After Loss, Art Can Help Ease the Pain
Sooner or later, the people we love will die. It’s a universal fact of life.
But exactly how we accept that fact varies from one person to the next.
A new art show, set for Art Week Des Moines, aims to help people come to terms with death and let go of whatever grief might be weighing them down. The artist, Amy Putney Koenig, wants to help folks unpack their emotional baggage and leave it behind.
“It’s beautiful how art can get people to open up,” she said. “That’s what I’m hoping for: an opportunity for people to share their own family stories, their own tragedies.”
The story that Putney Koenig’s paintings, prints and collages tell is a sad one. On a rainy Saturday in May 1968, her aunt Susan died in a car accident on the way back from a Girl Scouts trip to Ledges State Park near Boone. Susan was 11 years old.
Her “death sent my grandparents on a heartbroken mission for justice they would never know,” Putney Koenig said in a video about a 2013 art exhibition she built around similar themes. “My family was changed forever by this darkness.”
The artist was born a year after Susan died, so they never met. But her aunt’s memory cast an unshakable shadow, a story that nobody discussed.
It wasn’t until Putney Koenig received a box of family memorabilia a few years ago that she started to understand what had really happened — and, in the process, to unlock her family’s secrets of depression, addiction and suicide.
She transformed some of those keepsakes into the 2013 show “Shapeshifter: The Art of Family Tragedy and How to Be Amazing Anyway.” It helped her family release some of the sorrow they’d carried for almost half a century. They may never reach full closure, but the artwork helped get close.
Putney Koenig’s mother “loved it so much she was blown away and brought to tears that I would share Susan with the community — her story and the impact her death had on the family 50 years later,” she said. Her older sister was emotional, too, just “walking through the show and taking in the details she had never known about the accident.”
But the artwork also affected complete strangers.
At her upcoming show, on June 28 at her home studio, she’ll invite visitors to write their reflections in a notebook or on sheets of paper she will burn or add to a community collage.
“Everyone has these family stories,” she said. “You can stay and guard them, or you can share them with others to get through it.”
Putney Koenig’s mother passed away last year, and her ashes were placed in the family’s vault in Resthaven Cemetery in West Des Moines. When the artist visited the site, she got special permission to open Susan’s coffin and take a few photos for documentation.
“I had her school work, her baby teeth, audio recordings — but I never dreamed I’d be able to see her in any shape or form,” she said.
Since Susan had taken up so much space in the lives of both Putney Koenig and her mother, the artist said it was moving to finally see her — her youth, her innocence, her frailty — and know she could have been saved if things had gone right that day in 1968.
“To see her was sad and sweet and beautiful and intense,” she said.
Eight photos from the coffin will be displayed in the new show, “A Viewing: Art on Death and Reconciliation,” in a separate space marked by a sign so visitors can choose whether or not to see them. They’re a way to see death for what it is — no more, no less.
The rest of the show picks up where the old one left off, with a mix of prints, photos and collages that portray death in both general and specific ways. An image of a dead bird. A rubbing from a tombstone. A snapshot of a roadside memorial.
“They all tell a story,” Putney Koenig said. “People (who make roadside memorials) may not think of themselves as artists, but they’re creating art and healing. They’re creating a place to take their pain.”
“A Viewing: Art on Death & Reconciliation”
WHEN: 7–10 p.m. Friday, June 28
WHERE: 2730 Moyer St., Des Moines
ADMISSION: Free
Note: Amy Putney Koenig won the recent Arts Marketing Shark Tank, a professional-development event organized by the Iowa Arts Council and Art Week Des Moines. At the event, three artists pitched their Art Week plans to a panel of media and marketing experts who helped them refine their ideas. The other participants were Erica Abell Holland, who pitched “Three Dish Night,” and Robert Moore, who pitched “Wooly’s heART Show.”
— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
