During the Spring 2020 Ohio Field School, Lydia Smith and Jacob Kopcienski worked to document the cemetery in Rendville OH, a progressive and historically integrated town in Perry County. In collaboration with Rendville Historic Preservation Society (RHPS), their fieldwork blended traditional ethnography with methods from their backgrounds in visual, sound, and performance art. This resulted in a rich media profile that included interviews with the town’s residents as well as audio recordings, videos, and photographs of the cemetery’s headstones, landscapes, and soundscapes. In late spring, they created a website to serve as a public access point for their research and as a platform for community engagement with the cemetery and its traditions.

Jacob and Lydia both received Small Grants for Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Research from the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme to continue the multifaceted ethnographic work they began during the Ohio Field School and collaboratively produce an artwork that critically reflects on the cemetery’s place within Rendville’s community and enduring legacy. Learn more at https://u.osu.edu/rendvillecemetery/.