Hart Island, the Bronx, in the Long Island Sound, was bought by New York City in 1869 to serve as a “potter’s field” or public burial ground. It is the largest mass grave in the United States. At least 1,000 bodies are buried on the island a year. It is estimated that one million people are interred across the island. New York-based photographer Joel Sternfeld and Melinda Hunt, interdisciplinary artist and director of the Hart Island Project—a nonprofit organization identifying and tracking burials on the island—began working together in 1991 on a long-term artistic project based on this unusual burial ground. Joel Sternfeld took a series of color photographs depicting the site or people visiting the island for specific purposes. Some of these images were remediated by Melinda Hunt in visual installations that also displayed archival material that she had collected. The artwork was published in a book, entitled Hart Island, in 2005. Sternfeld’s photographs are organized around a sophisticated aesthetic framework and a serial mode of representation, revealing traces of human presence and inviting the viewer to meditate on the passage of time and the unbroken natural cycle of death and rebirth. By contrast, Hunt’s installations exhibit death records, administrative paperwork, newspaper clippings or letters from relatives to break the cycle of anonymous burials that has been taking place on the island over the past century and to challenge viewers’ perception of social and historical memorial processes. Throughout the project, both artists also make a political and philosophical statement about the way visual arts can be used to shed light on problematic issues, like poverty and death, in American contemporary culture.