphasizing “the scale of their volumes and their bodies,” Shin said. She also used materials such as fallen leaves and branches to bury them next to the tree trunks. Late last year, Shin teamed up with Dannielle Tegeder of Hilma’s Ghost to organize a ritual around the in-progress installation, which by then was covered in snow.
At the time of the press preview on April 16, an excavator had buried the trees under a long, sloping, oval-shaped mound of earth. During the event, which featured a community ritual led by Korean shaman Mudang Jenn, a group of volunteers planted wildflowers and shrubs on top of the hill and decorated it with shades of pink and green. As the trees in the trench decompose, they will enrich the soil, nourish microbes and create two interconnected ecosystems that support the plants above, making the installation a living memorial.
“It’s like trying to imagine that death is not the end, but actually just the beginning,” Shin said.
Rebirth is a dominant theme at Green-Wood this spring, as Offering also accompanies the reopening of the historic Weir Greenhouse, a Victorian-era landmark at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 25th Street. Why does the Green-Wood Cemetery have a greenhouse? “We didn’t do that,” Lisa Alpert, Green-Wood’s senior vice president of development and programming, explained during a press tour in late March. “So it was part of what I like to call the ecosystem around any major cemetery, which is funeral homes, monument makers and flower shops.”
Originally built in 1880 and adapted to its current form in 1895, the Weir Greenhouse is one of the oldest surviving commercial greenhouses in New York City. The copper-domed building was designated a city landmark in 1982, but fell into disrepair in the early 2010s. In 2012, the cemetery purchased the greenhouse from McGovern Florists, a Brooklyn-based company that had owned the structure for more than four decades. Green-Wood then embarked on a $43 million restoration and transformation of the greenhouse and surrounding area, led initially by Page Ayres Cowley Architecture and Walter B. Melvin Architects, and later by Architecture Research Office (ARO) and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Ultimately, the project was expanded to include a new L-shaped building covered in glazed terracotta fins, located behind the greenhouse.
“We recognized that there was a large gap between what we as an institution knew and would convey through our programming, and what the public knew about us,” Alpert said. Hyperallergic. And so Green-Wood partnered with ARO to create a visitor center. The design finally received the green light from the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2021, after previous proposals failed. The new building consolidates several functions previously spread across the cemetery grounds, ranging from gallery spaces to archives and offices for Green-Wood staff.
The structure also includes a permanent exhibition space that tells the story of Green-Wood’s past, as well as an adjacent white cube gallery for art installations.
The latter space houses Shin’s “Celadon Landscape” (2015–2019), previously on view at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and at the Sarasota Art Museum. The installation consists of two monumental mosaic vases, pieced together from discarded pale blue-green ceramic shards, submerged in a pool of ceramic fragments on the floor of the gallery.
Shin said she discovered piles of such shards while visiting Korea and meeting ceramic artists in their studios. “I became very excited and inspired by this mountain of what I thought were still treasures, [even though] they rejected them because they weren’t perfect,” she explained. The installation consists of shards that were part of a nearly two-ton shipment that Shin brought from Icheon, South Korea, for her previous work on an installation at the Long Island Rail Road station in Flushing, Queens.
Once part of something bigger, but now separated from their origins, Shin sees the shards as a metaphor for the Korean diaspora.
“The diaspora community, like me, has somehow become detached from our hometown and yet despite all the displacement and distance, we are still Korean, even though our context, language and customs have changed,” Shin said.
Like ‘Offering’, this installation also contains elements of ritual and participation that will transform it over time as it remains on display until January next year. On pieces of mulberry paper, visitors are invited to write the names of loved ones and respond to the question: “Who are we carrying with us?” Shin plans to take these fragments and collage them onto a large scroll that will be installed in the gallery.
The piece is meant to evoke a sense of connection, which for Shin drives people to persevere, to carry on in the face of a shared reality as fragmented as the broken ceramic shards of ‘Celadon Landscape’. She added: “As we experience such brutal realities today – war, death and everything else – that sense of memory and what we hold on to is really crucial.”
