Sacred Landscapes: Memorialization in New York City Public Parks

Join us for the launch event for A Breathing Place, written by Amelia Medved, the 2023–2024 Duffy fellow. There will be a presentation of Medved’s research and a light reception.

Public parks are the theater of New York City civic life, serving as spaces of recreation, rest, learning, and protest. They host the diverse, occasionally conflicting desires of the living, while simultaneously exhibiting a record of our shared public history. Medved’s research concerns the contemporary use of park memorial spaces in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, specifically those that are consecrated burial sites.

In A Breathing Place, Medved explores what it means to designate public space as sacred at four case study sites: the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial in Fort Greene Park, the Enslaved African burial ground in Van Cortlandt Park, the public cemetery on Hart Island, and the National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center.

About the Speaker
Amelia Medved, FCRH ‘23, majored in environmental studies and visual arts. She currently works as a studio assistant at SCAPE, a New York City-based landscape architecture firm. Medved is passionate about environmental justice, specifically with a focus on parks equity and community-based ecological stewardship.