Riverhead students honor military heroes with 1,000 handmade ceramic poppies at Calverton National Cemetery

Riverhead students, in a project that fuses art and history, have planted a field of more than 1,000 handmade ceramic poppies at the entrance to Calverton National Cemetery as a solemn Memorial Day tribute.

The annual project began in 2021 with about 200 poppies, according to Riverhead High School art teacher Selena Pagliarulo, who runs the poppy program with colleagues Katy Wilkinson and Debbie Cantalupo.

Over the years, hundreds of students have created more than 1,200 flowers in their ceramics and creative crafts classes. It’s become a way for students to honor fallen service members while bridging art with broader lessons on history and society.

I really like this project because it’s not about us.

—Riverhead student Jacqueline Velado

Pagliarulo modeled the display after a 2014 public art installation at the Tower of London by Paul Cummins. That project, entitled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” featured 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing a British serviceman killed in World War I.

“It was a very moving art piece that a lot of people connected with,” Pagliarulo, the daughter of a Vietnam Marine veteran, said in an interview. “The representation of the poppies paying tribute to the sacrifices that our soldiers have made is an important thing for the students to recognize for Memorial Day weekend.”

Poppies have come to symbolize the blood shed during World War I because they grew on battlefields, inspiring the 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” about the war by Canadian physician and Lt. Col. John McCrae, according to the American Legion Auxiliary.

Riverhead sophomore Jacqueline Velado, 15, said she learned about the significance of poppies in her global history and Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps courses. But molding a slab of clay into a flower and glazing it in blood red, she said, was a chance to reflect on its deeper meaning.  

“I really like this project because it’s not about us,” she said. “Making these poppy flowers in my ceramics class helped me think of the sacrifice that soldiers made for their families and countries during World War I. And I also think that small things can do a lot.”

This is the first year the Calverton cemetery is hosting the poppy display, which will remain on view through Thursday.

The installation was first shown in 2021 at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead, where a monument lists over 300 men from Riverhead who served in World War I, according to the museum. Pagliarulo said the poppy project had outgrown the lawn there.

“All the students make them and I save them throughout the years,” she said. “We’ve come to an impressive amount."

Riverhead’s poppy project is one of several ways students and community members are giving back at the cemetery for Memorial Day.

Dozens of students from Comsewogue volunteered to clean gravestones last week, and an estimated 5,000 volunteers placed flags at burial sites Saturday, according to executive director Anne Ellis.

Ellis, in a statement, said the project is a “wonderful tribute to those who have given their lives in service to our nation.”

“It is our duty and our privilege to ensure their sacrifice is never forgotten,” Ellis said.

An annual Memorial Day commemoration ceremony is scheduled Monday at 1 p.m. at the cemetery, near the assembly area at the end of Princeton Boulevard.

The cemetery spans 1,045 acres, and approximately 295,000 veterans and eligible family members are interred at the site, officials said.