Unlike many cultures, Americans have very few rituals surrounding death — no monthly remembrances, no festivals. Yet over the course of the pandemic, conversations on mortality have become more and more prevalent in popular media. In 2021’s “Sex and the City” follow-up, “And Just Like That,” a distraught Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) stashes her late husband’s remains among her most prized possessions: her shoes. A subplot of the third season of “Atlanta,” which aired this past spring, finds a pair of characters played by LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz crashing a so-called living funeral ceremony in Amsterdam, where one of them receives grounding life advice from a death doula.
And a new generation seems not only more willing to talk about dying but also to have strong aesthetic opinions about it. This shift is announcing itself most strikingly in the work of several artists and designers who have turned their attention to creating original and unconventional urns. (Cremation is now more common than burial in the United States; the National Funeral Directors Association projects its popularity will rise from under 60 to nearly 80 percent by 2040, driven in part by cost and its marketing as an environmentally friendly alternative.) Although urns have existed for almost as long as humans have practiced cremation as a funeral rite — the oldest known examples, ceremonial pottery pieces from 7000 B.C., were unearthed by archaeologists at Jiahu, an early Neolithic site in China — for most of history, they’ve been buried or put in mausoleums. More recently, however, it’s become increasingly customary to store the ashes of the deceased at home, even if urns have tended to be bland objects to be tucked away rather than displayed.
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In Santa Monica, Calif., Farrington Mortuary recently hired Jennie Jieun Lee, a 49-year-old sculptor from New York, to create a series of experimental funerary vessels. Free-form and vivid, with richly colored glazes, her pottery is informed by the “colors, shapes and movements” that Lee imagined one might want to be surrounded by in one’s final resting place. Sparrow, a funeral home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that opened in 2021 and hosts a regular stand-up comedy show about grieving, partnered with the 44-year-old artist Bari Ziperstein, who lives in Los Angeles, on a range of ceramic urns, including a Y-shaped columnar design with customizable glazes, that people can purchase at its in-house store, where prices vary from $50 to about $2,500. According to Ziperstein, who is the founder of the home goods brand BZippy, expanding the pool of choices gives people a greater sense of control: “The urn is a conduit of memory for the person who keeps it in their home,” she says. “We wanted it to take on a sculptural quality that could potentially be representative of a loved one.”
Some designers are even hoping that their creations might help to speed up the grieving process. The Milan-based design company Urne.RIP, started by the gallerist Vittorio Dapelo, 71, and the independent art consultant Laura Garbarino, 48, has enlisted fine artists to imagine cinerary urns that double as art objects. One series, by the Milan-based duo Diego Perrone and Andrea Sala, who make work together as Ducati Monroe and who are also partners in the Urne.RIP project, offers a minimalist and futuristic approach. Described on their website as a “victory of form over function,” the elegant marble and bronze urns appear to prioritize order over bereavement, serving as objects whose main goal is a seamless incorporation into one’s home décor.
Then there’s John Booth, 38, who was commissioned by Farewill, a direct-to-consumer platform that helps people write wills, handle probate services and order cremations, to produce a small run of ceramic objects that reframe the narrative around death, encouraging conversations about what we want when we die. The London-based fashion illustrator and textile designer’s vibrant urns are patterned with exuberant brushstrokes. “I wanted them to feel joyful and celebratory,” says Booth. “I don’t think art related to death needs to be heavy or morose.”
