Time: 7 pm EST
Admission $8 - Tickets HERE

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From the winged skulls of colonial burial grounds to the angels that preside over Victorian cemeteries, each symbol in these places of death has meaning. Sometimes their significance is now obscure, but through deciphering what they meant to the departed we can learn a lot about the past, including the stories of individuals whose names may no longer be remembered anywhere else.

This talk will concentrate on cemetery symbolism in the United States and how it transformed over time, but the exploration of symbols like draped urns, flying hourglasses, inverted torches, and snapped roses can be applied to cemetery wanders around the world.

Allison C. Meier is a writer and cemetery tour guide for burial grounds including Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. She regularly writes about the intersections between death and culture, with recent bylines including Lapham's Quarterly, National Geographic, the New York Times, CityLab, Wellcome Collection, JSTOR Daily, Raw Vision Magazine, the Public Domain Review, and other publications on art, architecture, and history. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She is the author of the Concrete New York and Art Deco New York maps published by Blue Crow Media.

Image: Grave from the Old Burial Hill, Salem, by Rex Young