Art Installation at Poughkeepsie Cemetery is Turning Heads

If you happen to be walking through the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, there is one unusual tombstone that may stop you dead in your tracks.

The tall, narrow monument looks like it should mark someone's final resting place. Instead, it's dedicated to someone who is very much alive.

The bluestone monument is actually a public art installation created by artist, designer and publisher Ben Denzer. Titled "The Artist's Age Until Death," the piece stands in Section N of the historic Poughkeepsie cemetery.

Ben Denzer

The 44-inch-tall stone displays Denzer's current age. Every year around his September 9 birthday, a stone carver adds his new age while chiseling away the previous number.

The project fits right in with Denzer's other work, which frequently takes ordinary objects and ideas and pushes them to unusual extremes.

Denzer studied architecture and visual arts at Princeton before earning an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design. For his 2023 thesis, Denzer didn't just write a book. He created one that was physically larger than the school's library.

The massive thesis measured 200 by 125 feet when opened. The actual written work, titled "Making Then Meaning," is 816 pages long and based on a 49-minute artist talk.

Denzer has also embroidered and screen-printed money, embedded coins into handmade paper and created an ongoing series of constructed paper models. His work has been collected by institutions including The Met and Guggenheim, and he is currently an assistant professor at Parsons.

His Poughkeepsie project may be one of his most provocative works yet.

Most tombstones are designed to permanently record the age someone was when they died. Denzer's does the opposite, marking the passage of his life one birthday at a time before eventually disappearing altogether.

When Denzer does finally die, he says the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery has been instructed to remove the tombstone.

For now, the unusual monument remains standing among the real graves at Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, quietly counting the years of an artist who is still very much alive. You can see more of Denzer's artwork on his website and his Instagram account.