COLLECTIONS

Credits

Dylan Burns Curator
Vicki Read Contributor
Mikkel Skinner Design
Shay Larsen Design
Devin Greener Preparator
Darcy Pumphrey Digital Team
Alison Gardner Digital Team
Becky Thoms Digital Team
Adam Gifford Scanning Tech
Gravestone…

The Weeping Woman

The most well known headstone in the Logan City Cemetery carries the title “Weeping Woman” or “Weeping Lady.” Countless urban legends and folktales surround this monument to Emelia Cronquist. Some of these stories tell of a…

Gravestones

A headstone, tombstone, or gravestone is typically placed over the head of the deceased’s grave and inscribed with their name, birth date, and date of death. Many headstones also contain symbols or sayings that allow mourners and…

Cemeteries and Funerals

Logan Cemetery
Before the 19th century, most burials took place on church yards or family-owned lands. Eventually cities saw the need to regulate the burial of human remains more closely. Public cemeteries became areas,…

Der Antichrist und die fünfzehn Zeichen

Der Antichrist und die fünfzehn Zeichen vor dem Jüngsten Gericht (translated from German as "The Antichrist and the fifteen signs before the last judgement) is a German legend drawn from the apocryphal…

Undeath

As the macabre and gruesome depictions of death and dying suggest, the event of death itself is one many wish to avoid or circumvent. This desire often manifests in spiritual or religious responses, but sometimes it enters the realm of…

John Taylor Funeral Programme

John Taylor, the third president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, passed away in 1887. His funeral programme displays traditional black and cream Victorian-era designs and lists the procession of…

Mourning Photography

Funeral customs that might strike us as odd today were common a hundred yearsago. The advent of photography allowed the creation of keepsakes of lost loved ones. Photos capturing the recently deceased alongside living…

Mourning Posters

These two posters offer examples of mass manufactured mourning materials printed by The Art Panel Company of Philadelphia. Mourners provided a photograph, date of birth and death, and a poem in each of these ready-made posters for…

Mourning Imagery

Unlike the macabre iconographies explored earlier in the exhibit, funeral and mourning rituals and images ring more somber and muted. Funerals and mourning, once primarily a home affair, began to reflect larger trends toward mass…

Santa Muerte

Santa Muerte (“Saint of Death” or the “Holy Death”) is a Mexican folk saint. Drawing from both the Aztec and Catholic traditions, Santa Muerte straddles the line between Saint and personification of death. Although a skeleton,…

Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio
The fifth and final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins in a graveyard. The diggers of Ophelia’s grave comment on an uncovered skull, which Hamlet then lifts and recognizes as Yorick, the court jester of his…

The common aspects of the Danse Macabre

Because of its focus on the afterlife, the Danse Macabre carries deep religious connotations. Saintly relics and art depicting the violent death of Jesus contributed to a cultural obsession with the macabre.…

Vesalius

Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (“on the fabric of the human body”), first published in 1543, provided a major leap forward in the fields of medicine and anatomy. The true-to-life accuracy of the text’s illustrations…

Memento Mori

Skulls act as reminders to both the limits of life, and the farce permanence of bones. Bones are the last part of the body to decompose, often remaining in reliquaries or crypts for centuries after the deceased’s passing. A viewer…

Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death

Universality proves a common theme in the Danse Macabre as the dead dance with both commoners and aristocrats alike. Consequentially, the Danse Macabre was often used for social critique. Hans Holbein the Younger, a…

The most common text follows,
with the original Middle English:

‘I am afraid’
(Ich am afert),
‘Lo, what I see!’
(Lo whet ich se),
‘Methinks these be devils three’
(Me þinkes hit bey develes þre).
And the Three Dead reply:
‘I was well…

I was well fair, such shall you be

An early example of the Danse Macabre comes from the story of “The Three Living and the Three Dead.” While the story’s exact origins remain a mystery, scholars have traced its theme to 13th century murals,…

Danse Macabre

The Danse Macabre is an eternal round in which the dead alternate with the living. The dead lead the dance; indeed they are the only ones dancing.
-Philipe Aries

The Danse Macabre,
or Totentanz (“dance of death” in English) marked an important milestone in the art of the Middle Ages. Ghastly figures, often skeletons with tattered hair and clothing, dance and converse with both ordinary and extraordinary…

Why should I fear death? If i am, death is not.
If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that
which can only exist when I do not?
-Epicurus

Memento Mori,
"Remember that you will die,"

is a Latin saying that conveys the inevitability of…