Making a Powerful Statement about Same-Sex Marriage in a Bronx Cemetery

“Memorial to a Marriage”
(Credit: patriciacronin.net/art/memorial)

2015 will mark the year that the Supreme Court decides whether same-sex marriage is protected by the Constitution. It wasn’t that long ago, however, when same-sex marriage was illegal in every state.

Back in 2000, due to the illegality of the situation, inspiration struck sculptor Patricia Cronin to create a sculpture that packs a powerful punch political statement-wise about the major discrepancies between the legal rights of heterosexual couples and same-sex couples. While many of these basic protections have to do in times of illness and death, as Cronin reflected in her Huffington Post column from 2011, “They’re not about celebrating our life together but about the end of it. Since all I was legally afforded was death, I decided to make the most elegant a statement about it I could muster. With the help of the Grand Arts Foundation, I carved a three-ton Carrara marble mortuary sculpture titled ‘Memorial To A Marriage.’ It is a dignified double funerary portrait of my partner, artist Deborah Kass and me, lying half naked and entwined in each other’s arms.”

Unveiled in 2002, nine years before New York passed a bill allowing same-sex marriage, the statue resides on Cronin and Kass’s “actual burial plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.” The Woodlawn Cemetery, modeled after Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery, houses many historic figures. Cronin explains the reasoning behind her style for this sculpture, “I chose a nationalist form for the work, nineteenth century American neo-classical sculpture, to address what I consider a federal failure – not allowing gay Americans the right to marry.” According to her, as of 2011, “Memorial to a Marriage” is “the third most visited plot in the cemetery: There’s Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, then Deb and me.”

As monumental moments continuously happen in the history of same-sex marriage rights, this beautiful statement of a sculpture reminds me of the veracity of that age-old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”