Shannon Lai, “Remembering Shwedagon,” 2025. 

Street Altars, Remembrance of the Unseen

Some late spring days offer a taste of the summer to come. When I go outside, which is as often as possible, I can’t forget the presence of nature all around me. Sparrows and robins sing across the canopied Brooklyn sidewalks, and the breeze sprinkles pollen everywhere. I’m sneezing or rubbing my eyes on just about every block. It’s mostly worth it. Moving through the warm air conjures muscle memory like a return to some once-beloved childhood sport. Likewise, it makes me think of loss—how fast the spring always seems to go, and how many summers now live only in my mind.

By the time I reached Miriam Gallery after a walk in the park on the first Saturday of May, I was glad for a brief respite from the sun. Gentle music played in the cool, white-walled room, creating a grounding atmosphere to fit the artworks. I was there to see Street Altars, Remembrance of the Unseen, an exhibition curated by the ecology-focused artist collective Field Meridians.

Traditionally, an altar is a raised platform used for religious and ritualistic purposes. My first exposure to an altar was in a Catholic church—as the surface where the Eucharist is consecrated—though altars appear across many other sects of Christianity as well as most other religions. Consequently, no matter our religious roots, the sanctity of altars is common ground many of us share. In our contemporary urban landscape, altars exist beyond designated religious spaces. Collections of prayer candles, silk flowers, and other objects line the streets we walk, often appearing alongside images of lost loved ones or saints. We see the effects of time in the ways the city and the altars interact. They accumulate devotional objects; they gather dirt and grime.

Street Altars brings together several altars dedicated to the forces of air, water, fire, earth, and salt. Here, the altar becomes tied not to a specific religious practice but to a wider meditation on the changes occurring constantly around us in the natural world. Each artist infuses their altar with distinct vernacular materials, provoking viewers to consider the ways worship and remembrance permeate our lives across cultures and even in secular spaces.

Laurel Schwulst and Ellie Hunter, “Wind Chime Festival,” 2025

The first piece to catch my eye was a TV screen displaying several side-by-side video feeds. “Wind Chime Festival” by Laurel Schwulst and Ellie Hunter offers portals to eleven artist-made wind chimes around the world. The artists hope that the piece will invite viewers “to set an offering or intention to be carried across great distances, trusting that the wind will circulate their message.” I thought at first of the pollen and petals outside, how it’s the wind that facilitates the propagation of plants and the chimes that make this unseen force visible. Sitting along video feeds of far-flung places like Argentina, Italy, and Japan, the video feeds of California hit me with a pang of homesickness—I felt I knew those backyards, that I had spent some sunny and peaceful afternoons there. A wind chime’s melody feels potent; it’s a simple sound with centering, even transporting power. The screen was paired with an “egg chime” hanging from the gallery’s ceiling, made by Schwulst in collaboration with Elliott Etzkorn out of fishing wire, wood, and ten eggs—those notoriously fragile objects that are also the genesis of life. The chime hung motionless indoors, and I wondered at its function. Outside, it would test the limits of the wind’s gentleness, risking breakage whenever a breeze blew through it.

I moved onto Alison Kuo’s “Plant Altar,” essentially a shelving unit stocked with beaded sculptures, found objects, and plant life. The piece felt removed from some lived-in domestic space, its constellation of objects reflecting the specific language and interconnectivity of a close-knit household. I spotted a green Bic lighter and a teapot, mundane possessions elevated by Kuo’s embellishments and their coexistence in the piece with nature. Two unpotted seedlings sat on the ground before the altar, lending it an unfinished quality that speaks to the perpetual change of street altars. Like these urban memorials, “Plant Altar” will change over the course of the exhibition as the plants grow or wither. Its mutability also means that it asks for maintenance, for care. I wondered if the gallery attendant sitting quietly behind a desk was the one responsible for tending to these living things.

Alison Kuo, “Plant Altar,” 2025

Similarly, Rachael Louise Elliott’s “Terra Firma” incorporates earthy materials: rocks, acorns, pinecones, plants, and soil. These pieces compile in a mesh pillar atop cinder blocks and brick. One plant, potted in a glass bowl, sits at the pillar’s base along with a few scattered acorns and twigs. The shape seems at once to constrict the land—providing an enclosure for what would otherwise spread out and perhaps grow—and deify it by molding it into a shape that connotes fortitude. It also draws a contrast between the natural, rough-edged rocks and the refined concrete beneath them. Elliott studied architecture, and her altar reminded me of the often unseen elements that uphold a building’s structural integrity and how these human-made things must cooperate with the dirt and rocks around them to remain.

On the other side of the room was “Salt of the Earth” by LinYee Yuan and Michiko Shimada, a terracotta sculpture with salt spilling from its base and across the floor. It stood in contrast to “Terra Firma,” suggesting a mutability and borderlessness in its form despite the similar pillar-like stance of the terracotta. On the wall behind this sculpture was Kevin McCaughey’s “Agit-Nest,” a wooden birdhouse adorned with screen-printed graphics and an incense stick sitting atop it in a brass holder. As the work’s title is reminiscent of “agitprop,” or the use of agitation and propaganda to shape public opinion, I meditated on what the printed words were urging me toward. The text directly behind the incense stick read, “What was inward illumination becomes a consuming flame that turns outward.” How do our private meditations transform into real-world forces? How do we render the unseen visible to others?

  Left: Kevin McCaughey, “Agit-Nest,” 2023
Right: LinYee Yuan and Michiko Shimada, “Salt of the Earth,” 2025

I made my way back to the front of the space and to the ground, to a mound of dirt with tiny green buds sprouting out of it: “Remembering Shwedagon” by Shannon Lai. Maybe it was the rich color and texture of the dirt, but this piece felt like the show’s heart. Crouching down, I spotted human-made objects like a binder clip alongside organic materials like a sand dollar. I leaned closer to read a handwritten note about a place vital to the artist’s roots: the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Burma, the birthplace of the Lai’s parents. The pile of soil itself echoed the pagoda’s shape.

    Shannon Lai, “Remembering Shwedagon,” 2025

As I crouched on the floor, the gallery attendant finally addressed me, inviting me to contribute an object to the piece, which functions as a “community altar.” Like “Plant Altar,” “Remembering Shwedagon” will shift over the course of the exhibition as visitors contribute their own objects to it. The attendant also informed me that I was welcome to take a starter plant from “Plant Altar.” I looked back at the tiny little leaves in the plastic containers on the ground. It felt like something I had been asking for so quietly I hadn’t even heard my own desire till I saw its object in front of me.

“Those little guys?” I said with some disbelief, pointing at the seedlings. She nodded and giggled under her breath.

I returned to “Plant Altar” and kneeled before it. I picked the smaller plant, just small enough that I could carry it in one hand on my journey home. I thanked her and left.

It at first felt wrong to take something from a gallery space, almost like I was stealing. Those sterile, hushed rooms still intimidate me despite my lifelong interest in and practice of visual art. But as I returned to the blooming trees outside, I interrogated that feeling of wrongness. My new plant was a little piece of the land I walked on, and I was eager to tend to it.

my plant <3

On my way home, I walked through Los Sures. In the mid-20th century, this neighborhood in now heavily gentrified Williamsburg was home to a predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican population; it was also one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Despite gentrification’s attempted erasures, the neighborhood continues to make its cultural lineage evident through murals and street altars. With Street Altars, Miriam Gallery—on Bedford Ave and South 2nd Street—devotes itself to the practices of worship that shape its surroundings, if only temporarily and in a relatively cloistered space. The familiar streets I passed through after the exhibition deepened and expanded upon the artists’ work. Despite the relentless crush of capitalism often seeming to drive the very heartbeat of New York City, these acts of remembrance and community care survive. They are made by the people, in honor of the people, and visible to anyone who walks past and pays attention. My favorite thing about Street Altars was not any single piece in the show, but the way they together re-attuned my focus to my surroundings.

Though the exhibition only consisted of six works, it blended with the vast network of streets to put my mind into a deeply reflective space as I walked. Little streaks of dirt spilled from my plant’s plastic container and onto my sweaty palm; I loved the earthy smell. I thought about my grandma, who was born “dirt poor” in the hills of West Virginia—an ironic term to describe a population that heavy industry exploited due to the very richness of the land they occupied. She always told my mom that old adage, “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt,” which my mom in turn repeated to me, an offering upon an altar of sorts, a way to make someone’s words live beyond their body. I thought about my great-grandma too, all the pictures she’d made and archived throughout her life that now rest in my mom’s garage. I thought about the New Year’s Eve when my mom and I drove to the cemetery to visit my great-grandparents’ graves and leave them flowers, and how as I stood before the headstones of these people who had died before I was born, a sense of stability broke through my baseline anxiety for the first time in months, and I felt protected. I thought of my mom, myself, my future—do I have it in me to become a caretaker too? In what ways am I one already?

I got home and placed my plant in a spot of indirect sunlight, hopefully enough to nourish it without scorching its leaves. I was happy to channel the tenderness that exists in my hands and is all too easily forgotten during work weeks spent typing at a fluorescent-lit cubicle. The plant sits on a plate I bought years ago from an artist at a street fair, among seashells I’ve collected or been gifted up and down the California coast, sprigs of dried flowers that have decorated other gifts I’ve received, and hair clips, some of which I’ve had since middle school. On the wall behind it is a picture I took of my dad looking out over the Hudson River and my collection of photo booth strips from nights out with friends.

Excited, I texted a picture of the plant and its setting to my mom. Without knowing anything about the context of the exhibition I had just left, she replied, “It’s like a nice little intention altar.”


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Street Altars, Remembrance of the Unseen, curated by Field Meridians, is on view at Miriam Gallery (319 Bedford Ave) through June 20. At the exhibition’s close, the pieces will move to Brower Park in Crown Heights for a celebration of the summer solstice, integrating back into the city’s landscape.