From gargoyles to totems: No garden-variety art for this Morristown park

By Kevin Coughlin

She has carved gargoyles at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.  And now she is tackling another daunting assignment:  Casting a century of Morristown’s immigrant history in stone.

Limestone, to be precise.

“I like being challenged,” sculptress Gabriele Hiltl-Cohen said on Tuesday, after a brainstorming session at the Morristown Neighborhood House.

Morris Arts  received a $20,000 grant last year from the National Endowment for the Arts for Our Heritage is Our Future, The Gateway Totem Project.   Hiltl-Cohen has been commissioned to create two pillars that will grace a small park at the entrance to the Early Street Community Garden.

Each of these totems will have eight icons, depicting the neighborhood’s waves of Irish, Italian, African American and Latino immigrants.

“We’re asking the community to come up with the iconography,” said Hiltl-Cohen, who intends to start carving in June at Drew University in Madison, with a September target for installing the 10-foot-tall artworks at the garden in Morristown.

On Tuesday, she met with representatives of Morris Arts, Grow It Green Morristown (the nonprofit that created the garden), Bethel A.M.E. Church, Art in the Atrium Inc., the Morristown Partnership, the Neighborhood House, and the history and genealogy center of the Morristown & Township Library.

Several more meetings are anticipated, to gather public input, said Kadie Dempsey of Morris Arts.

“We need to get it moving. [The totems] are going to be there for a long time,” added Morris Arts Executive Director Tom Werder.  The NEA grant specifies that the project must be completed this year, he said.

The sculptures will reside at the “intersection of old and new in Morristown,” Werder said. “We want to be sure we’re looking to the future, while honoring the past.”

The Rev. Elizabeth Cotten of Bethel A.M.E.–Morris County’s first African American congregation– said she plans to interview residents with long family histories in the area.

James Lewis, head of the library’s history section, suggested staff member Cheryl Turkington’s books about Morristown’s African American and immigrant communities as resources.

“The Community Garden is about bringing the community together. This is the perfect tie-in,” said Grow It Green co-founder Carolle Huber. 

Grow It Green has raised $135,000 toward a $200,000 expansion of the garden, Huber said. Dozens of new plots already have been installed, along with an educational pavilion and cistern, with more features to come, she said.

Huber,  a landscape architect, met Hiltl-Cohen a few years ago and became a fan.  The gargoyles at the New York cathedral are “amazing,” she said.

Hiltl-Cohen, who hails from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, has been a stone carver for 35 years.

“I like working with my hands,” she explained. In college, she experimented with clay. “Then I wanted to try other materials.”

A three-year apprenticeship at Saint John the Divine was transformative for Hiltl-Cohen, who holds degrees in stone carving and sculpture from the Master School in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and is a member of the National Stone Carvers Guild.

Now a New Jersey resident, Hiltl-Cohen edged out eight other applicants for the Morristown project.