Artist-In-Residence

Roberto Mighty, Mount Auburn’s inaugural artist-in-residence from 2014 through 2016, drew inspiration from the sights, sounds, and individual stories of the Cemetery to create earth.sky, an immersive meditation on life, death, ritual, history, landscape, nature, and culture. The original version of his project, designed to be screened in Mount Auburn’s Story Chapel, premiered in full in November 2016. To make the films, music, images, and storytelling of the original exhibit available to audiences worldwide, Mighty completed his residency with the release of an online version of his project.

During her residency, musician and composer Mary Bichner composed a series of new works inspired by Mount Auburn’s breathtaking landscape and landmarks, using her sound­-to­-color synesthesia to select the musical components that best “match” the natural color palette of each location. As Bichner completed her compositions in 2016, she performed a series of “pop-up” concerts and gave talks about her artistic process. In early 2017, her Mount Auburn compositions were professionally recorded. Bichner completed her residency with two sold-out concerts in Story Chapel. Mount Auburn: Spring & Autumn Suites, the product of her Mount Auburn residency, is now available to stream or as a free digital download.

During his residency, playwright Patrick Gabridge wrote two series of plays inspired by Mount Auburn: The Mount Auburn Plays: The Nature Plays and The America Plays. In June 2019, we produced The Nature Plays, five one-act plays in the landscape that explored the rich natural environment of the Cemetery touching on topics such as spotted salamanders in Consecration Dell, and birders at Auburn Lake. In September 2019, we presented The America Plays, a series of five short plays that brought to life the drama, philosophies, and struggles of notable residents like Mount Auburn Founder Jacob Bigelow and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. The journey through the American experience concluded with an immigrant story on some of Mount Auburn’s Armenian residents.

Mount Auburn Cemetery’s 2020 Artist-in-Residence was visual artist Jesse Aron Green. Jesse’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Harvard Art Museums; the ICA Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna; and many other museums and galleries around the world. Jesse received a BA from Harvard and an MFA from UCLA. During his residency, Jesse envisioned several ambitious and large-scale public art projects. Due to COVD-19, implementing these projects was not logistically possible. However, Jesse’s research and concepts were added to the Mount Auburn archives.

Zhonghe (Elena) Li has been visiting Mount Auburn for many years, but her deep connection with the place developed after the pandemic started, when Mount Auburn became a sanctuary for her during social isolation. Her almost daily walks at the Cemetery became the source of her artistic creativity and led her to envision a project, The Art of Living Together, about the vital interconnectedness of art and nature and the ways the two are balanced at Mount Auburn. Li’s work was a combination of watercolor paintings, traditional Chinese papercuts, and video compositing and digital animations.

Ponnapa Prakkamakul explored Mount Auburn’s landscape with her project, Seasons of Change. Painting in plein-air, she used a variety of processes including pastels and mixed-media, to observe seasonal changes at Mount Auburn. “As a landscape architect and immigrant, environments – and our relationship to them – fundamentally inform my work. Mount Auburn is an ideal place to observe, explore, and reflect upon the concept of change and connections between humans and nature.”

Mount Auburn’s plant collections was the focus of Ben Denzer’s artist book. Denzer compiled organic materials (leaves, flowers, seeds, etc.), arranging and preserving the samples into plastic sheets bound together as a large book. Denzer published the book via Catalog Press, a small edition press he uses as a framework to make art and explore how information and objects are collected and preserved. 6,000 DANDELIONS is “a compression of Mount Auburn’s remarkable plant diversity into a single sculptural form; a beautiful and unique book.”

Choreographer and dancer Jennifer Lin created an original site-specific contemporary dance that was performed in Hazel Dell at Mount Auburn. Her project, The Gathering Place, drew inspiration from “themes of history and place, mourning and meditation, and appreciation of nature, while connecting the past with the present.”

Musician Todd Thibaud composed, produced, and recorded two original songs, inspired by his research and personal experience of Mount Auburn. He explored ideas relating to humans’ relationship with death and grief, “and the important role that a dedicated space of remembrance can play in that process.”

Visual artist Madge Evers and photographer Thierry Borcy collaborated on Mount Auburn Statuary: A New Way of Seeing. Borcy captured images of Mount Auburn’s monuments using monochrome photography, then Evers transformed the printed images with patterns of foraged mushroom spores, and the altered images were re-photographed, interpreting the original monuments in a transformed context. “The created imagery will depict the landscape, link human created statuary with natural materials, and present the regenerative qualities present in biodiversity, specifically fungi and plants.”

Musician Ira Klein composed, produced, and performed The Oak Cycle, a series of guitar pieces inspired by specific oak trees at Mount Auburn. Klein is a recent graduate of Berklee College of Music, and his concentration in American roots music will inform his compositions. “I frequently visit the Cemetery, as I am fascinated by its natural landscape and bird population. As a musician, I find myself deeply inspired and recharged by the Cemetery’s tranquil environment.”

Simone Nemes, a former gardening technician at Mount Auburn returned to create Memorializing Nature, a series of four seasonally-themed illustrations of fantastical urns. These images drew upon Nemes’ deep understanding of plants and the natural world from her previous horticultural career. “Painting in a realistic style, I will re-interpret traditional urn designs [found at Mount Auburn] to incorporate the flora and fauna of the cemetery, with each season featuring native species that are active during those months.”

Jill Slosburg-Ackerman created Mourning Benches – several portable, low-to-the ground benches carved with designs inspired by Mount Auburn’s flora. Her project was inspired by her own experience of visiting her husband’s grave at the Cemetery. “I have longed for the means to sit closer, in order to comfortably commune with his spirit and to immerse myself in the landscape. Creating the Mourning Benches is my gesture of amelioration.”

Liz Walker produced Dance of Arrival, a contemporary dance performance on Mount Auburn’s grounds. The theme of her dance connected directly with her pregnancy at the time, and was inspired by her experience visiting Mount Auburn with her partner upon learning of her pregnancy. During their walks, they were deeply impacted by the graves of children, and found themselves seeking inspiration for baby names amongst the monuments. “This site-specific dance work will explore themes of life and death as they relate to Mount Auburn Cemetery as a destination for pivotal moments in one’s life. A crucial touchpoint for the project is my experience as a dancer who is pregnant and preparing to welcome a new life.”

John M. Williams created four collages depicting the Cemetery’s landscape in each season, layering pieces of cut paper to create a sculptural effect: Seeing Mount Auburn with a Different Eye. His work is influenced by his experience as an artist who is autistic. “The title of my project relates to the special skills and way of seeing the world that comes with autism. My work is a completely new way of seeing and depicting the landscape.”

Drawing from her training in Indian Classical dance, for her residency, Swati choreographed and performed a series of original dance pieces that celebrate the beauty of seasonal change at Mount Auburn.

Informed by a rich history of painting and contemporary artmaking processes, Resa’s projects also call on poetry, science, and nature. Resa made a series of paintings and several glass moss terrariums for her residency at Mount Auburn.

Capturing all the seasons, Billy immersed himself in the intersections of the natural and human worlds creating documentary-style photographs of Mount Auburn’s natural ecosystem and the humans who support, study, and preserve it.

Carolyn Oliver created a series of epistolary poems inviting the reader-friend to join her at a particular place or time in the cemetery; elegies (these too, so far, in the form of letters) to friends recently lost and friends in palliative care; praise poems, which attempt to describe the experience of the cemetery in a particular month; and lyric poems that don’t fit neatly into these categories.  The poems were read aloud on a roaming reading.

Eden reconstructed the recently removed Bigelow Chapel organ pipes into a new instrument played like a gamelan. She wrote a set of original compositions for the new instrument, similar to Buddhist death awareness meditations.

For their residency, this mother-daughter duo created a series of audio stories crafted from interviews with people connected to Mount Auburn. The audio stories explore how and why we talk with each other about death and with whom we have those conversations.