Cool job alert: Green-Wood Cemetery is looking for an artist-in-residence
Here's your chance to work among the 'the Plaza Hotel of graveyards'
Art and cemeteries, they go together naturally, at least that’s what I assume since I have an ex-girlfriend who was extremely interested in making the former and wandering around the latter. Perhaps you too are an artist who wants to be surrounded by death all the time, and also you want $5,000 and the chance to show off your work in a graveyard. Great news for you and your very specific desires: there’s still time for you to apply to be the 2026 artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
As the artist-in-residence at Green-Wood, you get nine months to use a studio in the cemetery’s landmarked Fort Hamilton Gatehouse and full access to Green-Wood’s staff and historical archives, plus an opportunity to display your work at the cemetery. And yes, you also get that $5,000 honorarium.
Even without the money though, the chance to spend most of a year using Green-Wood as your workspace, getting to paw through its archives and quizzing its staff about the graveyard’s history and upkeep practices sounds like an incredible opportunity. Green-Wood is already a place that people love to visit either for an event or just a stroll through the headstones, but the residency gives you access that even the biggest fan of the cemetery would kill for.
This is, after all, the Plaza Hotel of graveyards, an exclusive and historic space, a literal landmark on the National Register of Historic Places where some of the most famous and accomplished people in New York City history now rest forever as some of the most famous and accomplished dead people in New York City history: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pete Hammil and Boss Tweed; the inventor of the safety pin Walter Hunt; Pop Smoke, former Governor DeWitt Clinton. You should be so lucky to be buried at Green-Wood.
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Until that time though, if you’re alive and count yourself as an “emerging or mid-career artist” who lives and works in New York City, you can be Green-Wood’s house artist. To apply, you’ve got until August 17 to give them an artist statement and a brief explanation of why you’re interested in the cemetery residency, as well as how your time spent at Green-Wood will shape your work.
The residency is one of the rare bright spots to come out of the pandemic, as it was specifically created in response to some of the upheaval that era brought the city.
“I come from an art background, and I noticed a lot of artists were losing their studios,” said Harry Weil, Green-Wood’s vice president of education and public programs. “They were not able to have exhibitions, the art world came to a halt during the pandemic. So we wanted to find a way that we could support artists, especially emerging artists, who were the most affected.”
Unsurprisingly, the works that previous artists-in-residence have made are focused on death and death rites. Inaugural house artist Heidi Lau, who had the position for the 2021-22 season, made ceramics inspired by Taoist myths and Chinese gardens, a work she did after walking the cemetery every day. Subsequent artist Rowan Renee built an exhibit incorporating the cemetery itself by highlighting the cemetery areas where poorer people were buried, while last year’s artist Adam Tendler made a piece that explored the connection between grief and objects left behind by loved ones.
Having access to the entire cemetery though can bring in interesting wrinkles to the work according to the artists that have done the residency. Renee said that their access to the cemetery over a year-long time period, and the fact that there's active use of the area, was exactly what allowed for such a deeply-researched project to take shape.
"Green-Wood is not a monument to the distant past – there are burials nearly every day, and people visit their loved ones and use it as a space to process grief," they told the Groove. "As an artist working in this space, I felt my work had to address this context."
Shanzhai Lyric, the collective that’s currently the artist-in-residence, are using their time to create a piece centered on the monk parakeets that live in Green-Wood. As Weil pointed out, there’s no residency in the city quite like this one (or around the country really, save for Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts).
“I don't think there's a residency program anywhere else in New York that offers this opportunity, because I don't think there's any other institution that has a preservation team, a horticulture team and cemetery services or our archives and historic collections,” Weil said. “And you can be inspired by our permanent residents — there are well over 500,000 people who are interred here.”
Renee agreed with Weil's that the depth of different kinds of knowledge and history provides an opportunity artists won't get in other places.
"It's a unique opportunity to be immersed in another world, or more accurately worlds. Not just the landscape, but the day-to-day business of the cemetery. Getting to know the patrol team, the gravediggers, the staff that maintain the grounds and conserve the monuments adds so much to the experience of working there. Although it is made up of individuals and there are so many individual stories, being at Green-Wood really is an experience in participating in something far bigger than any individual: something that has a history well before our time and that will continue long after," the said.
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