Tag: death

Freeman Ranch is a 3,500-acre (1,400 ha) plot of land between San Marcos and Wimberley, Texas. It was founded in 1941 by weekend ranchers Harold M. “Harry” Freeman and his brother Joe.[1] Freeman Ranch houses 50 varying dead decaying bodies. These bodies are used to study the effects of the stages of body decomposition on the effect on the soil. [2]

Kiki Smith, Heute, 2008

“Ms. Smith, whose younger sister Beatrice died with AIDS in 1988, has long been fixated on the fragility of the human body. In her 2008 sculpture “Heute (Now),” left, on view in Ms. Smith’s Brooklyn Museum show, a coffin in unfinished knotty pine holds meticulous lamp-worked glass dandelions, produced by the glass artist David Willis, sprouting from its interior. (It also represents another thread that has run through her work for decades: an interest in unusual juxtapositions of materials.) Although the date of the work corresponds to the 20th anniversary of her sister’s death, Ms. Smith said she was not conscious of this when she made it; rather, the piece speaks to her fascination with natural-world cycles of death and renewal.”

—NY Times