Follow this link to artist Michelle Turriani’s online exhibit featuring vanitas assemblies with the skulls of endangered species: The human skull of the Vanitas or Memento Mori painting is substituted by an animal one. The viewers are invited to review their existential questioning beyond the confines of their own individual destiny and to embrace their … Read more“In the Tradition: Memento Exstingui”
This is my Summer Solstice contribution to the Artists of the Wall 2021 project. It’s a local (Rogers Park, Chicago) tradition extending back about 30 years, when residents started decorating a 600 foot long concrete bench/ barrier between Loyola Park and the Lake Michigan beach. Artists purchase the right to paint sections of the wall … Read more“… with hope that this assemblage of rubble would become a shrine …”
I will be teaching this upcoming online course via the Morbid Academy, starting August 25: This course explores an emergent, dynamic and positive response to the existential problem of death denial, centered on the simple philosophical premise of “mortality sapience”; that by remembering death, we can learn to seize the day. In that spirit, artists, … Read moreThe Art of Ritual: Changing Ways of Life and Death (Online Course)
I visited the Holocaust Memorial during a trip to Berlin in May of 2012. Unfortunately I did not have time to enter the underground museum/information centre, so this review is specific to the open-air installation, which is the most conceptually brilliant memorial I have ever seen, or, more accurately, “been part of”. The Memorial is … Read moreThe Holocaust Memorial (Berlin, Germany)
Philadelphia’s Monument Lab is a public art and history studio working with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory.
From Barbara Groth, Founder and Creative Director of the Nomadic School of Wonder: This image is from the very first gathering of the Nomadic School of Wonder in Galisteo, New Mexico in 2015 where we explored the theme of “Death & Rebirth” with palliative care physician and teacher Alex Jadad. On All Hallow’s Eve, Alex … Read moreA/Wake Ritual with the Nomadic School of Wonder (Galisteo, New Mexico 2015)
A presentation by Sacred Stones Barrows, Ltd., an English company that constructs columbaria inspired by prehistoric British stone architecture.