Keynote Speaker: Melinda Hunt
About Melinda
Melinda Hunt is an interdisciplinary artist and founding director of the Hart Island Project. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (1985) and an MS in Digital Imaging and Design, NYU (2007). She began working on Hart Island with photographer Joel Sternfeld in 1991. They published a book, Hart Island (Scalo, 1998).
Melinda directed a film Hart Island: An American Cemetery (2008). She received awards from NYSCA in public art (1995), film (2000), and electronic art (2011). She received Canada Council Interarts Awards (2008, 2009, 2017, 2018) and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2017. She directed development of Traveling Cloud Museum produced in collaboration with Studio AIRPORT and Inspire Innovation in the Netherlands. She recently launched a creative initiative to recover the identities of AIDS victims buried on Hart Island.
About the Hart Island Project
New York's City Cemetery on Hart Island occupies 131 acres in the Long Island Sound on the eastern edge of the Bronx. Since 1869, prison labor has been used to bury unclaimed and unidentified New Yorkers in mass graves of 150 adults or 1000 infants. Until 2014, these graves were inaccessible to families of the buried.
On November 14, 2019, the New York City Council passed legislation to create a public park where citizens can freely visit graves. NYC Parks and Recreation assumed jurisdiction on December 4, 2019 ending 150 years of penal control over city burials. Parks take over managing Hart Island by July 1, 2021.
This transfer comes directly as a result of advocacy by The Hart Island Project, creation of a database of recent burials and Traveling Cloud Museum storytelling platform. Burial information about each person includes a clock that measures the period of time that they have been buried in anonymity until someone adds a story, image, epitaph, sound or video.
In 2018, The Hart Island Project mapped the entire island using a drone and embedded geotiffs into over 68,000 profiles listed in the Traveling Cloud Museum. This information now displays on our homepage and populates search engines.
Traveling Cloud Museum was conceived by Melinda Hunt and funded as an artist project through the New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Women’s Fund and the Canada Council for Arts.
The Hart Island Project provides access to information about the burials on Hart Island, tools and workshops for storytelling as well as personal support to families of the buried.
All information quoted from hartisland.net.