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News October 2022 Perspective Online

Bridwell Update: Danse Macabre

Bridwell Library and SMU’s Department of Art History welcomed the collaborative artist team of Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick to campus September 21–23 for a number of public events marking the opening of Bridwell’s autumn 2022 exhibition, “Lead Stealing the Danse Macabre: Changing Roles & Identities in the Modern Dance of Death.” Kahn and Selesnick presented on their collaborative process and the range of visionary artworks produced over the span of their career.

The Danse Macabre, also called the Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of allegory of the Late Middle Ages on the universality of death. The art typically features the dead, or a personification of death, engaging people from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child and laborer.

The art was produced as memento mori, to remind people of the fragility of their lives, and how vain were the glories of earthly life, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, and “the effect was both frivolous, and terrifying.”

The exhibition, on view at SMU’S Bridwell Library, runs through Dec. 16. Visit the online gallery here.

Read more Bridwell Library updates in The Quill and The Bridwell Quarterly.

Photos courtesy Bridwell Library.