NEW YORK, NY.- It is a journey we all make. But is its destination — what Hamlet called “the undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveler returns” — merely an abrupt conclusion? Or is it the beginning of another existence?

Religious leaders, artists and ordinary people have been grappling with these questions for millenniums. And now several museum exhibitions are doing the same, with results that are surprising, poignant and even comic.

According to studies, “most people in the world believe in some sort of afterlife, even those who have no specific religious affiliation,” said Elena Pakhoutova, senior curator of Himalayan art and the organizer of “Death Is Not the End” at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Objects reflecting those convictions may be especially comforting because of the COVID-19 pandemic, whose arrival subtly reshaped — and often postponed — the plans for these shows. The Rubin, for instance, has made “Death Is Not the End” part of “Life After,” a thematic focus for 2023. On view through Jan. 14, 2024, the exhibition examines attitudes toward mortality in both Tibetan Buddhism (the museum’s specialty) and Christianity.

The works include some secular art, like the European painting “A Woman Divided Into Two, Representing Life and Death” (1790-1820), in which half the image is vibrant and elegantly dressed, and the other half a skeleton. The art’s intent is simply to remind the viewer of the impermanence of all things, Pakhoutova said, which is also a central tenet of Buddhism.

Other commonalities appear in the religious works. Both Buddhism and Christianity envision an afterlife, with pleasant and unpleasant possibilities. In Buddhism, a person’s accumulation of karma can lead to a rebirth in any of six realms, including the animal kingdom and hell. But the two faiths also offer routes to salvation, which depend on individual action.

“Human agency,” Pakhoutova said, is ultimately “why all of this art is created.”

Visitors can create something, too. At the show’s end, they’re asked to respond to prompts like “Tell us how death may not be the end.” One written note on display said, “I don’t believe any of this!”

Still, this visitor “came to look,” an amused Pakhoutova said.

Humans’ ability to influence their destiny also runs thematically through “Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where almost 300 objects will rotate at regular intervals until the show’s close in July 2024.

The works, which bridge ancient times to the 1990s, include Buddhist ritual objects like raigo paintings — medieval scenes, often made of painted silk — that could be hung at the bedside of the dying. Depicting the benevolent Amida Buddha, who offered paradise to believers, some had silk cords extending from the buddha’s hands that the expiring person could grasp.

The exhibition also has a gallery devoted to Zen Buddhism, with calligraphy by Zen priests and elegantly carved sculptures of deceased Zen masters, which were used in memorial services.

“I imagine these objects as in some ways cheating death,” said Aaron Rio, the Met’s associate curator of Japanese art, pausing next to a 15th-century sculpted figure with inlaid crystal eyes. The brushed calligraphy on view is mesmerizing, too, he added.

“You get the movement of the hand,” Rio said. “And so it’s a way of feeling the physical reality of the person after their death.”

A more torturous view of eternity dominates “Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds,” which is to travel to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco after it closes on May 7 at the Asia Society Museum in New York. But with so much paradise depicted in art, hell can be “a little bit more interesting,” said Laura Weinstein, the New York museum’s premodern curator.




The show, which was organized by Adriana Proser, now a curator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, is certainly varied, with images from Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Islam. Here are both fiery and icy hells, kings of hell and intriguing characters like the Hell Courtesan, a Japanese 15th-century figure of legend who was said to have attained enlightenment, with the help of a Zen monk, despite her occupation.

The Islamic art even includes representations of the Prophet Muhammad, which Shiite Muslim custom allowed until about the 16th century, Weinstein said. The Islamic work, all made by Shiites, sometimes reveals sectarian politics, with damned souls depicted as Sunni Muslims. Contemporary artists find their own vengeful amusements, as demonstrated by “Akeldama,” a 2006 painting by Filipino artist Luis Lorenzana, which portrays Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was president of the Philippines at the time, as a hellish monster.

“Comparative Hell” also has the only work inspired by the pandemic: Iranian American artist Afruz Amighi’s “Spirit Canopy,” a room-size installation filled with shapes created by fine metal chains that are tethered to the ceiling; some appear to rise from the floor. They evoke the souls she imagined hovering over New York in 2021.

The body, as much as the spirit, plays a role in “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” at the Field Museum in Chicago through Aug. 27. (It will tour afterward.) As a natural history institution, the Field initially conceived the show as a way to help parents explain specimens like taxidermy to children. But it has become a space for all visitors to “think about death in ways they haven’t thought about before,” said Ben Miller, an exhibition developer.

Patrick Ryan Williams and Gary M. Feinman, curators at the Field and the lead content advisers on the show, have included a huge diorama of a whale fall: a whale carcass that is a deep-sea banquet and a thriving ecosystem for other creatures.

“We often found ourselves coming back to this idea that a death is only a death from one perspective,” Miller said in an interview at the museum.

Museumgoers can view many different cultural responses to death here, including possessions left in ancient Egyptian tombs to assist the soul’s transition and a canoe-shaped Ghanaian coffin designed by Seth Kane Kwei. Embellished with carved figures of rowers, it celebrates the deceased. An ofrenda (altar) by local Mexican American artist Norma Rios-Sierra is equally joyful, paying tribute to dead family members.

But as much as the curators investigate death globally, they want you to contemplate your own as well. Organized around questions like “What will happen to my body?,” “Death” encourages visitors not only to look but to listen (there’s ritual music) and even smell.

Not everyone wants to sniff the compounds known as putrescine and cadaverine — this particular sample isn’t as awful as you might think — but many eagerly take part in the final display. Adapted from a public artwork by artist Candy Chang, it has two enormous chalkboards: one on which visitors can write what they want to do before they die and one for what they wish would happen afterward.

“There’s a lot of ‘I want to haunt my friends,’” Miller said.

“Haunting” is certainly an appropriate term for “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid,” another exhibition at the Met. A retrospective of the work of Brown, a contemporary British American artist, it features many large canvases inspired by the art traditions of memento mori and vanitas (works reminding of the inevitability of death).

The paintings include more than one of a woman seated before a round mirror, in which the subject and her reflection unmistakably form the eyes of a skull. Another, “Aujourd’hui Rose” (2005), creates a death’s head from the seated figures of two little girls with a dog.

Brown, however, insists that the images are essentially playful puns, offering “heavy subject matter dealt with,” she said, “with a very light touch.”

The exhibition, curated by Ian Alteveer, also includes still lifes, several echoing baroque paintings by 17th-century Flemish artist Frans Snyders, which often featured dead game. Brown, however, said she saw even such centuries-old art as being part of the present, its continuing existence an assertion of vitality.

On view through Dec. 3, the show reflects the “energy of a person making something,” she added, “which, in the end, is kind of the most positive, the most antithetical thing to death that one can do.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.