Alison Cornyn has been researching the site’s history, particularly its time as the New York Training School for Girls, for a long time. Inspired by a box of prison records discovered by a local thrift shop owner, Cornyn started the project “Incorrigibles” in 2014, which now holds annual workshops for former “students,” or detainees.
Last summer, the group held a memorial service at a long-forgotten cemetery on the site. Cornyn says they placed white roses at the graves of at least 14 young women, girls and babies, many of whom died in childbirth or of illnesses like syphilis and tuberculosis.
“This is kind of the impetus for this whole exhibition, thinking ‘How do we honor the lives that are lost and marginalized and kind of erased and forgotten about?’" Cornyn says.
Footage of the ceremony and burial ground serves as the starting point of a new exhibit called “Unearthing the Light” at The Church in Staatsburg, about an hour south of the prison. With works from 17 artists, it takes the main theme from “Incorrigibles” — the criminalization of independent behavior in girls — and expands on it to include reflections on loss, destruction, healing, and remembrance.
“And also extending into the body of the earth, thinking about these babies and girls being buried in the earth, and what that body is like that’s holding them," Cornyn adds.
At times, “Unearthing the Light” makes you feel as if you’re standing in an open grave. Root drawings by Jillian McDonald are positioned high up on the walls of the Church, as if they’re dangling above. A collage by Tanya Marcuse uses photographs of the scraps and eggshells discarded by vultures. And the largest sculpture in the room — a kneeling “Mother Earth”-like figure by Sandra Harper — is made out of a combination of clay and seaweed.
Artist Maggie Simonelli spent weeks researching and collecting pine needles and other materials in the pine barrens of New Jersey for her piece. The result was an encaustic painting that uses beeswax and bright red, homemade pigments to make it look like the pine needles are burning.
“What I learned was pine trees need fire to regenerate. Without the fire, the seed cones will not open," she explains. "So it became a collection of a landscape, the ecosystem that was in balance. Here, the fire is actually constructive to the wood.”
The exhibit also includes a surprising amount of digital works. A video in one corner, by Rite Peress, captures a flower from Hudson Correctional Facility as it slowly dries and fades from a bright green to a dark bronze.
Another video, by Nina Sobell, plays with the exposure of different photographs and the frequencies of various nature sounds, like heartbeats, to depict a destroyed world that, slowly, puts itself back together.
Sobell says she made it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s a trip of us traveling into space and then being transformed, and coming back down to Earth again in hybrid form — because we are a hybrid form, now that we’ve been invaded by this virus," she smiles. "A transmutation of ourselves that we weren’t before.”
For all the darkness explored in “Unearthing the Light,” there’s also a lot of love and healing. One piece, by Nancy Burson, literally uses the word “love” written in different colors over and over until the page looks like its own cosmic universe, literally made out of “love.” A small book in a glass case, meanwhile, contains simple phrases embroidered by Diana Weymar. Cornyn currently has it open on a page that reads, “I think of you.”
“Part of the whole idea of the show is remembrance, and not forgetting those people who have been erased, so I thought that was important," she notes.
Cornyn says there’s still a lot she wants to learn about the cemetery and the New York Training School. She’d like to find the families of the girls buried there, for example, and use ground-penetrating radar to determine whether there are any unmarked graves. But for now, she’s focused on small acts of remembrance. She says artist Ofelia Manger held a workshop at the Church this summer that encouraged visitors to make balls of clay and wildflower seeds that they could then “infuse” with the memories of their loved ones, and toss into their backyards.
“She actually has a little poem that comes with the bags you can put your seedballs in," Cornyn reads. "‘Find a place in need of some beauty. Bask in the glow of remembrance. Sow these seeds to bloom and grow.’”
“Unearthing the Light” is on view weekends at the Church in Staatsburg through September 14.
