Day Long Symposium on Art and Death at Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, October 28

Attention New Yorkers: On Saturday, October 28, we will be hosting a day-long symposium dedicated to the intersections of art and death at Green-Wood Cemetery to celebrate the publication of Death: A Graveside Companion, edited by Morbid Anatomy creator Joanna Ebenstein. Tickets and more can be found here.

This book, published by Thames and Hudson, features over 1,000 images exploring humankind's imaginings of death, many largely unseen and drawn from The Richard Harris death collection. It also contains 19 essays by a variety of Morbid Anatomy regulars on a variety of art and death related topics.

Presenters--most of whom also contributed to the book--include medical historian Michael Sappol; Evan Michelson of Obscura Antiques and Oddities and TV's Oddities; hair artist and art historian Karen Bachmannn; filmmaker Eva Aridjis Porter; Ronni Thomas of the The Midnight Archive; photographer Shannon Taggart; Bruce Goldfarb of Baltimore’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner; medical illustrator Marie Dauenheimer; Morbid Anatomy’s Joanna Ebenstein and Laetitia Barbier; and more. Talks, screenings, and show-and-tells will span the allure of Victorian hair art made to mourn the dead, Géricault's morgue paintings used as studies for the Raft of the Medusa, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, death in Mexico, photography of spirits after death, the surprising history of the guillotine, anatomical self identity, and much more.

Books will be available at a special discounted rate, lunch will be provided, and many contributors will be on hand to sign copies of the book.

There will also be an after party with music by Friese Undine and magic lantern projections by Joel Schlemowitz.

More and tickets here! Hope very much to see you there.

Above images: Paolo Vincenzo Bonomini, Cycle of Scenes of Living Skeletons, early 19th century. Painted for the Church of Santa Grata Inter Vites, Bergamo, Italy, for the Triduum of the dead. More in Death: A Graveside Companion, which can be preordered here.