Philly’s most exciting arts venues? Cemeteries.

“We walk around with ghosts,” DonChristian Jones declared on a recent visit to Laurel Hill Cemetery. Gazing at the moss-covered tombstones, imposing mausoleums, and looming statuary on a drizzly, overcast May morning, it was hard to disagree.

“Some of them are benevolent,” continued Jones. “Some of them maybe aren’t so good.”

Jones, a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and musician, grew up between Germantown and East Falls and began visiting the historic cemetery as a young child. He also frequented Laurel Hill West, across the Schuylkill in Bala Cynwyd, where his grandparents were interred. As he rode his bike to his job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he would often stare up at the mausoleums bordering Kelly Drive and was inspired to incorporate them into his own art.

“I did a series of eight large oil paintings of abandoned spaces in Philly,” he recalled. “One painting is of these three mausoleums, with the notion that one day my mother, my father and I would be buried. It was pretty dark, but I find some levity in being able to talk about this rather than be sequestered in feelings that can be very uncomfortable to people.”

Jones, whose early aesthetic influences include "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Edgar Allan Poe, film noir, mystery,” often draws on images of the macabre. But those elements have taken on a more personal significance in his art since his father, Frederick Douglas Jones II, died in February 2024 from bone cancer.

He was cremated at Laurel Hill West, and his son travels with his remains, incorporating them into his performances. The elder Jones was also a focus of DonChristian’s debut solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art PS1 earlier this year.

Frederick Douglas Jones II was a lifelong conga player who participated in drum circles across the city. Jones’ uncle is the late Philly Soul legend Teddy Pendergrass. He is also a descendant of the Philadelphia abolitionist, writer, and Underground Railroad conductor William Still, whose legacy he strives to maintain through his work along with the legacy of music he has inherited.

“I consider myself an abolitionist in every sense of the word,” he said. “Nowadays abolition mostly involves mass incarceration and police abolition — systems I don’t believe in. I also went to a Quaker school my whole life, so those ideas were instilled in me at a very young age and have colored my character and my values.”

This weekend, Jones will bring his site-specific piece “The Politics of Mourning” to Laurel Hill as part of the inaugural Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival. It will be the fourth iteration of a “site-specific intervention on the subject of grief” that Jones has previously performed and captured on the shores of Sicily and at temple ruins in Calabria, Italy.

For this version, he was drawn to the cemetery’s receiving vault, a Doric terra cotta building designed to hold bodies during the winter months when the ground was too hard for burial. It is located at the foot of a winding path, which will allow him to link his piece with that of his mentor and collaborator, Eiko Otake, which will unfold simultaneously.

“It’s called the receiving vault, and I want to receive it,” Jones said. “I want to create space and time for people to grieve collectively and to remember, and I want to be a well for some of these feelings.”

In addition to Jones’ “Politics of Mourning,” the four-day festival will also feature performances by artists Shavon Norris, Eiko Otake, Mel Hsu, and mayfield brooks, alongside panel discussions, workshops, and information services from experts and advocates in the end-of-life field, at both Laurel Hill East and West.

That kind of communion between the living and the dead is exactly the sort of dialogue that Philly-based choreographer, performer, and death doula Annie Wilson hoped to facilitate when she cocreated the Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival.

“Grief, loss, and death figure a lot into my own work,” explained Wilson, who was inspired to delve deeply into those subjects in the wake of her sister’s tragic 2016 death from a heroin overdose. “As a death doula, I’m in conversation with grief counselors, social workers, funeral directors, and hospice nurses. Having one foot in both worlds I have a unique vantage point.” Death professionals, she said, want to transform the culture around dying.

“At the same time I see artists making visionary, imaginative work about these deep mysteries, and I realized that’s what artists do, they transform culture.”

Local audiences will have more opportunities to enjoy the arts against the backdrop of mourning over the coming months. Christ Church Burial Ground is hosting “Sonic Sunsets,” a monthly series of adventurous jazz concerts. Next up: the trio of saxophonist Stan Zenkov, bassist Pete Dennis and drummer Karen Smith will perform on Saturday, June 7.

Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival, May 29-June 1, Laurel Hill East & West, philadelphiadeathandarts.com