Here Lies The Rub
June & July 2026 at Old Dutch Church in Kingston, NY
Cemeteries are for the living. Their nature implies that we don’t have access to what is below the surface. Lives are lost, bodies decompose, memories fade–all that remains for future generations are markings (if there ever were any), worn down over time or upended or penned into a book of records (maybe). Headstones give us a glimpse of all this; to make a rubbing of one is to trace the lines of excavation and create an impressionist imprint of a fixed history. And while cemeteries are utterly holy and hallowed ground, one could make an equally good argument for the hallowed dirt of all of nature. The divinity of life is proof of miracles beyond our wildest imagination.
Who—or what—we mourn says more about our values than the value of those who have died. But with the scale of devastation we witness everyday, it is hard to feel a connection to the lives of our ancestors. It feels more important to grieve for every animal that goes extinct due to climate change or each child who dies by a U.S.–manufactured weapon. This exhibition is my attempt to rectify that dissonance, and bring past and present rituals around collective mourning into conversation.
The centuries-old, hand-chiseled carvings in cemeteries along the Hudson Valley are not my people: There are no headstones for my family members in this country before the 20th century. Among the hundreds of headstones outside the walls of the Old Dutch Church are four recent additions: I pulled three of the four stones from a long-gone settler house foundation in the Tannersville woods and learned to carve them. Imagining what was via the relics of what had been is a way for me to reckon with the short, violent, colonial history that decimated the ecosystems and culture of this valley over a span of a few hundred years. Each rock is 350 million years old. The designs pay homage to the creatures of the Hudson Valley who have become endangered or extinct since the creation of this cemetery, but also to connect this ecosystem to the ecosystems my ancestors may have lived in.
I look to Slavic and Jewish headstones of Eastern Europe as inspiration, and wonder what plants grew along the rocks they carved into, and how their ecosystem might be similar or different to the one I am living in now. There were so many lions on the headstones, some looking more like bears or dogs. Had my ancestors in Hungary or Ukraine seen lions in the 18th or 19th centuries? Impossible to know, but I did learn that there had been lynxes there then, just as there once had been here, until they were poached or driven into Canada.
My genealogical research has felt equally geological as I attempt to find generations embedded in history like prying apart and studying layers in rocks. My family moved every generation, and photographs of my ancestors’ rabbinical headstones I found on the internet were the only access I had to their lives. The markers were carved in Yiddish I couldn’t read, fellow headstones decorated with ornate motifs of flowers, fingers, and fauna–which defied Jewish law as “graven image.”
I have been trying to make sense of a language that was stripped from the mouths of my family through the process of assimilation. I have fed these pixelated, shadow-filled photographs through language-translation apps that further mutate the information into an incomprehensible mythology. These feel like a strange antithesis to geology and the forever grounded nature of rocks. Without the physical stones to rub, my connection to my past can only be rendered through drawing these images. Just as my own connection to the animals and plants that have disappeared from the Hudson River valley are to carve them into stone.
This well-preserved cemetery at the Old Dutch Church is a beautiful resource to our town. But how can we apply a more critical understanding of cemeteries to the way we culturally memorialize? How can we reconsider public space for grief that extends beyond the people whose names already line our streets? Where are the markers for the Munsee Lenape people who died at the hands of the Dutch and British? A few blocks away from here on Pine street, sits a cemetery that holds Kingston’s early African American residents—enslaved by people buried in this churchyard. A hardware store was built on top of the buried, with no markers for hundreds of years, and as I’m writing this, no carved headstones to symbolize their final resting place. Our modern knowledge of this site was nearly accidental. Only with diligent work can we memorialize those who were not treated with the same dignity in their lifetime.
- "Here Lies The Rub" is on view June & July 2026 at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, NY