Time: 02/18/2017: 10:30AM–12:00PM
Location: Concourse A, Concourse Level

Chairs: Steven Pinker, Harvard University; Heide Hatry, Independent Artist

Icons in Ash. Portraits Made of Human Ashes. This panel discussion introduces the art project and book publication Heide Hatry, Icons in Ash. The art of the human image arose many millennia ago precisely for the purpose of keeping the dead among us, not just in memory but in charged ceremonial objects that were intended to embody and preserve their spirits for their survivors and for the community as a whole. It was a way of integrating the inexplicable fact of death into life, of insuring that the dead and what they meant stayed present and abided with us. Heide Hatry, a German visual artist working in New York, has invented a new technique and purpose for portraiture employing actual human ashes to create meditative images of deceased people at their own request or that of their families. Twenty-seven contributing authors, including the present panelists, have written about how we have dealt with and continue to deal with our dead, offering perspectives from art history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, ecology, and so on, as well as discussing death taboos, personal experience, the impact of relics, and more. A social as well as an aesthetic project, Icons in Ash proposes an alternative to the way we see and deal with death, in particular a radically different approach to mourning and consolation, as well as how we understand the purposes of art. A panel discussion will follow the initial presentation.

CAA (College Art Association) Conference
Hilton Midtown, 519 W 24th St., NYC

Book Fair: February 16-18
Thursday - Friday 9am-6pm
Saturday 9am - 2.30p
Hilton Midtown, Rhinelander Gallery, Second Floor; and Americas Hall I (access from Third Floor West Promenade)

Please visit our booth
Ubu Gallery and Station Hill Press
at 1001, Americas Hall I

Book Signing: February 17, Friday 2-3pm
Hilton Midtown, 1001, Americas Hall I

Exhibition: February 17, Friday 5.30-7.30pm
Hilton Midtown, East Ballroom Foyer 3rd floor

Panel: February 18, Saturday 10.30am - 12pm
Hilton Midtown, Concourse A, Concourse Level

Panelists:
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Mind and Body, Form and Essence, the Unbearable and the Inconceivable

Eleanor Heartney, Independent Critic
Corruptible Bodies: Catholic Morbidity

Anthony Haden-Guest, Independent Art Writer
Art and Death

George Quasha, Station Hill Press
Dead Talke

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, School of visual Art
Art and the Many Ways the "Disenchanted Body is Enchanted Again an Again"

Heide Hatry, Artist
Icons in Ash