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Date: Sunday, October 18, 2026
5:30 pmm – 7:30 pm ET
$10 Patreon Members / $12 General Admission
Location: Industry City, 254 36th St 2nd floor, C251, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Floriography, or the language of flowers, was incredibly popular in the 19th century at the same time there was a heavy emphasis on mourning. In Victorian cemeteries, roses with snapped stems were carved in marble for lives cut short; hair from the deceased was delicately formed into pansies for thoughts and worn as jewelry or displayed in memorial artworks. Language of flowers books offered harebell for grief and asphodel for "my regrets follow you to the grave." Complemented by the memorial hairwork now installed in the Morbid Anatomy space from Leila’s Hair Museum, this talk will delve into these hidden messages of love, mortality, and remembrance in floral symbolism with a focus on their use related to death and mourning.
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer on art, history, and culture who has been leading cemetery tours at New York burial grounds since 2011. Her book Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines the history of how we care for our dead. She has covered topics related to death and memorialization for the New York Times, National Geographic, Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Review, the Art Newspaper, and many other publications. She is a researcher of folk art and traditions and was recently a Research Associate at the American Folk Art Museum. Her books Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Concrete New York (Blue Crow Media, 2026) are forthcoming this fall.
Date: Sunday, October 18, 2026
5:30 pmm – 7:30 pm ET
$10 Patreon Members / $12 General Admission
Location: Industry City, 254 36th St 2nd floor, C251, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Floriography, or the language of flowers, was incredibly popular in the 19th century at the same time there was a heavy emphasis on mourning. In Victorian cemeteries, roses with snapped stems were carved in marble for lives cut short; hair from the deceased was delicately formed into pansies for thoughts and worn as jewelry or displayed in memorial artworks. Language of flowers books offered harebell for grief and asphodel for "my regrets follow you to the grave." Complemented by the memorial hairwork now installed in the Morbid Anatomy space from Leila’s Hair Museum, this talk will delve into these hidden messages of love, mortality, and remembrance in floral symbolism with a focus on their use related to death and mourning.
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer on art, history, and culture who has been leading cemetery tours at New York burial grounds since 2011. Her book Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines the history of how we care for our dead. She has covered topics related to death and memorialization for the New York Times, National Geographic, Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Review, the Art Newspaper, and many other publications. She is a researcher of folk art and traditions and was recently a Research Associate at the American Folk Art Museum. Her books Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Concrete New York (Blue Crow Media, 2026) are forthcoming this fall.