Celebrate your mourning:
34th Annual Wreath Interpretations at the Central Park Arsenal
Entering the lobby of the Central Park Arsenal, a building that predates the Park itself, time has stopped. The ancient-looking wall paper depicts moments from hundreds of years ago that seem completely removed from the world outside.
Stepping out of the elevator into the 3rd floor gallery, however, the styles, materials, and images make it clear that I am looking at our time. It’s the end of 2016.
Wreaths have historically signified both mourning and celebration. Religious or spiritual symbolism aside, the tradition of making wreaths engages in a practice of uniting with the materials around us, familiar materials, to express an array of values.
As I look around in this well preserved landmark, I wonder what the wreaths would have looked like in the early 1800s, before the industrial revolution, when the building was first built. The most prevalent materials would most likely be plant-based — evergreens? Ivy? Holly?
Wreath Interpretations at the Central Park Arsenal (on display free to the public until January 6th) beams with a vivacious diversity of materials, cultures and values reflective of the times we live in.
These contemporary assemblages push the imagination into a world where we find joy in the industrial waste that now must become our cherished familiar resources.
The wreaths celebrate materials we simultaneously mourn — the replacement of evergreen branches with discarded green aluminum cans in Christina Massey’s “All Green Everything,” the loss of ecosystems. A wetlands wreath seems to weave urban native maritime species like yellow seaside goldenrod and Spartina alterniflora marsh grass into a funeral assemblage memorializing the almost complete annihilation of NYC wetlands since the late 1700s. Yet, at the same time, the wreath’s very composition is a testament to the surviving wetland ecologies today. The wreath mourns and celebrates at once.
Other wreaths tell unique cultural histories and values in a spirit of reclaiming agency over waste. In the increasingly destructive capitalist society we experience today, wreaths maybe help us find joy in our immediate surroundings and connect with the things we have to live with. We must make peace with our surroundings, and if we can’t make peace, we must learn to bend them to our will.
I worked on the wreath below with a small team from GreenThumb, the community garden division of NYC Parks. Our wreath entitled “Unexpected Harvest” (or “Unwanted Harvest”) celebrates finding joy through small interactions with humans and nonhumans in your local community. At this time in history, seeing waste as a resource and forming alliances with our surroundings and neighbors holds incredible value. As we mourn our changing lives, we celebrate the processes of life.
“Unexpected Harvest”
The power of people coming together to change the world for the better is on full display in GreenThumb community gardens. New Yorkers volunteer their time to act as stewards of the environment and active caretakers of their community. While the visible fruits of their labor are celebrated, this wreath recognizes the beauty of process in grassroots community organizing, ordinary gardening tasks, and hard work. The everyday items found in gardens — chicken wire, weeds, rubble, twigs — are often discarded by garden communities as they work toward sustainable food production and building vibrant cultural spaces. This “Unexpected Harvest” wreath celebrates the relationship that gardeners “harvest” with their larger social and urban ecology through the remarkable spirit and skill they put forth to grow things from the ground here in NYC.
