Riverhead High School’s ceramic poppy art installation has a new home. The red ceramic poppies, hand-crafted by art students, now grace the main entrance of Calverton National Cemetery.
The installation, now comprising some 1,200 ceramic poppies, outgrew its original location at the World War I Memorial on West Main Street, Riverhead High School ceramics teacher Selena Pagliarulo said.
The installation debuted in 2021, featuring 200 ceramic poppies created by students of Pagliarulo and high school creative crafts teacher Debbie Cantalupo. The number grew to 450 poppies in 2022. The installation continued to grow and this year, the teachers sought a new, larger space to accommodate it.
MORE COVERAGE: High school students to ‘plant’ 200 ceramic poppies at Riverhead’s World War I monument for Memorial Day
Pagliarulo brought the idea for the installation to Riverhead in 2021, inspired by “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” a public art installation created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins in the moat of the Tower of London in 2014. The Cummins installation marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War- I. Each of the 888,246 ceramic red poppies in that installation represented the life of one British or Colonial serviceman killed in the war.
The daughter of a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, Pagliarulo was so impressed by the Cummins installation and wanted to do something with her students “to give back and to honor people who have died fighting for our freedom,” she said in a May 2021 interview.
Poppies became a symbol of remembrance of World War I (July 28, 1914 – Nov. 11, 1918) because of “In Flanders Fields,” a poem written during the war by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian physician who wrote the poem in May 1915 after he conducted the funeral of a close friend killed in battle in Belgium. McCrae’s poem was first published that December in a British magazine. It became popular around the world. To the present time, veterans organizations sell remembrance poppies around Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Pagliarulo, Cantalupo, art teacher Katy Wilkinson and Riverhead’s Director of Fine Arts Jason Rottkamp installed the poppies Wednesday, in advance of the Memorial Day weekend, when thousands of people flock to the national cemetery in Calverton — to place flags on gravesites on Saturday, a project coordinated by the Support Committee for Calverton National Cemetery, and then, to visit gravesites and on Monday, attend annual Memorial Day ceremonies, hosted by the support committee.
Encompassing more than 1,000 acres, Calverton National Cemetery is one of the largest and busiest national cemeteries in the country, with more than 7,000 burials each year.
The ceramic poppies art installation will be on display at the national cemetery through May 29.
RiverheadLOCAL/ Emil Breitenbach Jr.
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