Proceedings of the Art of Death and Dying Symposium
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/2996
The University of Houston Libraries, in partnership with the Blaffer Art Museum, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the Department for Hispanic Studies, the Honors College and School of Art, hosted a three day symposium titled "The Art of Death and Dying" on October 24-27, 2012. Selected papers from the symposium are collected here.
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Item Complete Proceedings of the Art of Death and Dying Symposium held at the University of Houston (TX)(2018) Buehner, Katie; Creelman, Kerry; Essinger, Catherine; Malone, AndreaThe University of Houston Libraries, in partnership with the Blaffer Art Museum, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the Department for Hispanic Studies, the Honors College and School of Art, hosted a three day symposium titled "The Art of Death and Dying" on October 24-27, 2012. This publication includes selected papers from the symposium.Item Death as Confrontational and Embracing in Symbolism(2018) Hartel, Herbert R., Jr.Death was hardly a new subject in the visual arts in the late-nineteenth century, having been depicted often in Christian and mythological narratives and symbolically in still lifes, portraits and landscapes. The Symbolists of the late-nineteenth century were fascinated with death, probably more than any earlier artists, and depicted it often. Death was part of their interest in the bizarre, frightening, morbid, and mysterious. Prior to Symbolism, depictions of death sustained a measure of emotional, spatial and physical detachment between the grim subject and the viewer. Death was depicted with the necessary facts and details and was meant to effect the viewer emotionally, but it was still somewhat remote and safely on the other side of the picture plane. The Symbolists often strove to eliminate this separation between the viewer and the dead, between the living and the dead, as they pondered the mysteries of what death was. They showed death as a profound and mysterious event that was inescapable and always nearby. Death was regarded as something to be avoided and feared, or accepted, or perhaps occasionally even welcomed, depending on the circumstances of the one who was seen dying.Item La representación de la muerte como vida en la narrativa de García Márquez(2018) Marrugo-Puello, CeciliaIn a number of literary pieces in the western world tradition, death has typically been represented as an obscure episode related to mourning and sadness, brought about by ceasing of life or the departure of a dear one. However, in Hispanic Literature we find examples of how death is a symbol of laughter, a carnival, the celebration of new life and rebirth. For instance, this kind of festive representation of death is portrayed in the narratives of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Short stories such as “Big Mama's Funeral” depict the celebration of death in the decease of the “most powerful matron in the world”. This kind of representation is also observed in the narratives of some other Colombian Caribbean authors, which reveal an inversion of values in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque sense of the world: the deceased becomes the center of the spectacle, and mourners the participants and performers of a cirquesque function. In this presentation, I will focus on different literary examples, to explain the illustration of the death as a carnival and rebirth, in relation to the tendency of Colombian Caribbean writers to explore their coastal popular culture.Item Objects of Immortality: Hairwork and Mourning in Victorian Visual Culture(2018) Harmeyer, RachelOften misunderstood as purely an artifact of mourning, hairwork was exchanged as a living, sentimental token of love and friendship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hair was an artifact of affection and a material for memory, and was often made into hairwork objects and jewelry. This function of hairwork can be understood in the context of the visual culture of death and dying in the nineteenth century, which equated beauty with immortality. This paper will show that sentimental hairwork was inextricably linked to portraiture, even when it was not tied to the miniature portrait. For those who created it, hairwork had the capacity to reconstruct the body into an ideal form that could live beyond death.Item Representations of Death in Mexico: La Santa Muerte(2018) Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, MalgorzataThe Aztecs had their representation of the land of the dead—Mictlan—with their respective god and goddess, Mictlanetecuhtli and Mictecacíhuatl. The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought their own medieval imagery of death as a caped skeleton with a scythe. Nowadays in Mexico, some of the most widely known images are those associated with the Day of The Dead. Notwithstanding, a new representation, that of an unofficial saint called Santa Muerte, which started in mid-twentieth century as a private devotion among the marginal population of Mexico City, is spreading rapidly, both in geographical and sociological terms. It expanded to Central America and the United States, and it is practiced mainly among parts of the population that deal with transitions and danger. I examine representations of death focusing on this ambiguous figure that is becoming popular among different segments of Mexican society.Item The Way She Looked the Day She Died: Vernacular Photography, Memory, and Death(2018) Brown, AmandaFocusing on a private photographic memorial album held at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), this paper explores the relationship between photography, death, memory, and time in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century memorial photography. To date, what little research exists on memorial photography has dealt almost exclusively with single images rather than albums. In contrast, this paper focuses on how memorial photography functions in an album format, with particular attention paid to the implicit narrative of these albums. In the case of the UCB album, image sequencing and the combination of image and text work together to enact a private mourning ritual and narrative, one in which photography serves to fix forever the deceased in an image of youthful innocence and beauty.