
Artist in Residence Program
Throughout its rich history, Lakewood has been a place of comfort, solace, and beauty that is shared with our families and the community, providing inspiration for many artistic ideas. As both an active cemetery, and a cultural landscape, Lakewood is committed to providing new ways to honor, remember, and memorialize through a variety of mediums.
The Artist in Residence program, sponsored by the Lakewood Heritage Foundation, engages local artists to create and share new original artwork with our families, visitors and community. The resident artists will explore our beautiful and sacred grounds and create art drawn from their own experiences of the cemetery, using their creative practices to highlight new perspectives on Lakewood and engage our visitors.
Meet the Artists
We are excited to announce the selected winners of our 25-26 Artist in Residence Program! Learn more about the artists.

Diana Eicher
Recycling and Repurposing the flowers of Lakewood
Diana has a BA in painting from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MFA in printmaking from the University of Hawaii. Diana balances her life as an artist for over thirty-five years with her career as Director of the Printmaking and Papermaking Studios at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Diana works in printmaking, handmade paper, papercutting, and installation work.
I am a printmaker and papermaker and my residency project is to use and repurpose flowers that are being discarded after a funeral. I will use these flowers to make handmade paper that people can take with them. I plan to make prints on the handmade paper with floral imagery that I will exhibit at the end of the residency. I will also teach two workshops in printmaking on the handmade paper that will be free and open to the public.

Sarah Greer
Giving Voice to Grief
Based in the Twin Cities on Dakota homelands, vocalist Sarah M. Greer (www.sarahmgreer.com) has invented music on local and international stages. An avid singer and song carrier, she developed Giving Voice to Grief to help communities in the Twin Cities come together to hold and transmute our grief over local and global events. Sarah has led her song circle, Songtaneous, since 2006 and teaches singing at Minneapolis College as well as to private students. They are passionate, almost evangelical, about every person’s right to sing and about the power of singing to change the world.

Andrew Grum Carr
An Opening
Andrew Grum Carr is a Twin Cities painter, writer and teacher. Whether in pictures or in words, his work seeks out quiet, restful corners and unhurried rhythms: from an arrangement of leaves at the conservatory, to the unexpected dignity in a freeway overpass.
I will write an extended narrative essay, meditating on an experience as a teacher, visiting the Lakewood chapel with students after a classmate’s death. I’ll also paint nine large watercolors of the cemetery through the changing seasons, to accompany the essay.

RJ Kern
Ethereal Echoes: A Journey of Light
R. J. Kern (b. 1978) is an American artist whose work investigates ideas of home, ancestry and a sense of place. Accolades include Critical Mass Top 50 (2018, 2021, 2024), artist grants from Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and seven grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Monographs include The Sheep and the Goats (Kehrer Verlag, 2017) and The Unchosen Ones (MW Editions, 2021). Public collections include Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center.
This body of work merges Buddhist teachings on impermanence and rebirth with the alchemy of Chromoskedasic photography—a technique that transforms expired silver gelatin prints into mirror-like images echoing 19th-century daguerreotypes. Created steps from Minneapolis’ Lakewood Cemetery, where generations of my family rest, these meditative pieces invite viewers to contemplate life’s cycles (birth, community, mortality) through organic patterns shaped by light, chemistry, and memory.
Upcoming Artist in Residence Program Events
Interested in Participating in this Program?
We are still working out details for the next Artist in Residence program at Lakewood. If you are interested in learning more as information becomes available, please leave your name and email below.
The Lakewood Heritage Foundation
This offering is sponsored by the Lakewood Heritage Foundation. Donations to the Lakewood Heritage Foundation support educational programming and the preservation and restoration of Lakewood’s landscape, art, architecture and public spaces—for the benefit of all.
You can donate on the Lakewood Heritage Foundation page.

Questions?
For more information, please contact Amanda Luke, Community Programs Manager at amandal@lakewoodcemetery.org.