GRACELAND CEMETERY, VISITING ARTIST

In 2024, I served as a Visiting Artist at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, launching the first formal community engagement project for Mapping the Liminal. Graceland is both a historic cemetery and a certified arboretum. It offered a unique setting to study how people move through and make meaning in spaces of memory.

This project explored cemeteries not as static resting places but as dynamic cultural landscapes shaped by visitor interaction. Using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in geography, sociology, anthropology, and visual arts, the study focused on how individuals navigate the grounds, what draws their attention, and how personal, historical, and environmental experiences overlap.

Visitors were invited to walk the cemetery with a simple paper map and mark their route while identifying 10–15 themed objects: recurring names, headstone styles, tree species, wildlife sightings, dates, and more. These hand-drawn pathways and observations were later digitized in ArcGIS to reveal shared patterns of movement and common points of interest. All participation was anonymous, and all maps (printed on FSC-certified paper) were scanned and composted afterward.

The resulting spatial dataset illuminated how people experience Graceland as a contemplative environment, a historical archive, and an urban green space. Insights from this work support broader conversations around cemetery design, conservation, public memory, and community engagement. The project also contributed to the broader MTL work exploring how burial grounds function as living, evolving parts of the urban landscape.