Film
Using Strange Humor to Grapple With Loss
Jan Oxenberg grapples with the loss of her grandmother in Thank You and Good Night, a film that's fallen into obscurity since 1991 but is now available to stream.
Death
Art
An Innovative Design Solution to the Messy Matter of Cremation
“Ashes were providing such a poor user experience,” said Justin Crowe, founder of Parting Stone, a company that turns cremated remains into solidified stone-like objects.
Art
My Session with an Artist Who Helped Me Confront Death
Lindsay Tunkl’s performance series, Parting Practice: Rituals for Endings and Failure, invites participants to practice parting from ambitions, hopes, possessions, friends, family, and your life.
Art
Luxurious, Terrifying Visions of Death in Renaissance Memento Mori
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is exhibiting memento mori objects from Renaissance Europe, often grotesquely designed to startle viewers into recognizing mortality.
Art
Photographs Revisit the Places Terminally Ill Patients Chose to See Before They Died
"Once visited by these terminal patients, these places aren’t just places anymore, they turn into monuments," artist Hrair Sarkissian said of his Last Scene project.
Books
A Guide to Architects' Mundane and Monumental Graves
The architects of our great landmarks are often buried beneath the humblest of tombstones, or have no marker at all.
Art
Photographs from the World’s Largest Human Decomposition Center
For his series The Washing Away of Wrongs, Robert Shults photographed the forensic research of the world's largest center for studying human remains at Texas State University.
Art
Memorial Portraits Made with the Subjects’ Ashes
After the loss of her father and a close friend, Heide Hatry began making portraits where her subjects' faces are delicately recreated with their own cremated remains.
Art
Restoring a Tiffany Mosaic and Its Ethereal Light to a Bronx Cemetery
The Tiffany-designed 1914 Swan Memorial in the Bronx's Woodlawn Cemetery is being restored after over a century of deterioration in the open air.
Art
A Prototype for a New System of Composting Human Remains
The Urban Death Project is building a structure at Washington State University where human remains will be transformed into soil.
Art
Revisiting America’s Dead in Posthumous Portraits from the 19th Century
The 19th century saw the rise of the posthumous portrait when, through photographs and paintings, people preserved the faces of departed loved ones.
Books
Death by Wallpaper: The Alluring Arsenic Colors that Poisoned the Victorian Age
Lucinda Hawksley's book Bitten by Witch Fever chronicles the rise of poisonous pigments in the 19th century through the burgeoning British wallpaper trade.