“I’ve been thinking about death since I was eight years old,” says the artist Nao Bustamante, who is about to launch a performance and installation at her burial plot in Los Angeles’s famed Hollywood Forever cemetery. “My godmother and her two daughters were lost in a car accident. And that coincided with me getting my period and thinking I was dying.”
Last month, Bustamante purchased a plot in the bucolic cemetery near Paramount Studios, which is the final resting place for Hollywood celebrities including Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and Cecil B. DeMille, as well as artists and other movers and shakers. The cemetery is also known for its public programmes, such as film screenings and its Day of the Dead festival, which Bustamante has attended. “I was so enamoured with the families and the music and the people in skeletons, in drag,” she says. “The celebration of the talking to the dead has always been of interest to me.”
Her new project, Grave Gallery, opens on 19 February and is her way of “confronting death, becoming familiar with it. It’s my way of trying to make friends with an inevitable outcome of being alive.”
The public is invited to come to the opening (registration is required); for the unconventional gallery’s debut, the artist Karen Lofgren will contribute sculptures featuring impressions of knees bent in prayer or submission adorned with gold leaf.
There will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony of sorts, with Bustamante using props and costumes from the early 1900s affiliated with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Lodge. She also has a “spirit trumpet” from the same era that women used to channel messages from the world of the dead. “It’s an interesting moment, when women were revered as these mediums and they could speak through this device,” she says.
Bustamante adds that she is not quite sure how she will use the trumpet: “I’m going to let the spirit take over.”
