Ever since the University’s founding in 1842, students have worked campus jobs — including, during the 1950s, the digging of graves in Cedar Grove Cemetery along Notre Dame Avenue.
Over time, student workers quietly vanished from the cemetery’s 22 acres. But that changed in 2019, when an anthropology and preprofessional student named Molly McNamara ’24 requested an office job. Jon Adamson, then a senior administrative assistant in auxiliary operations, was amenable.
That “yes” became something bigger: a move to bring students back into cemetery work — not just to maintain Cedar Grove but to restore it. Now the cemetery’s director, Adamson has launched a beautification campaign that, beginning in the summer of 2025, introduced a new kind of student worker: artists charged with restoring aging statues and cleaning monuments.
“My goal is, by the time I retire, that we’ll have no broken crosses, that every statue will be restored, that people will see Cedar Grove and say, ‘Wow, these people really do love and care for the dead of the University forever,’” he says. “And that is a special kind of Catholic witness to the world to say, we take this really, really seriously — that the dead are not lost or forgotten.”
Cedar Grove holds more than 16,000 graves, but Adamson sees it as more than a final resting place. To him, it’s a devotional landscape — a place for walking, grieving, praying and remembering. “And the artwork, the aesthetics of the grounds, should support that experience,” he says.
That vision does not entail a strict plan for getting there as far as student workers are concerned. “I wanted the job description to leave it fairly nebulous. I didn’t know exactly what I was getting,” he says.
So, after hiring a pair of undergraduate cemetery artists this past summer, Adamson asked them to clean lichen, grime and pollution from old statues and monuments. One, sophomore industrial-design major Greta Lannon, possessed skills that led to a new assignment: repainting some of the cemetery’s religious statues whose original colors have long since worn away.
Armed with six cans of Benjamin Moore exterior paint in basic colors — black, brown, yellow, red, green and blue — Lannon began her work.
Because no record shows what the statues once looked like, it was up to her to determine what colors to use. She painted each part of the statues in traditional colors — blue for Mary’s robes, natural tones for skin, distinct shades for hair — and mixed paints to create new hues and layered them with shadows and highlights, adding a dynamism Adamson hadn’t expected.
Her first piece was a 3-foot statue of the Virgin Mary. The figure didn’t have a halo, so Lannon painted one into the hem of her robe using a custom-mixed gold. On the base, she added a miniature cosmos — heavens and waters drawn from Genesis.
“I walked out to the garage one day, and the mantle had variation,” Adamson says. “There was gradation of paint color going on. . . . She was mixing six base colors to create many more — it was something else.”
Each statue takes Lannon about 50 hours to complete — roughly two and a half weeks of her work time, and there are dozens yet to be repainted. Adamson repairs any physical damage to the concrete before she begins a new project.
“The process starts with a lot of research,” Lannon says. “The great thing about religious statuary is that there’s already such a rich tradition of existing artworks to look back on.”
She studies stained glass, sculpture and classic religious art to develop a plan for each piece.
“From there, the challenge is trying to capture that soul in the piece and reclaim some of that beauty that gets hidden by years of deterioration,” she says.
Lannon has been making art since she was 2, but she says the cemetery work is different. What started as summer employment, “quickly became much more,” she explains. “This job is not just maintaining appearances and landscaping. . . . When you work in a place like this, you have a responsibility to all the generations of people who came before you and are now resting here or who helped build this place and make it the place that it is.”
For Adamson, that responsibility is part of the spiritual character of the work.
“Everything you do is also a prayer,” Adamson says. That mindset, he believes, turns physical labor into spiritual care. It’s about memory, reverence and ensuring that for generations to come, Cedar Grove reflects the sacredness of Notre Dame’s enduring community.
Michelle Cuneo is an associate editor of this magazine.