Laurel Hill Cemetery is among the most celebrated – and most densely populated – swaths of Greater Philadelphia. Beneath seventy-eight acres of lawn, trees, and monuments lie some 70,000 bodies – a silent and sprawling subdivision that took shape over nearly two centuries. Today’s expanses of stone and sod testify to the success of the original vision while making it hard to decipher. When Laurel Hill opened in 1836, it was Philadelphia’s first “rural” cemetery. This was a new kind of institution and it grew out of competing impulses: attached socially and economically to the city, it stood physically and symbolically in the countryside. That paradox underlies this exhibition. Garden, graveyard, and civic amenity – a place of mourning and recreation – Laurel Hill was both public and private, rural and urban, a scene of development and a possible antidote to it.
Curated by Aaron Wunsch, 2011.
