2025 Artworks
Story Chapel
Thought Artist Offering
Created by MASARY
Each year, community leaders are invited to speak about their connection to Mount Auburn Cemetery and their personal reflections on the Winter Solstice. Each is an opportunity to connect to the various relationships the seasonal moment has to offer. This edited video is shared online, and this year, will be shown during the event in Story Chapel.
This year’s featured Thought Artists are Martha Steele, Robert Pinsky, and Stan Strickland.
Hazel Dell
Created by MASARY
This immersive installation transforms Hazel Dell into a living cosmic meditation, blending projection, light, and sound with the surrounding gardens, trees, and monuments. Rooted in metaphors of humanity as stardust, it invites reflection on life and transformation while evoking the vast cycles of stars and the universe. Absorbing and atmospheric, the work unfolds slowly, encouraging wandering, patience, and contemplation within an environment alive with cosmic wonder.
Beech Ave
Arbor Poetics
Created by MASARY
Arbor Poetics is a promenade through the imagined expression of an ensemble of trees along Beech Ave. An echoing, call and response of imagined arbor tones, the sound and light environment draws forward the silhouettes of certain trees, producing volumetric expressions in light and shadow, set to a sound score built on the geographical and poetic logic of the site.
Hortus Gateway
Created by MASARY
Two pairs of illuminated towers are installed at Central Ave and Cypress Ave to guide visitors along the Solstice path. Designed with Mount Auburn’s Horticulture team, they feature flora and forms unique to the Cemetery, representing balance, endurance, renewal, and longevity. The towers at Central Ave embrace each visitor’s arrival through interactive light, marking the start of their journey into the landscape.
Bigelow Chapel
Duality
Created by MASARY
In collaboration with Philip Gedarovich & Pelican Sound
From spring blossoms to winter’s bare branches, from light to dark, nature moves in dualities—an endless cycle made vivid through the seasons and felt deeply during the solstice. This artwork draws on this theme, depicting growth, decay, and renewal through the poetic gestures of one of Mount Auburn’s grand Ginkgo trees.
Rhythm of Light
Created by MASARY
Our relationship to a rhythm of light is ever-present in the darkest days of the winter solstice and in welcoming renewed light. This artwork draws from that rhythm, portraying light through eccentric patterns that are inspired by celestial pulses, past solstice events, phyllotaxis arrangements, and rings of wood from Mount Auburn trees. These all layer into a unique imprint—offering space to reflect with this collective rhythm at winter's turning.