Preservation Volunteers Blog
The pilgrimage is coordinated by Preservation Volunteers, an organization that brings people together to clean and restore graves inside Green-Wood as well as historic areas of Staten Island each summer.
“It is important to be able to pay respects to people who were here long before us, and in doing so, we learn a little bit about the history,” Dexter Guerrieri, president and founder of Preservation Volunteers, told InsideEdition.com.
Beneath a modest headstone at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat continues to draw crowds.
On Thursday, Basquiat was paid a more down-to-earth homage when four French volunteers arrived at his resting place in the southeast corner of the vast Brooklyn cemetery to clean the grime from his granite headstone. The artist died in August 1988 at 27 of a heroin overdose in his East Village apartment and art studio.
The volunteers — three university students and a teacher from Paris, St.-Étienne and Alsace — were part of an exchange program sponsored by Preservation Volunteers.
Perched at Brooklyn's highest natural point (200 ft. above sea level) in Green-Wood cemetery, the Roman Goddess Minerva received a fresh waxing Tuesday morning, courtesy of a few French volunteers (and one American).
"I know that when I'm back in France I'll tell everybody that I know that there's this great cemetary and this great statue," said Ines Reulet, 21 from France, one of six volunteers in New York for the next two weeks with the Preservation Volunteers of America program.
