Location: 1221 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14209 (Get Directions) 

“Witness trees” are trees that have seen history unfold. They bear witness to an immensity of birth, life, decay, and death. Trees are the long-term inhabitants whose fates are often shaped by us, an ever-rotating cast of short-term residents. Old trees are a piece of visual infrastructure that afford us the opportunity to consider life through a stretched-out scope of time: how we are born into stories that have been unfolding for an eternity and how those stories will continue to evolve after we are long gone.  

In this artwork by Detroit-based artist Pat Perry, the trees reframe the individual human stories depicted. Local moments pulled from people’s lives seem small compared to the three-hundred-and-something year old sycamore on 402 Franklin Street or the even older oak tree in Delaware Park—two of the oldest trees in Buffalo.

In this expanded view, a moment where a family walks together by Lake Erie seems somehow sacred. When someone who has passed on is briefly visited at the cemetery by a family trying to remember them, it is a struggle to keep the present and past from uncoupling. When friends pose for a photo in the locker room at Skateland, they mark that they were all alive at the same spot in time. Old trees contextualize time so we can remember our shared predicament and what we owe to one another.