"Cemeteries are spaces where ritual and reflection converge, where commemorations of life co-exist with contemplations of human mortality. In Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a new pair of installations by artist Jean Shin question how ritual and reflection mark cycles of time, shaping what we carry with us and what we choose to leave behind.
Situated in a meadow facing the cemetery’s brownstone Gothic Revival 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 at Green-Wood. The installation was informed by tumuli, artificial burial mounds of earth and stone found all over the world. Shin was particularly inspired by the kinds of rounded, hill-like tumulus mounds seen in traditional Korean funerary practices, which she told Hyperallergic are “so distinctively different than when you walk around in an American cemetery...”
