Kambui Olujimi, Hart Island Crew, 2020

Kambui Olujimi: My name is Kambui Olujimi. 

Hart Island is this little island right across from Rikers. A lot of people forget, New York is just a bunch of islands, it's a little archipelago. And so, one of them is Hart Island and for a little more than a century, we've been burying the unclaimed dead there.

And as I started to look at some research on Hart Island, a lot of the labor that was done there was performed by incarcerated folks at Rikers. Over the years, the incarcerated were paid pennies, and asked to absorb a lot of this grief in an emotional way. They're the only mourners for bodies that are buried there. So unclaimed dead from the AIDS epidemic, from just living in New York, from crack, from Covid, there're these waves of deaths that happen in any urban space. But in New York, and as a New Yorker in particular, this was my black hole, I feel some kinds of way about New York. These are my folks that are unclaimed.

Narrator: Olujimi made this painting in the summer of 2020, during lockdown. 

Kambui Olujimi: There's something really ghostly about it for me in that they're wearing these hazmat suits. It's so clinical, so much of the epidemic was about a loss of touch. 

I wanted to include the landscape so that as a viewer, I felt like I was there, that I'm engaged, that I can feel the sort of pits. There were so many graves being dug during the pandemic that there were bulldozers, and they're mass graves in general. So this heavy machinery, it's not just one person, but then people come in and they might shape it or cover it back. But it's real terraforming. So the landscape was important to me. Also, a sense of scale and openness.