Soul in the Stone: Cemetery Art from America's Heartland

Celebrating master stone sculptors as well as grassroots and ethnic folk artists, Brown's images document the rich traditions of cemetery art as found throughout Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. Combining strong visual images with stories and analysis, Brown illuminates the cultural, historic, and aesthetic roles of gravestones in both metropolitan and rural cemeteries. The art itself manifests a great many forms and subjects, including life-size limestone statuary, hovering marble angels, and ornate wrought-iron crosses, in addition to the more modest traditional motifs in etched granite and concrete. Brown also records the idiosyncratic and the bizarre - an Egyptian sphinx, a gigantic baseball, an elaborate locomotive, a converted car engine - and provides insight into the meaning of epitaphs and iconography.