‘Cursed Images’ in the UMMA Collection To Get You Ready for Halloween

When you hear “cursed images,” you might think of “culinary abominations, nail art fails, creepy costumes, and NSFW optical illusions.” 

Though you can definitely find a few objects like that in our online Take Your Pick: Collecting Found Photographs exhibition, we’re using the phrase a bit loosely here. In the lead up to Halloween, we wanted to share a few images from UMMA’s collection that fit the spirit of the season.

Skeletons? Of course. Graveyards? Got a few. A Mayan God of Death hanging next to a painting made with splattered pig’s blood? Well... that’s currently on view in our historic entryway. 

Ah Puch, Guillermo Meza

Guillermo Meza painted this ominous, threatening image of Ah Puch, a Mayan God of Death, in 1949. The skeleton-like being is generally pictured as a human with an owl’s head, but Meza’s depiction reflects the role the skeleton mask plays as a powerful symbol in Mexican culture while also invoking the fear and violence of the ancient world.

You can view this piece on the first floor of UMMA’s Alumni Memorial Hall in the Lizzie and Jonathan Tische Apse. (And yes, that Jordan Eagles painting it’s hanging next to is made of actual pig’s blood.) 

Read more about this artist and image

Guillermo Meza, Ah Puch, 1949, oil on canvas. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Museum purchase, 1958/1.102. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City

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The Underworld, Ann McCoy

McCoy claims that her underworld series, of which this chaotic lithograph is a part, was inspired by a dream she had in which she visited the underworld land of a medieval cult, the Bogomils, who believed the world was actually created by the devil. As reflected in this work, McCoy dreamt of this world full of bizarre complexes and corpses.

For her, underwater worlds and the classical underworld often meld into one, thus bringing together the images of sea creatures, demons, and the galaxies.

Read more about this artist and image

Ann McCoy, The Underworld, 1980, hand colored lithograph on paper. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Professor and Mrs. Edward J. Mitchell, 1981/2.176. 

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Death Carrying a Child in His Arms, Stefano della Bella

This piece is the second in Della Bella’s “Five Deaths Series,” all of which are set in Paris’s Cimetière des Innocents. In each image, the “sanitized, or ‘boiled bones’” (as one curator called him) character of Death carries someone off. Della Bella saw “death’s presence as one that interrupts life’s pleasures without warning” – which is fitting, as he died before completing two of the pieces in this series.

Read more about this artist and image.

Stefano della Bella, Death Carrying a Child in His Arms, No. 2 of the Five Deaths series, ca. 1648, etching and engraving on paper. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Jean Paul Slusser, 1963/2.47

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Cemetery Gates, George A. Tice

California’s hottest ghost town is Bodie. This place has everything: abandoned brothels and opium dens, a toddler who started a catastrophic fire, curses put on visitors who take anything as a souvenir, you name it! Early in his career, George A. Tice visited Bodie to take a series of photographs (many of which you can see by searching his name in our collections database). 

This one depicts a dramatic silhouette of the Bodie cemetery’s gates (full of tragic figures, of course) against a stormy sky. As one curator wrote, Bodie “invites reflection on the frailty of human ambition”–and what’s more cursed than that? 

Read more about this artist and image.

George A. Tice, Cemetery Gates, 1965; printed 1971, gelatin silver print on paper. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of the Marvin Felheim Collection, 1983/1.295.12

Untitled (Child in Graveyard), Bruce Davidson

“There’s a lyrical beauty to it with the children playing in the cemetery," photographer Bruce Davidson once said of his time spent in Wales. This image is expertly composed, with the girl’s white collar echoing the white curve of the headstone above her, and the drab, stoic chimneys in the background poking up like headstones do in tall grass. But also, standing on a grave like this seems like a good way to get possessed.

Read more about this artist and image

Bruce Davidson, Untitled (Child in Graveyard), from “Welsh Miners”, 1981, gelatin silver print on paper. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas M. Kenyon, 1983/2.243.9