A project led by
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Ann Street Gallery Artist Researcher in Residence
From the Ground UP is a convergence of local community stakeholders and artists led by Ann Street Gallery Artist Researcher in Residence (ARiR) Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. The project brings Superville Sovak’s creative research and practice together with community members dedicated to imagining, rendering, and presenting collaboratively-designed visions for remembering and honoring African- Americans buried in, and disinterred from, Newburgh’s “Colored Burial Ground” through conversation and the arts.
From the Ground UP is hosted by Ann Street Gallery and consists of three fluid project phases. The first phase launched in October 2023 with a series of community gatherings, presentations, and events that will continue through February 2024. The second phase of the project transforms the Gallery space into a lab, workshop, and exhibition space for Superville Sovak’s research, his socially engaged art practice, his creative output, and the display and performance of commissioned works from other interdisciplinary artists and cultural producers. The third and final phase of the project includes creating digital and analog archives of the project to record the public’s interactions, the artist’s research and process, and the developments of the project in the form of a website and printed materials. The project archives aim to serve as a model for collective forms of memorialization, a resource, and symbolic form of restorative justice for the City of Newburgh.
Superville Sovak’s project seeks to engage histories that have been erased from dominant historical narratives, specifically Black lives during the period shortly after the gradual abolition of slavery in New York State (1827) and the Civil War, a period that coincides with the Newburgh “colored” cemetery’s usage.
The project asks: How can collectively inspired memorials truthfully function? How should the dead, once desecrated, now be honored? What were the lived experiences that intersected with the segregated cemetery? What is the reparative capacity of a monument and how can memorializing gestures, space, or objects serve that capacity to its fullest potential? How can the arts and spaces designed for the exhibition of art facilitate community conversation, healing, imagining, and creativity? From the Ground UP is conceived as an open-source feedback loop to display a diversity of ideas and creative forms of what publicly-inspired and collaboratively-designed memorials could look like, including stories, offerings, speculative proposals, performances, readings, discussions, and more.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Ann Street Gallery Artist Researcher in Residence
From the Ground UP is a convergence of local community stakeholders and artists led by Ann Street Gallery Artist Researcher in Residence (ARiR) Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. The project brings Superville Sovak’s creative research and practice together with community members dedicated to imagining, rendering, and presenting collaboratively-designed visions for remembering and honoring African- Americans buried in, and disinterred from, Newburgh’s “Colored Burial Ground” through conversation and the arts.
From the Ground UP is hosted by Ann Street Gallery and consists of three fluid project phases. The first phase launched in October 2023 with a series of community gatherings, presentations, and events that will continue through February 2024. The second phase of the project transforms the Gallery space into a lab, workshop, and exhibition space for Superville Sovak’s research, his socially engaged art practice, his creative output, and the display and performance of commissioned works from other interdisciplinary artists and cultural producers. The third and final phase of the project includes creating digital and analog archives of the project to record the public’s interactions, the artist’s research and process, and the developments of the project in the form of a website and printed materials. The project archives aim to serve as a model for collective forms of memorialization, a resource, and symbolic form of restorative justice for the City of Newburgh.
Superville Sovak’s project seeks to engage histories that have been erased from dominant historical narratives, specifically Black lives during the period shortly after the gradual abolition of slavery in New York State (1827) and the Civil War, a period that coincides with the Newburgh “colored” cemetery’s usage.
The project asks: How can collectively inspired memorials truthfully function? How should the dead, once desecrated, now be honored? What were the lived experiences that intersected with the segregated cemetery? What is the reparative capacity of a monument and how can memorializing gestures, space, or objects serve that capacity to its fullest potential? How can the arts and spaces designed for the exhibition of art facilitate community conversation, healing, imagining, and creativity? From the Ground UP is conceived as an open-source feedback loop to display a diversity of ideas and creative forms of what publicly-inspired and collaboratively-designed memorials could look like, including stories, offerings, speculative proposals, performances, readings, discussions, and more.
From the Ground UP is made possible with support from:
