In 2008, workers renovating an abandoned Newburgh schoolhouse into the city’s courthouse began digging around the building’s foundations. Bones appeared. Then skulls. Police and the coroner were summoned, and archaeologists eventually recovered the remains of 99 people from the property at Broadway and Robinson Avenue.
The school had been built in 1908 over what was historically known as the Newburgh Colored Burial Ground, a segregated cemetery used primarily by the city’s poor during the 19th century. Officials believed the graves had been relocated before construction began. A century later, the earth offered a correction.
“I like to say the ancestors rose up,” says artist Jean-Marc Superville Sovak.
The burial ground supplies one strand of “Open for Unfinished Business,” Superville Sovak’s sprawling exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz which opened on September 9 and continues through December 6. Bringing together more than two decades of prints, drawings, sculpture, video, sound, archival research, and new site-specific installations, the show examines the obscured histories of Black life, labor, and freedom in the Hudson Valley. It opens September 9 and remains on view through December 6, with an opening reception September 19 from 4 to 6pm.
The title refers, in part, to the unfinished work of emancipation. Although 1827 is commonly identified as the end of slavery in New York, Superville Sovak argues that servitude was frequently reinvented instead of abolished. The state’s self-image as the progressive North has helped bury that history. “It’s what has been paved over,” he says, acknowledging the metaphor’s grim literalness. “It turns out that, yeah, same old story.”
The exhibition is billed as a solo show, a designation the artist rejects. “There is no such thing as a solo exhibition,” he says. “No artist is solo. That’s just fiction.” Curated by Sofia Thiệu D’Amico, the exhibition was conceived as a platform for partnerships, particularly with Alison McNulty of Newburgh’s Ann Street Gallery; the Margaret Wade-Lewis Center; Historic Huguenot Street; and the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at Elting Memorial Library. Several objects loaned by those institutions have rarely, if ever, been displayed.
At the center of the exhibition is Jacob’s Ladder, an installation made from windows removed from a New Paltz house built by Jacob Wynkoop. Born one day after slavery was formally abolished in New York, Wynkoop belonged to the first generation of ostensibly free Black New Yorkers. A prolific builder, he constructed many homes in what was then New Paltz’s Black neighborhood, leaving a distinctive peaked Gothic window as a kind of architectural signature.
When owners of one Wynkoop house replaced its original windows, dating to around 1888, they donated them to the Margaret Wade-Lewis Center. Superville Sovak arranged the windows as the steps of an unstable ladder, supported by black walnut slabs purchased from a Craigslist seller in Amenia. The wood carries its own history: Black walnut trees were cultivated as an accessible source of protein for people who could not afford meat.
The sculpture ascends and descends simultaneously, its precarious form suggesting how tenuous freedom remained for Wynkoop and his contemporaries.
With its attenuated climb and unreachable promise, Jacob’s Ladder also appears to converse with Accord-based sculptor Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, the monumental 1996 sculpture that used forced perspective to evoke Washington’s gradualist vision of racial progress. In both works, the ladder promises ascent while casting doubt on whether its destination can ever be reached.
It also exemplifies Superville Sovak’s overlapping roles as artist, researcher, and curator. The archive, he says, is his “happy place,” although it can be a violent one. People denied a voice in conventional histories often survive only as numbers in censuses, property records, inventories, and ledgers that calculate their monetary or productive value.
Another installation returns to the Newburgh burial ground. Working with McNulty, Superville Sovak created “burial portraits” of the 99 people whose remains were removed from beneath the courthouse. Those remains are still held at SUNY New Paltz while awaiting reburial, connecting the exhibition site directly to the people it commemorates.
Courtesy the artist.
Superville Sovak’s best-known body of work, “a-Historical Landscapes,” similarly asks viewers to look for what has been removed from the picture. In the series, he inserts figures taken from contemporary abolitionist tracts and antislavery publications into picturesque 19th-century Hudson River scenes. The original landscapes promoted the region as a destination for travelers with disposable income, editing out the brickyards, tanneries, mills, and other industries lining the river—as well as the people whose labor produced its wealth.
“They were landscapes of leisure,” he says. “But for some folks, it was also a landscape of survival.”
Humor offers an entry into these difficult histories. Superville Sovak describes it as a “side door” through which information can reach people without immediately triggering guilt, shame, or defensiveness. The exhibition includes his pandemic-era video series “Black in a Minute,” short, punchy Instagram lessons created when the platform limited videos to 60 seconds.
The jokes do not soften the history. They invite people inside long enough to encounter it. For Superville Sovak, that encounter carries a responsibility: to recognize the people who built the Hudson Valley, restore individual lives to an incomplete record, and disturb the smooth surface of the stories the region tells about itself.
“Jean-Marc Superville Sovak: Open for Unfinished Business,” is on exhibit at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz through December 6. An opening reception will be held on September 19 from 4 to 6pm.
