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350 Years After the Great Plague, Its Skeletal Reaper Remains
Title page for a collection of ‘Bills of Mortality’ that chronicled the Great Plague’s death counts (1665) (via Wellcome Images) The personification of death goes back centuries, with Thanatos of...
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The 19th-Century Tomb That Inspired London’s Iconic Telephone Box
London telephone box and Eliza Soane’s tomb (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted) When you step into one of London’s iconic red telephone boxes, you’re entering the...
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Archeologists Discover 400-Year-Old Hearts in Lead Boxes
Heart-shaped lead urn with an inscription identifying the contents as the heart of Toussaint Perrien, Knight of Brefeillac (photo by Rozenn Colleter, Ph.D./INRAP) Five heart-shaped lead boxes dating to...
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Art that Acknowledges Death Without Showing the Body
Friedrich Kunath, “Untitled” (2003), acrylic and metallic paint on linen, 84 1/4 by 44 1/4 in. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) Every autumn in New York, leaves fall, grass turns brittle,...
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Dealing with Death in an Evocative Game about Cancer
Riding constellations in ‘That Dragon, Cancer’ (all GIFS by the author for Hyperallergic, via YouTube) “We grieve in silence,” game maker Ryan Green says at one point in That Dragon, Cancer, an...
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Mementoes of Grief Go to Auction from the US’s Only Museum for Mourning Art
One of a pair of English hand-colored woodcut engravings, from Valentine Green’s ‘Death and Life Contrasted — or, An Essay On Man; An Essay On Woman’ (1770, London), printed by Bowles and Carver,...
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Could NYC’s Island of the Dead Become a Green Burial Park?
Melinda Hunt, “Buildings Among Burials” (2015), ink sketch of Hart Island (courtesy the artist) Each year, hundreds of New Yorkers are buried in trenches dug deep in the soil of Hart Island, a sliver...
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Connecting with Humanity in the Paris Catacombs
General view of the St. Eustache chamber in the Paris Catacombs A skull motif in the Paris Catacombs (photo © Christophe Fouin, all images courtesy the City of Paris) PARIS — We rarely experience the...
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Creating a Puppet Documentary for the Count Who Loved a Corpse
Mockup of a puppet reenactment for ‘No Place for the Living’ (courtesy Ronni Thomas) The fact that he slept for seven years with the corpse of a woman he loved is, for filmmaker Ronni Thomas, one of...
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Actors Have Been Dying to Play the Skeletal Role of Yorick in ‘Hamlet’
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet with Yorick’s skull (1880-85) (via Library of Congress/Wikimedia) Reports last month suggested that the skull of playwright William Shakespeare was no longer in his grave. A...
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Climbing into a Mortuary Drawer to Smell the Scents of JFK’s Last Moments
‘Famous Deaths’ on view at the TFI Interactive Playground, part of the Tribeca Film Festival (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) In Famous Deaths, you experience the smells and sounds of the...
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Cheery Skeleton Mosaic Found in Turkey Says, “Enjoy Your Life” [UPDATED]
The 2,400-year-old mosaic discovered in Hatay, Turkey (photo by Halit Demir, © Andalou Agency) Reclining by a wine jug and a portion of bread, a cup in one bony hand, the skeleton on a 3rd-century BCE...
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A Future Where the Decomposing Dead Could Power Cemetery Lights
The “Sylvan Constellation” designed by the Death Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, imagining a cemetery illuminated by the dead (courtesy Death...
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Marking an Artist’s Forgotten Grave with His Own Sculpture of Death
Thomas Crawford, “The Babes in the Wood” (1850), marble, on view at Green-Wood Cemetery (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted) The unmarked grave of 19th-century artist...
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Shopping for the Afterlife in China
A joss paper bicycle (photo by Sara Codutti, courtesy Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) Chanel shoes, McDonald’s french fries, iPhones, cognac, lacy lingerie, and machine guns are just a few of the...
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Mourners from Around the Globe Gather to Share Our Traditions of Grief
‘An Occupation of Loss’ by Taryn Simon at the Park Avenue Armory (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) As a New York gravedigger once succinctly put it to me: “We all have dead.” No person is...
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A Burial Suit of Mushrooms that Consume Your Remains
The Infinity Burial Suit by Jae Rhim Lee (courtesy Coeio) Despite embalming and sealed caskets being a relatively new tradition in American burial, brought about by the high mortality of the Civil War,...
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London’s Most Eccentric Museum Restores the Catacombs Beneath It
The Dome Area and Apollo Recess with newly reinstated wall behind the Apollo statue (photo by Gareth Gardner, courtesy Sir John Soane’s Museum) The neoclassical architect Sir Johne Soane had a macabre...
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The Real Corpses That Served as Models for the Doomed Crew of the “Raft of...
Théodore Géricault, “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818–19), oil on canvas, 193.3 × 281.9 inches (via Louvre Museum/Wikimedia) As Halloween approaches, it offers a chance to delve into the occult,...
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When a Drowned Woman’s Face Became the Muse of Paris
Death mask of “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (1900 photograph) (via Wikimedia) As Halloween approaches, it offers a chance to delve into the occult, phantasmagoric, otherworldly, and haunted aspects of our...
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A History of Photographing Ghosts
Photograph by William Hope of a couple with a female spirit (nd) (via National Media Museum/Wikimedia) As Halloween approaches, it offers a chance to delve into the occult, phantasmagoric,...
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A Lost 15th-Century Mural that Depicted Death’s Indiscriminate Dance
Photograph of the Lübeck “Danse Macabre” (via Wikimedia) As Halloween arrives, it offers a chance to delve into the occult, phantasmagoric, otherworldly, and haunted aspects of our world. In a series...
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Death by Wallpaper: The Alluring Arsenic Colors that Poisoned the Victorian Age
Martin Engelbrecht, hand-colored engraving of a dominotière, or maker of brocade and printed papers, wearing a dress of wallpaper samples (Germany, 1735–40) (courtesy Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs,...
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Revisiting America’s Dead in Posthumous Portraits from the 19th Century
Ambrose Andrews, “The Children of Nathan Starr” (Middletown, Connecticut, 1835), oil on canvas, 28 3/8 x 36 1/2″ (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Nina Howell Starr, in memory...
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A Prototype for a New System of Composting Human Remains
Rendering of the Recomposition Center for the Urban Death Project (courtesy Katrina Spade) A proposal to turn human remains into soil as an alternative to current funerary options is approaching...
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Restoring a Tiffany Mosaic and Its Ethereal Light to a Bronx Cemetery
Detail of the Swan Memorial mosaic by Tiffany Studios in Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx (courtesy Courtney Magill and Woodlawn Conservancy) There is an angel in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery that walks...
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Memorial Portraits Made with the Subjects’ Ashes
Heide Hatry, “Emily Jordan Boxer” (2016), mixed media (loose ash particles, pulverized birch coal, white marble dust, beeswax), 14 x 11 inches (courtesy the artist) There is a tactile quality to the...
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Photographs from the World’s Largest Human Decomposition Center
Robert Shults, photograph from The Washing Away of Wrongs, with undergraduate student Jordan Daem inspecting a casket at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility at Texas State University (courtesy...
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A Guide to Architects’ Mundane and Monumental Graves
The marker for Bruce Goff in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, designed by one of his former students, Grant Gustafson, with a piece of glass from his Shin’en Kan house that was destroyed in a fire...
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Photographs Revisit the Places Terminally Ill Patients Chose to See Before...
Hrair Sarkissian, “Foto Zwarthoed 23/10/2014 14:12” (courtesy the artist) Since 2007, a group of medical volunteers in the Netherlands have fulfilled hundreds of wishes of the terminally ill to make a...
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Luxurious, Terrifying Visions of Death in Renaissance Memento Mori
Finials of a Chaplet (France or southern Netherlands, 1530 with mid-19th-century insertion) (ca. 1850–1860), elephant ivory (courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London) BRUNSWICK, Maine — The first...
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The Funerals of Artists
A grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (all photos by the author unless otherwise indicated) As a last statement, our funerals are remarkable as much for their uniformity as for their conclusion of...
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You Can Kickstart an Urban Human Compost Center
Rendering for the Urban Death Project (courtesy Katrina Spade) At death in the United States we are faced with two options: burial or cremation. While some outliers select donating their remains to...
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Photographs Document the Global Traditions of Living with the Dead
Konrad II, Basilica Minor of St Michael, Mondsee, Austria (© 2015 Dr. Paul Koudounaris, all images courtesy Thames & Hudson) Aside from scattered tombstones lodged in cemetery earth, most people in...
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An Artistic History of Death
Willem Van Swanenburg, “Death and an Arrow About to Strike the Man Down,” plate 4 from ‘Allegory of the Misuse of Worldly Property, after Maarten van Heemskerk,’ (1609), engraving, Dr. and Mrs. E....
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A New Museum Encourages Us to Consider Death
The Museum of Death in New Orleans (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless noted) NEW ORLEANS — No matter how strong your stomach for the macabre, there is likely some moment in the Museum...
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The Lost Ritual of Photographing the Dead
“Surrounded by Flowers” (1860), quarter-plate ambrotype, hand colored, 4.75″ x 3.75,” a postmortem photograph of a young boy in a burial gown (courtesy Thanatos Archive) Despite the current ubiquity of...
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A Guide to the 20th-Century Artists’ Graves of New York City
Sphinxes at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless noted) Following our exploration of the artist graves in New York City from the 19th and early 20th...
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My Session with an Artist Who Helped Me Confront Death
Lindsay Tunkl, ”Untitled” (2018) (all images courtesy of Lindsay Tunkl) OAKLAND, Calif. — As I rode the BART train from San Francisco to Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery to meet artist Lindsay Tunkl,...
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An Innovative Design Solution to the Messy Matter of Cremation
Parting Stone transforms cremated remains into solidified, stone-like remains (image courtesy of Parting Stone) SANTA FE, New Mexico — When Justin Crowe’s grandfather died in 2014, his funerary...
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Using Strange Humor to Grapple With Loss
From Thank You and Good Night (1991), dir. Jan Oxenberg Pioneering queer filmmaker Jan Oxenberg’s documentary memoir Thank You and Good Night made the rounds of the indie film festivals in 1991, but...
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How Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson Killed Her Father Multiple Times (for a Movie)
From Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), dir. Kirsten Johnson (all images courtesy Netflix) Dick Johnson Is Dead is one of the best films of the year, an utterly unique rumination on mortality from one of...
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Glimpse Heaven and Other Afterlives With Films About Life After Death
From A Matter of Life and Death (1946), dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (image courtesy Criterion) People tend to pay special attention to horror movies during October, but there are...
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Science Confirms That Life Flashes Before the Eyes Upon Death
It’s been an age-old trope in literature and film but now brain scans suggest it’s true.
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In Lewis Warsh’s Poem Composed Over Many Decades, the Past Is Never Really Past
Mortality and memory are points of inquiry in this posthumous publication.
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An Unlikely Art Show Pops Up in an LA Mausoleum
Dignity Plus, staged in an Altadena funeral home, addressed themes of mortality and memory while making use of improbable spaces for art.
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The Living Legacy of Funerary Arts
Funerary arts play a vital role in preserving key cultural values and knowledge keeping while reminding us of our humanity by so devotedly caring for the dead.
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The Importance of Art in a “Good Death”
The resurgence of deathcare workers across industries presents an opportunity to creatively reimagine what a good death can look like.
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How Artists Reimagine Our Relationship With Death
As part of Hyperallergic’s Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, Brianna L. Hernández examines how seven artists reclaim end-of-life traditions in their practice.
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The Tragic, Poetic, and Ironic Ways in Which Artists Die
A new book by former Met Museum archivist Jim Moske assembles a haunting and hilarious revue of artist obituaries from 1906 to 1929.
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