“Curated by Teens: Death as a Constant Companion”

The “Death as a Constant Companion” exhibit features paintings by Dutch and Flemish painters that contain symbols or images of death.

Unexpected juxtapositions often make for great art, but in this case, the very name might raise eyebrows and curiosity: “Curated by Teens: Death as a Constant Companion,” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 

As the exhibit says in a text next to one of its works, “Most humans don’t openly discuss death, and the few times we do, it feels uncomfortable.”

If that is true for many adults, it’s even more true for young people. 

“People are very surprised when they find out that high school students curated an exhibition on such a taboo subject,” one of the teen curators told The Bay State Banner. 

As the museum writes in introducing its exhibit, “The works on view convey death in various ways—from the choice of subjects to how artists represent them.” 

The teen-guided exploration of death and decay is in collaboration with the MFA’s Center for Netherlandish Art, so much of the work is from the MFA’s collection of Dutch and Flemish art.

There are still life paintings — which, as writer for The Suffolk Journal put it, gives a feeling of frozen time or stillness. Those include “Vanitas Still Life,” depicting a skull and extinguished candle, and “Still Life with Dead Partridge and Kingfisher.” Death and humans are featured too, such as “Allegorical Subject with Death Holding a Globe” and “Young Man with a Skull.”

Five Boston-area teens curated their exhibit as part of the museum’s Curatorial Study Hall program.
Credit: Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Through its Curatorial Study Hall program, the museum included five Boston-area high school students in 2023-2024 school year. The idea behind that program is to get young teens involved in the creation, interpretation and design of art and exhibits. Christopher Atkins of the Center for Netherlandish Art said that too often museum programs are too academic: In an interview with Boston University’s Daily Free Press, Atkins said, “If we want to inspire the next generation, maybe we should actually talk to that generation and meet them where they are.”

And inspired they were: It was the students who arrived at death and decay after viewing the Netherlandish Art collection during a brainstorming session. One student curator said, “We were looking at our pictures and we’re like, ‘Wow, we see death. …Why don’t we just make an exhibition about death.’”

The Harvard Crimson says of the exhibition that it “presents death as an integral, unchanging aspect of the human experience. The teen curators bring a fresh perspective to this age-old subject, using art to explore their understanding of life’s impermanence.”

The exhibition continues through November.