Five new artists-in-residence have kicked off their yearlong projects at Mount Auburn Cemetery, bringing an eclectic mix of styles and perspectives to the cemetery’s storied grounds. The group was inducted earlier this month at a welcome breakfast in the gothic Bigelow Chapel, which overlooks the cemetery’s main entrance.
This year’s class includes the performing duo of detritus dance, Caroline Bradbury and Claire Lane; artist, filmmaker, and writer Sara Jordenö; poet and playwright Lenell Moïse; and interdisciplinary and sound artist Jacek Smolicki.
The program received 145 applications for the current residency, nearly double the number in the previous year, said Jessica Bussmann, Mount Auburn’s director of education, who has worked at the cemetery for nearly two decades and seen the residency grow from its infancy.
Mount Auburn was the first U.S. cemetery to create an artists-in-residence program when it launched in 2014. “It was a very natural fit because Mount Auburn has been a muse and inspiration to several artists throughout history,” Bussmann noted. The cemetery want to expand its programs beyond walking tours. “We were looking to add more arts in our calendar, and to really just invite people in to see the cemetery through a different lens,” Bussmann said.
Until 2021, residency grants were awarded to a single artist — the first three worked over multiple years — before expanding to an annual and cohort model. Artists receive a stipend ranging from $500 to $4,000.
Roberto Mighty, filmmaker and host of PBS Passport’s “World’s Greatest Cemeteries,” was the first artist-in-residence, beginning in 2014. He worked through 2016 and created earth.sky: 29 short films and a photo gallery. The project began as an installation in the cemetery’s Story Chapel.
Mighty said Megan Winslow, the cemetery’s senior curator of historical collections, had come up with the idea and turned to him, since he had previously worked with Mount Auburn.
“I insisted that my residency last an entire calendar year, so I could film the landscape during all four seasons,” said Mighty, who was at this month’s induction of new artists. Mighty had also requested a key to the cemetery, which he received.
“I ended up spending a lot of nights here, and spent time here during blizzards and rainstorms,” he reminisced.
The new artists-in-residence
Jordenö (they/them) is an experimental filmmaker and documentarian originally from the small Swedish city of Umeå — and since 2022, a resident of Arlington. Jordenö will create an abstract 16mm film with antiquated film equipment, and “handcraft” the film using material gathered within Mount Auburn and attached to the physical filmstrip. They will complement the film with a correlating artist book.
Their work, “Repose (Our Ashes Mixed),” will explore the lives and early 20th century burial of poet and sculptor Anne Whitney and painter Abby Manning, who lived together on Beacon Hill for 40 years in a “Boston marriage,” a relationship between two women financially independent from men. Their families agreed to let them share a grave. “What’s so amazing to me is that the family allowed for them to be buried and [their ashes] to be mixed together, which is very unusual in the context of the historical moment it happened in,” Jordenö said.
Jordenö will also explore the topic of dignity in death, inspired by an interview conducted for their critically-acclaimed 2016 film “Kiki.” “I was interviewing a young transwoman, who was around 18, and she started talking to me about her death and how she was planning for it, because she was terrified of what was going to happen after that,” they said. “She was already thinking, how do I prevent being buried as a man?”
Smolicki, born during martial law in Kraków and now living in Stockholm, is spending a year as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His artistic work blends deep research and creative applications of sound, creating ecologically and historically focused soundwalks, soundscape compositions, and other audio and video installations.
At Mount Auburn, he will create an immersive soundwalk that will help guide visitors through the cemetery, using site-recorded sounds, testimonies from those who care for the site, and a sprinkle of his own storytelling.
“I think it is the lack of sound that is really striking here,” Smolicki said. “I know people come here to take a break from the noise pollution of the city, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any sound.” The cemetery’s many human and non-human visitors and residents create a rich soundscape, he said.
Moïse (they/them), a long-time Cantabrigian, grew up visiting Mount Auburn. The cemetery was a place of solace in their childhood, after moving from Haiti in the 1980s. Now it will be their studio.
Moïse will write and film several original poems at Mount Auburn, centered around Ghede, the Haitian Vodou spirit of life and death. They will complement this with a short film, “On Human Rites,” which will “celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” according to the cemetery’s website.
To them, working on this project means revisiting their childhood. “I find myself returning to the sites of my youth, as an adult, to re-investigate the spaces that meant a lot to me as a young person, and to find new meaning in them as a grownup.”
“This is something we all have to do to be able to think about endings and new beginnings,” they added.
The detritus dance duo plans to work and perform around the cemetery, potentially in the Asa Gray Garden. Their work will model pioneer transcendentalist and journalist Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s famed literary salons, held in the mid-19th century at the Elizabeth Peabody Bookstore in Boston. She is memorialized at Mount Auburn.
“Our work is based on [Ossoli’s] ‘Conversations,’ so we framed our proposal [to the cemetery] as a dance salon, exploring how we as the dancers are interacting with the specific women who we will be highlighting in the cemetery,” Bradbury said.
The two will bring a roaming contemporary dance performance to the grounds, welcoming interaction from visitors and seeking to understand how conversation can take place through dance.
A stronger
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