The Anna Pierrepont Series (the Afterlife of Public Monument)

In the past half dozen years, millions have awakened to the manipulations of memory that underly the raising of monuments. Turning against the personages and institutions they celebrate with singular intensity. The objects becoming palimpsests upon which emotional response to life trajectories stunted and memories coercively buried are being embroidered on monumental surfaces. These additions have been captured in my most recent studio works on paper in my art project, the Anna Pierrepont Series (howardskrill.blogspot.com).

Shortly after my father’s death in 2011, I began wandering Green-Wood cemetery in walking distance from my long-time home in Brooklyn, New York, creating numerous plein-air drawings of its numerous funerary monuments. I named the series after Anna, a 19^th century grand dame of Brooklyn interred a grand sarcophagus at Green-wood that is slowly descending into ruin.

My father and his father were NYC builders whose efforts to create something persevering succumbed to tides of erasure. My life as a youngster sinking into ruin as a consequence.

Green-Wood was built over a battlefield of the 1776 military disaster, the Battle of Brooklyn. A monument celebrating Union victory in the Civil War was raised on the barely acknowledged site of the battle. NYC’s monuments as tools in the intentional erasure of memory became the project’s principal preoccupation resulting in pictorial essays such as ‘Erasure’ [https://newfound.org/archives/volume-6/issue-1/nonfiction-howard-skrill/]

Monuments are now being systematically erased. I had spent many hours documenting the tracery of ruin on Green-Wood’s monuments which I now apply to my studio works where the words, objects, chisel marks and paint splashes revealed by my paint brush and pencils freeze into place a potent dialog that the contemporary moment is having with whatever ‘lies’ beneath.