Art
Wellness + Cooking

Death Café

When

Sat, Jun 1, 2024 1:00PM – 4:00PM

Where

Glyndor Gallery, Sun Porch

Price

Free

with admission to the grounds

Death as a concept is avoided and hidden, especially where there’s a lack of respect for the living. Expressing grief is a survival mechanism; the way we mourn reflects the way we live. Guided by artist Anastasia Corrine (Wave Hill Winter Workspace 2024) and death doula Nancy Huang, Death Café is an opportunity for people to gather and share thoughts, fears, dreams about mortality, and plan for the future.

What world do we want our descendants to live in? What does grief reveal about human experience? How does collective grief deepen our commitment to love and dignity for the living, sick and dead? This program explores these questions and more with herbal companions, multiple lineages of death writing, and sound meditation. Through levity, curiosity, and patience, this program aims to create intergenerational spaces dedicated to the safety and celebration of people of all abilities, while rejecting the way death is sanitized without regard for the violent legacies of colonization or coded resistances of oppressed people worldwide. BIPOC to the front. Participants gather to discuss death and dying in a nonjudgmental space, build a collective altar, and enjoy light refreshments.

Participants are invited to bring something as a tribute to leave on the altar, whether that be a photograph, herb, piece of jewelry, note, or something your ancestor enjoyed—you can take it home with you at the end of the program.

Adults only, please.

Limited capacity. Registration required; online or by calling 718.549.3200 x251.

Glyndor Gallery is wheelchair-accessible. There is an accessible, ground-level entrance at the front of the building with an elevator that provides access to the gallery level. The Sunroom Project Space can be accessed with an ADA-compliant ramp. The restroom on the gallery level is all-gender and ADA-compliant.

Anastasia Corrine

Anastasia Corrine

Orginally from the Bronx, Anastasia Corrine is a reflex, root, and voidthot. They are a mirror and at least 60 percent water. As a voidthot, they sometimes find comfort and sensuality in a cavernous beyond. Using ceramics, electronic media, performance, and writing, Corrine is developing methods for digging a hole to the other side. Like a root and its reflex, they are seeking and dirt loving. Corrine’s practice inhabits The Afrovoid(ism): a fictive ecology and conceptual framework, which considers the immortality of the Black psyche. It exists on the spectrum of immortality as dignified–every genre of music created by Black America–and a wish gone wrong: a viral death. Afrovoidism is their original methodology for demystifying the occupied, uninhabitable oasis of The United States. Under conditions of colonial acceleration, The Afrovoid is a guide to lineal wisdom, sovereignty, and freedom through abstraction. Corrine is motivated and influenced by the roots of the African Diaspora, our dislocation, and the dialogue between all living/dying things + surrounding geologies.
Nancy Huang

Nancy Huang

Nancy Huang grew up in Shanghai, China and near Detroit, MI. She is an amateur folklorist, writer, and death doula. Huang is the 2024 Velvetpark Media Writer-in-Residence, and her forthcoming novel is about the moon. As a doula she specializes in pediatric grief and loss. Huang works at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo: Janelle Tang