Long before the establishment of Boston’s public art museums, Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, was a major attraction for visitors and a pleasure ground shaping artistic taste.  Its picturesque landscape, ornamented with tasteful works of commemorative art, was designed to provide solace to the bereaved and inspiration to the living. In the era before the founding of Boston’s public art museums, Mount Auburn, founded in 1831, offered one of the few venues where the public could see the work of European as well as the first generation of American sculptors and monument carvers. Mount Auburn was a virtual outdoor museum—an interwoven tapestry of art and nature—featuring memorials by artists such as Thomas Crawford, Stanford White, and Edmonia Lewis.

Registration is required.

Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1831 as a designed landscape of exceptional beauty with the purpose of burying the dead and providing comfort and inspiration to the living. With its founding, Mount Auburn led the rural cemetery movement in this country and provided the landscape pattern for the public parks movement that followed. Today, Mount Auburn is a National Historic Landmark, an internationally-renowned arboretum and botanical garden, a wildlife sanctuary, an important birding site, an outdoor museum of commemorative art and architecture, and a vibrant natural oasis in the midst of urban development. The Cemetery is known for its breathtaking horticultural beauty and its many historical associations

About our speaker:

Meg L. Winslow is Curator of Historical Collections & Archives at Mount Auburn Cemetery where for 30 years, she has been responsible for developing and overseeing the Cemetery’s permanent collections including more than 3,500 linear feet of archives, and significant artistic monuments on the grounds. Meg is co-author with Melissa Banta of The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery, Mount Auburn’s Significant Monument Collection, in its third printing. She currently serves on the Sculpture Committee for the Friends of the Boston Public Garden. And, at Mount Auburn, has a deep love of the connection between art and nature.

Presented by Cary Library in collaboration with public libraries in Ashland, Bedford, Groton, Needham , Randall Library in Stow and Thomas Crane Library in Quincy. 

"Beyond the Library" and Cary Library's museum pass program is sponsored by the Friends of Cary Library.