Guest dispatch by Trinity Eimer
Trinity Eimer graduated from Rice University in 2024 with a major in cell biology and genetics, a minor in medical humanities, and a certificate in Spanish. During the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was inspired by watching her mom, an intensivist, work through the many challenges and griefs the pandemic brought. Trinity also experienced the deaths of several family members, and wondered why the grief she felt–and saw around her–during the pandemic felt so different from grief during “normal” times. This question led her to travel the globe for a year as a Watson Fellow, exploring the pandemic’s effects in other countries. Thus far, she has visited Mexico, Chile, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Japan, and will return to the US in 2025. Upon her return, she plans to apply to medical school.
In July of 2024, I traveled to Mexico to explore the impact of COVID. I was particularly interested in exploring how healthcare workers and laypeople experienced pandemic-resultant grief. In order to better understand the pandemic’s accompanying sorrows, I sought to understand general sentiments and practices regarding death and grief in Mexico, both in the present day and throughout the country’s storied past.
As I traveled through Mexico, I became deeply interested in how often I encountered themes of death and grief within Mexican art. I visited Frida Kahlo’s historic Casa Azul and discovered that in her still life paintings, she hinted at deeper themes of death and pain. I toured the Casa Estudio Luis Barragán and noted how the famed architect worked symbolic reminders of mortality into the building itself. Reminders of mortality presented themselves in every museum and artistic space I entered.
I began to actively explore how death and grieving are portrayed in Mexican art. In fact, the theme of death is so prevalent in Mexican art that an entire museum is dedicated to the topic. The Museo Nacional de la Muerte in Aguascalientes houses artifacts and artworks related to funerary practices and death in Mexico throughout its history.
The museum itself is enormous and unforgettable. The exhibits are varied: the first room contains a replica of northern and western pre-Hispanic tombs, while later rooms explore the connection between political cartoons and skeletal imagery. Still further on, a collection of modern art related to death is on display. One memorable painting, titled “Catrina con celular” by Erandini Figueroa, depicts a skeleton in a revealing tank top talking on her mobile phone while wearing the catrina’s classic fancy hat. In other words, depictions of death-related imagery span the gamut from the solemn and religious to the irreverent and playful.
One of my favorite works in the museum is Francisco Toledo’s “La muerte caga I.” The print depicts a skeleton squatting down and releasing a billowing stream of ink from its backside.
My initial reaction to the piece — giggly shock — gave way, upon further contemplation, to a deep appreciation for its layered, complex meaning. Death and excrement are both shunned as polite topics of conversation. Yet death, like excretion, is an inevitable part of life. Both death and excretion work in cycles: you die and your nutrients are absorbed by the earth — you consume the nutrients of the earth and excrete them again.
By explicitly connecting the themes of death and excretion, Toledo powerfully demonstrates the natural inevitability of death while also forcing the viewer to contemplate why the bodily processes of death and excretion are so distinctly compartmentalized. Moreover, “La muerte caga I” calls to mind pre-Hispanic beliefs regarding the cyclical nature of death and life. Many different ethnic groups in Mexico shared some variety of beliefs in this cycle.
The popularity of the skull and skeleton in modern-day death-related art in Mexico is a direct result of this historically significant cycle, according to the museum’s accompanying text.
In many cultures across Mexico, the skeleton became not a symbol of death, but of eternal life; by representing skeletons as living beings, doing such things as talking on phones or using the bathroom, the phenomenon of life after death is made visible.
The ability of art to communicate healing and comforting ideas about death, or at least to introduce the necessity of considering death to the viewer, struck me as powerful. During the pandemic itself, art became a tool that many in the US used to cope with the painful reality of grieving in isolation. People wrote poetry reminding themselves and their communities of the power in solidarity and in friendship across distance. Others picked up long-forgotten paintbrushes and instruments, escaping the sad present into the arms of artistry.
Pandemic-era art serves to memorialize the events of the pandemic and commemorate those who died from COVID. Books such as “Our Evenings” by Alan Hollinghurst incorporate elements of the pandemic into the plot. Songs like “Supalonely” by Benee became popular during the pandemic, forever bearing an association between their lyrics (“I’m a sad girl, in this big world / It’s a mad world / … I’ve been lonely”) and lockdowns. Purposeful artistic memorials communicate the grief of the COVID-bereaved to future generations, communicating the importance of preparing appropriately for potential future pandemics and the impossible enormity of the many griefs left behind.
My exploration of death-related art in Mexico and its relationship to pandemic-era art led me to conclude that death and art are inescapably intertwined. Whether art is used as an outlet to express grief or as a medium through which to convey messages about death, it allows humanity to express the inexpressible and the unknowable: the vastness of grief, the mystery of death.
