Description
Hill Top, currently on view in
Living Conduit – Indigenous History and Present Day, South Ocean Gallery at South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Freeport, NY, October 3, 2026 – November 21, 2026
Shinnecock Hills holds ancestral burial places within a homeland now divided by roads, homes, and expensive real estate. Graves without stone markers remain graves. Their vulnerability comes from a system that can recognize a parcel's development value while disregarding the relationships between Shinnecock families and the ancestors laid to rest there. Hill Top places a living presence above disturbed earth, where a construction site would otherwise dominate the story.
In this staged scene, the figure can stand for a future protector watching over sacred ground, or an ancestor made visible by its desecration. The hill is a place of responsibility across generations. The Sacredness of Hills series responds to recurring disturbances, including human remains uncovered during residential construction on Hawthorne Road in 2018. What appears to an excavator as earth to move can be a family's resting place.
Shinnecock protection work continues through community organizing and efforts to safeguard sacred land. Years of work by the Shinnecock Graves Protection Warrior Society helped lead to the protection of Sugar Loaf Hill's summit in 2021, through a partnership with the Peconic Land Trust and Southampton Town. Such efforts require families to keep defending places that should already be treated with respect. Hill Top holds the position of someone who remains responsible to the land even when surrounding ownership has changed. Its elevated figure also restores a presence often absent from celebrated landscape images of the hills. The ground carries Shinnecock history because people lived here, buried their relatives here, and continue to care what happens here.
Artwork Details
Title: Hill Top
Year: 2019
Medium: Inkjet Print on Foam Board
Size: 24 x 36 inches
Edition: 1/10
