
How can art help with feelings of grief?
Hear from artists, writers, and therapists about what happens when art and grief collide.
Cole Imperi, Emily Price, Arlette Hernandez
Jan 29, 2025
When was the last time you grieved? What is for a person or an animal? A place or a thing? Did you experience grief at the loss of something intangible? These questions are not meant to cause pain. Rather, they offer an opportunity to acknowledge the grief that may be hiding within us—even if it’s been several years since you experienced the loss.
Many artists have used their talents to document, understand, and share their experiences of death, dying, grief, and loss. In this podcast episode, we discuss the work of three of these artists: Kay WalkingStick, Georg Kolbe, and Käthe Kollwitz. We’ll explore how grief entered their lives and how art helped them see it in new ways. We’ll also hear from a somatic therapist and a thanatologist (a person who studies death and grief). Together, they’ll help us make sense of this complex experience that affects our bodies, minds, and spirits, and discuss the role of art in helping us heal.
Cole Imperi: So much artwork that we have in the world is because of grievers. And many times, some of the most beautiful, captivating, emotive work comes from the moments when an artist is processing their own loss.
Kay WalkingStick: My first husband—he died young—so I wanted to memorialize him in a way that I thought he would like. And so I used his shirt in this art. And it’s amazing how little rituals like that help one deal with things.
Agosto Machado: In the piece, people might interpret it as pure sadness or grief. Oh, they’re all dead. They’re not dead. They’re alive. They’re moved on to a greater experience—because I do believe there’s an afterlife. But our shared joy, our happiness, and the exchanges and camaraderie are alive.
Judy Chicago: The painting references two deaths. One, the unresolved death of my father when I was 13, which was something that was never discussed in our family. And then 10 years later, the death of my first husband in an auto accident. I was grappling with grief and the paintings helped me make sense of what I had experienced.
KWS: My goal was to make something that had an immediate way of speaking to people. Art is a visual language. And, before you read anything, you should be able to look at that and say, “Oh my God, I get it.”
Arlette Hernandez: Welcome to MoMA’s Magazine Podcast. My name is Arlette Hernandez and today we’re exploring something artists have been tackling for centuries. Including some of the people you just heard from: Indigenous artist Kay WalkingStick, artist and AIDS activist Agosto Machado, and feminist artist Judy Chicago.

Agosto Machado. Shrine (White). 2022

Kay WalkingStick. Tears. 1990
KWS: My name is Kay WalkingStick, and in Cherokee, that’s Adolanvsdi.
AH: In 1990, WalkingStick made a sculpture called Tears. This was a time when many Indigenous communities were reflecting on the passing of 500 years since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. WalkingStick even wrote a poem, which accompanies the work as a plaque on the sculpture.
KWS: In 1492, we were 20 million. Now we are two million. Where are the generations? Where are the children? Never born.
The piece called Tears, it’s a model of a funerary scaffold. I made the piece myself from natural things. I used deerhide, cowhide, corn husk, turquoise, and some lithic stones. There are black chicken feathers on it. There are some bone beads. But the leather was from a shirt that I made my husband. He died young. And so this is about native people and native grief, but also my own personal grief.
AH: Art seeks to capture the human experience, so it makes sense that many artists use their work to talk about death and grief. And yet...it’s a topic that makes a lot of us feel uncomfortable.
CI: You will hear people say, “Oh, we have such a taboo about death.” But I’d say in America, we actually really don’t have a taboo around death at all. Death shows up in commercials. Death is in a lot of our pop culture songs. It’s in a lot of artwork. What we do have a taboo around, and this is my opinion, is grief.
AH: That’s Cole Imperi.
CI: I’m a thanatologist, an author, a speaker, a researcher, and the founder of the School of American Thanatology.
Thanatology is the study of death, dying, grief, and loss, and it’s an interdisciplinary field. And as a result, most thanatologists are also something else. They’re also researchers or doctors or scientists or psychologists. And this is because thanatology—death, dying, grief, and loss—shows up in basically every human’s life.
AH: I first spoke to Cole in 2023—just a few months after learning about Kay WalkingStick’s work. I was intrigued by the way artists like WalkingStick could bravely confront feelings of grief. Because my first instinct has always been to run away. And honestly, I think many might do the same.
CI: Americans will look at the death, we’ll talk about the death, we’ll talk about how so-and-so died, but the second grief shows up, that’s when everyone gets uncomfortable and we go quiet and we separate ourselves. It’s kind of like what happens when you see a car accident on the side of the road. We all rubberneck—you can’t help it. You slow down and you’re looking to see it. But none of us follow up to see how people are doing three days after the car accident when the reality, the impact of the situation, the impact of the death or the loss has really set in.
But then, if somebody has a chance to actually talk about death, we’ll say, “Oh, passed on.” I will say this one a lot, and I’ll catch myself—I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I lost my sister.” I didn’t lose her. I knew where she was the whole time she was alive, and I knew where she was the whole time she’s dead. I know where she is now. I never lost her. But this language, it’s a reflection where we’re all interested in death, but we can’t talk about it directly.
AH: Most people run away from grief. But not Cole. So I asked how she came to study something that a lot of us have difficulty confronting.
CI: Just because something is painful, messy, and uncomfortable doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Things that are really painful can be valuable, incredibly valuable.
I never wanted to work with death, dying, grief, or loss. But as time went on, different experiences with death, dying, grief, and loss kept being attracted to me like mosquitoes, and eventually you decide that you’re someone that’s just gonna get eaten up by the mosquitoes and you just accept it.
I have grieved multiple times in my life. I have a grandpa who died. I have grandmas who died. I have pets who died, and I also have grieved things where nobody died.
When I was a kid and we moved away from the house that I grew up in, I definitely grieved. Sometimes I experience grief more strongly than some of the other people in my life who have maybe lost the same thing. For me, part of growing up and getting older has been understanding that’s okay and that’s normal.
When I was a kid, I would look at other people and see how they were grieving and try to never be more than they were. But now, as an adult, I realize that your grief is something that you earned. It’s all yours. And just because someone else’s grief looks different than yours, doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you are acknowledging your grief for yourself.

Robert Frank. Sick of Goodby’s. 1978
AH: This idea that grief looks different for everyone is central to Cole’s work. And she wants people to know that you can experience grief even if someone hasn’t died.

Marc Chagall. I and the Village. 1911
CI: I coined the word shadow loss, and I want people to use it. And it’s been the centerpoint of my work and research as a thanatologist for a very long time. I’m interested in it because of how our language fails us.
A shadow loss is the death of something, not someone. A shadow loss is a loss in life, not of life. Some common shadow losses are divorce, friendship ending, getting ghosted, unexpectedly getting fired. Many people experience retirement as a shadow loss. Everyone’s telling them they should be so happy, but yet you’re grieving the loss of an identity.
A lot of the terminology we have related to grief and death comes from clinical environments and it’s designed for clinicians to diagnose you with it. “Ambiguous loss,” “secondary loss,” “disenfranchised grief,” all these things. “Shadow loss” is for us to use to describe our own lived experience.
Language is supposed to help us accurately communicate our own lived experience. That’s what “shadow loss” does, and I think that’s why people are using it around the world. It’s literally filling a gap in our language.
The other thing that shadow loss does is it saves a griever from a tremendous amount of emotional labor. For example, let’s say that I suddenly get fired and I lose my job and I am a wreck and I’m grieving. Many times people have to work to justify how wrecked they are by something. Instead, you could just say, “Me getting fired, that has been a shadow loss for me.”
I just communicated without having to relive a traumatic event. I don’t have to prove myself. I don’t have to give you all kinds of details. I don’t have to reopen the wound. That’s something that’s really exciting for me because I see grievers being supported.
AH: At a time when many are experiencing the loss of things—cherished objects, family photographs, their homes, and even the more intangible things like the comfort found in community—it’s important to have language that can help us communicate the different ways grief enters our lives. But what exactly is grief? And how can we learn to identify it?
CI: From a scientific perspective, grief is a response to loss. And there’s some outdated grief theory that’s still taught today. So if you’ve ever been taught that grief is an emotion, we now know it’s not.
Grief itself is not actually a feeling. You can feel sadness, anger, rage, despair, hopelessness. Those are all emotions, and those can be part of grief. All emotions can be part of grief. We now know that grief actually manifests in each person across six different categories.
The six categories are: physical symptoms, emotional, spiritual, social, cognitive, and behavioral.
Emotions are just a small part of the grief experience, and sometimes I would say that it’s smaller than some of the other categories where you can have more of an impact on your life, like physical symptoms. Something that happens to me when I’m grieving, I will often have really dry lips. Indigestion, heartburn—these are physical symptoms that often accompany grief, but many of us don’t realize that’s what’s happening. Nothing’s wrong with me. That is how my body is experiencing the loss.
Let’s talk about social symptoms. Typically people, when they’re grieving, they’ll usually have a change in their social patterns. They will either want to be around people more and all the time, or the opposite. You will be wrecked with grief and not want to leave the house. So that’s social.
Spiritual symptoms include, typically what we call existential pain. Someone you love dies, and a few days later you are wondering: What is the purpose of life? Why are we even here? Is there a god? How can there be a god that is benevolent if my person has died? These are spiritual conflicts that the loss forces us into confronting.
We also have cognitive symptoms, which is where your brain forgets things, in very simple terms. Leaving your purse at work and you’ve never left your purse at work before. Leaving an entire backpack behind at the grocery store checkout—that is a common example of a cognitive symptom. And now we know, according to modern grief science, that this is absolutely part of it, ‘cause your brain is stressed. Grief is stress. It’s going to have effects on different aspects of your body.
Behavioral. When we’re actively grieving, it’s normal for some of our common behaviors to make shifts. So for example, sleeping patterns is a behavioral shift. You may be an early bird normally, but you’re grieving and you’re not able to go to sleep until three o’clock at night and you wanna sleep in. That’s a behavioral shift.
So when someone grieving, it is a mind, body, spirit experience, truly.

Edvard Munch. Melancholy III (Melankoli III). 1902
AH: Grief is something we experience with our whole bodies. Now, how exactly do we make sense of that experience?

Georg Kolbe. Grief. 1921
CI: The first time that you have a loss is the first time you understand what it means when someone says, “I’m grieving.” You cannot understand grief until you live it. And that’s why many of us use forms of art to express grief or relate to grief differently.
You can’t see grief. But artists help us think about things that are invisible in different ways. So much artwork that we have in the world is because of grievers. And many times, some of the most beautiful, captivating, emotive work comes from the moments when an artist is processing their own loss.
AH: One of the grievers Cole is talking about is Georg Kolbe, a German artist who, in 1921, made a sculpture called Grief or Lamentation.
CI: It feels familiar to me when I look at it. You see a woman dropped down on both of her knees, palms completely outstretched as if she’s pushing away two walls that are crunching her in between.
When I first saw this piece, I immediately had flashbacks to times in my life where I’d gotten really bad news about the loss of someone or something, and I remember just dropping to my knees. Nothing pushed me in real life. Nothing. It’s just the way that my body responded to trying to comprehend the unthinkable.
There’s another aspect of the work that I think is important, and it’s the space around the form. Grief is like that.
When a human experiences a loss, grief is a thing that shows up to support us. So if you look at her drop to her knees, can you imagine grief being the friend that has their arms wrapped under her arms and is wrapping her in a hug as she’s folded over? Perhaps grief is there trying to provide her body a little bit of support in her time of need.
And so I look to that empty space around the form, and it reminds me of the experience of when grief arrives within our own lives. It’s actually there to support us and to help us take the space that we need.
AH: By the time Kolbe had made this sculpture, he had served in World War I and lived through the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918, witnessing countless deaths as a result of both.
CI: There was an exceptional amount of death. When I look at this piece, I see a woman broken down into complete stillness. I think that this is also an experience that’s reflected in our language. That when a death happens, many people say that it feels like time stopped, time stood still. But often the way that artists keep their grief moving is by making art.
AH: Käthe Kollwitz is another artist who made work to keep their grief moving.
Starr Figura: This is an artist working at a time of incredible transformation and transition, a little bit like the time that we’re living through today.
AH: That was MoMA curator Starr Figura, who recently curated an exhibition on Kollwitz’s work.
SF: Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist born in 1867. She was able to go to art school and study art from a young age, and she was really one of the first women to succeed so visibly as an artist. And also one of the first women to put the female point of view forward—to make women active, thinking, resisting, putting real feelings and real actions into motion as opposed to passive or idealized or sexualized.
Grief and death are themes that just carry through her work. There’s a lot of different reasons, but one is sometimes thought to be the fact that when she was a young child, she had a younger brother named Benjamin, and he died. And I think she felt like her mother was never really the same after that. It was something that she carried with her and maybe a certain amount of guilt that she even carried with that.
It also relates to the struggles of the working class in her day. Because Berlin was this rapidly changing city. The population exploded because everybody was moving from the country to the city, and so there was overcrowding and poverty and all of that led to a lot of disease and that led to a really high rate of infant mortality.
Just knowing people who lost their children was something that affected her deeply. So I think those two things came together into that preoccupation. And also just the deep empathy—she was just an incredibly empathetic person.

Käthe Kollwitz. Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind) state VIII/X. 1903
AH: One of her most celebrated works is a portfolio of prints called War, which contains seven woodcuts focusing on the sorrows of those left behind during war: mothers, widows, and children.
SF: World War I marked a turning point for Kollwitz. Part of her wanted to believe that the war was a worthy cause, but after her son died in that war, she became a pacifist.
German women were taught that losing a son was an honorable sacrifice for their country and that they should grieve quietly and privately. But Kollwitz completely turned that around with this statement of resistance, saying we are no longer going to sacrifice our children to the cause of war. She’s also giving an indication of just how many people are grieving because of the war.
AH: There’s a woodcut in Kollwitz’s portfolio that reminds me a lot of Kolbe’s sculpture. It’s called The Parents, and it shows two people dropped onto their knees as if weighed down by something heavy. The figures grip each other tightly, burying their faces into one another until they become a single unit.
This image, like many of the others in Kollwitz’s War portfolio, reveals an important fact about grief.
CI: Loss is something that happens on an individual level, but also happens on a group level. Grief is also a collective experience. Communities carry loss together and then we carry loss by ourselves. It’s important to never forget that even your own individual grief is usually not ever something that you and you alone carry and hold completely by yourself as this isolated thing.
AH: This is something somatic therapist Emily Price noticed about Kollwitz’s work.
Emily Price: Experiencing community really is what we need when we’re managing grief. It’s just this idea of look at that unit, the power and the protection of community. Being able to support each other, that idea of lightening the burden, of holding each other, of everyone knowing loss, or everyone having their own experience of this massive tragedy they’re all going through. This is it. This is what we have.
Something that I recommend for most people who are dealing with grief and loss, is to work on finding other people who’ve experienced it as well, because most people say that being able to talk to someone else who has experienced a loss is incredibly healing. They get it, they get you. You don’t feel so alone.

Käthe Kollwitz. The Parents (Die Eltern), state V/V plate 3 from War (Krieg). 1921–22, published 1923

Melvin Edwards. The Lifted X. 1965
AH: So art doesn’t just help us understand what grief might look like. It can also help us feel less alone in the midst of it. When we see the art of a person experiencing grief, it’s a reminder that there are others out there who understand our pain.
And when it comes to actually making art, that can produce a whole other set of benefits.
CI: When we’re grieving, it’s really important to try to have a connection to it.
We used to teach that when you’re grieving, you need to ignore it. You need to hide it. But now we know that grief is actually something that is there to help us, and sometimes we have to practice learning how to listen to it. And art is a really good way to learn how to listen to our grief.
Something I like to do is I like to ask myself, how can I keep my grief moving? Ask yourself what your grief wants to draw. Ask yourself what your grief wants to sculpt. Try that and see what comes out.
EP: There’s this idea in grief that we need to develop more rituals for recognizing grief, ’cause it’s something that, particularly in Western societies, we just aren’t equipped, or we just haven’t made space for grief. And as a result, we move through it very quickly. But the idea is that we all still are experiencing grief, we’re just holding it and not knowing what to do with it.
Drawing, painting—it’s like a way of accessing memories or emotions in a way that feels a little freer or a little bit less contained, a little bit more open.
AH: And this is what Kay WalkingStick found when making art out of her grief.
KWS: My first husband—he died young. So I wanted to memorialize him. So I used a shirt that I made my husband. He didn’t wear it very often ’cause it was so heavy. It was black cowhide, and it was fitted with a slight flare. He had a super cowboy hat that he wore with it. I used his shirt in this art. And I think part of that was also my own grief. So I wanted to memorialize him in a way that I thought he would like…and he would have liked this. And it’s amazing how little rituals like that help one deal with things.
One of the things that’s done at death in certain tribes is that the women will embroider the soles of the moccasins that the dead wear with beads. So they walk in beauty. This ritual act is very…it’s very healing.
CI: Grief is asking us to be vulnerable, to be a mess, to be a contradiction, and to just be our authentic selves. That’s why grief is so scary. Because it affects our entire body, mind, and spirit, and it forces us to become our authentic selves.
For many of us, we spend so much of our lives trying to be what we think we’re supposed to be—what society, religion, or families have told us, “This is what we expect of you.” Grief comes along and we’re seeing a part of ourselves that we haven’t seen before.
This is why I think many times, huge losses are the catalyst for so many people to finally do what they’ve always wanted to do. Grief is actually this wonderful thing, this wonderful resource or fuel that can push us to become who we’re supposed to be.
AH: But perhaps the most significant thing art can do for our grief is teach us to embrace it. To face it head-on instead of running away.
CI: To anyone that is experiencing grief right now, you might feel like you’re weird or different because you’re grieving and you have people in your life who don’t know what that’s like. You are not weird because of your grief. You are not different because of your grief.
Grievers have produced and made some of the most beautiful artwork, some of the most memorable songs, some of the most beautiful poetry. Entire movies and TV shows have been made by people who lost something and who were grieving, and they used that to put something back into the world that is good.
While it might not feel like it right now, the grief that you’re feeling that maybe makes you feel really different—this grief is here to help you. Grief helps us never forget the people that we love and the things that we love. And that will never ever be taken away from you. So just give it some time, remember that storms don’t last forever, and that your grief is there to help you.

Sky Hopinka. I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become. 2016
AH: Thanks for listening to MoMA’s Magazine Podcast! This episode was produced, edited, and narrated by me, Arlette Hernandez, with guidance from Sara Bodinson, Prue Pfeiffer, Rachael Schwabe, and Joan Horn. Brandi Howell did the mixing and sound design for this episode.
If you enjoyed our interview with Cole Imperi, check out her new book, A Guide to Grief. It’s aimed at young people between the ages of 10 and 14, but the ideas she shares might be useful to people of all ages.
Tune in next month for another episode. And in the meantime, spend some time making friends with your grief. You might find it’s not as scary as you think.
MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Related articles
-
Magazine Podcast
Ten Minutes with Rachel Herz: On Smell
A neuroscientist discusses how smell influences everything from emotions and relationships to identity and wellbeing.
Rachel Herz
Jan 17, 2024
-
Magazine Podcast
Ten Minutes with K. Melchor Hall: On Black Motherhood
Listen to the acclaimed writer talk about Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture Mother and Child, and its connections to rest, intimacy, and reproductive justice.
K. Melchor Hall
May 4, 2022