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“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

Hair Art Workshop Class: The Victorian Art of Hair Jewellery
With K. B.

14th, 15th, and 16th June 2013 from 1 – 5pm
Ticket price £50

Hair jewellery was an enormously popular form of commemorative art that began in the late 17th century and reached its zenith during the Victorian Era. Hair, either of someone living or deceased, was encased in metal lockers or woven to enshrine the human relic of a loved one. This class will explore a modern take on the genre. The technique of “palette working” or arranging hair in artful swoops and curls will be explored and a variety of ribbons, beads, wire and imagery of mourning iconography will be supplied for potential inclusion. A living or deceased person or pet may be commemorated in this manner. Students are requested to bring with them to class their own hair, fur, or feathers; all other necessary materials will be supplied. Hair can be self-cut, sourced from barber shops or hair salons (who are usually happy to provide you with swept up hair), from beauty supply shops (hair is sold as extensions), or from wig suppliers. Students will leave class with their own piece of hair jewelry and the knowledge to create future projects. Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry is a series which will explore in lectures and a workshop the history of the preservation of human remains for reasons sacred and profane, culminating in the flowering of Victorian hair art mourning jewelry, or jewelry which incorporates the hair of the beloved dead.

Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry is a series which will explore in lectures and a workshop the history of the preservation of human remains for reasons sacred and profane, culminating in the flowering of Victorian hair art mourning jewelry, or jewelry which incorporates the hair of the beloved dead.

Lecture One: “Speaking Reliquaries” and Christian Death Rituals (June 13, 7:00 PM) Lecture Two: The History of the Memento Mori and Death’s Head Iconography (June 14, 7:00 PM) Lecture Three: The Victorian Love Affair with Death and the Art of Mourning Hair Jewelry and Morbid Anatomy Going Away Party (June 17, 7:00 PM)

Workshop: Victorian Hair Jewelry Workshop with Master Jeweler K. B. (June 14, 15 & 16 1 – 5 PM)

K. B.
K. B. is a fine jeweler with over 25 years experience, including several years on staff as a master jeweler at Tiffany & Co. She is a Professor in the Jewelry Design Dept at Fashion Institute of Technology as well as the School of Art & Design at Pratt Institute. She has recently completed her MA in Art History at SUNY Purchase with a thesis entitled “Hairy Secrets; Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry”. In her downtime she enjoys collecting biological specimens, amateur taxidermy and punk rock.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society, please click here to buy tickets

“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

25th June 2013
Doors at 6:30 / Talk begins at 7:00 pm
Ticket price £7 A visiting Italian startled Londoners at the turn of the 19th century by making decapitated animals and executed men open their eyes and move around, as if on the verge of being restored to life. This was not magic but the power of electricity from the newly invented Galvanic trough, or battery. It was also the dawn of the modern neurosciences, as the thrust behind these macabre experiments was to understand the energy that moved through the nerves and linked our wills to our bodies. This talk will discuss a variety of historical instruments from the Science Museum’s collections that figured in these re-animation experiments, including the apparatus used by Galvani himself in his laboratory in Bologna. This will be a partial preview of an upcoming Science Museum exhibition on nerve activity, to open in December 2013.

P. L.
Phil Loring is BPS Curator of Psychology at the Science Museum in London. He has a Master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University and is currently completing his Ph.D. in the History of Science, also from Harvard, with a dissertation on psycho-linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the Second World War. Phil has been at the Science Museum since 2009, and during that time he has been particularly committed to sharing artefacts related to psychology and psychiatry with adult audiences. He’s currently preparing an exhibition on the history of nerves, to open in December 2013.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society at 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP – please click here to buy tickets

“Viva la Muerte: The Mushrooming Cult of Saint Death”
Illustrated lecture and book signing with Andrew Chesnut

10th July 2013
Doors at 6:30 / Talk begins at 7:00 pm
Ticket price £7

The worship of Santa Muerte, a psuedo Catholic saint which takes the form of a personified and clothed lady death, is on the rise and increasingly controversial in Mexico and the United States. Literally translating to “Holy Death” or “Saint Death,” the worship of Santa Muerte–like Day of the Dead–is a popular form of religious expression rooted in a rich syncretism of the beliefs of the native Latin Americans and the colonizing Spanish Catholics. Worshippers of “The Bony Lady” include the very poor, prostitutes, drug dealers, transvestites, prison inmates and others for whom traditional religion has not served, and for whom the possibility of unpredictable and violent death is a very real part of everyday life. In the view of her worshippers, Santa Muerte is simply a branch of Catholicism which takes at its central figure the most powerful of all saints–Saint Death herself, the saint all must, after all, one day answer to.The Catholic Church sees it, however, as, at best, inadvertent devil worship, with the worship of death–and the manifestation of a saint from a concept rather than an individual–as heretical to its core tenants. Tonight, R. Andrew Chesnut, author of “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint” and Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, will detail his research into the history and ongoing development of this fascinating “new religion.” Copies of his book will also be available for sale and signing.

Dr A. C.
Dr. R. A. C. earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. Professor Chesnut’s early work, “Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty” (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, “Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy” (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut’s most recent book is “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint” (Oxford University Press, 2012). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society – please click here to buy tickets

“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

The Astounding Collection of Henry Wellcome: Blythe House Backstage Tour
with Selina Hurley, Assistant Curator of Medicine, The Science Museum This event is limited to only 15 participants and will begin at 15:00.

Ticket price £20

7th June 2013 Henry Wellcome (1853 – 1936)—-early pharmaceutical magnate and man behind the Wellcome Trust, Collection, and Library–was the William Randolph Hearst of the medical collecting world. Upon his death, he had collected over one million objects–many still in unopened crates in far-flung warehouses–related in the broadest sense to the history of medicine. His curators reduced that number by around to around 100,000 keeping only the very best. That collection, possibly the finest medical collection in the world, now resides in Blythe House, kept in trust by The Science Museum on permanent loan from the Wellcome Trust.

Today, a lucky fifteen people will get a rare chance to see this collection, featuring many artifacts of which have never before been on public view, in this backstage tour led Selina Hurley, Assistant Curator of Medicine at The Science Museum.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society – please click here to buy tickets

“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

The History of the Memento Mori and Death’s Head Iconography: Part Two of “Hairy Secrets” Series
Illustrated lecture with Art Historian and Master Jeweler K. B.

14th June 2013
Doors at 6:30 / Talk begins at 7:00 pm
Ticket price £7

In tonight’s lecture–the second in a 3-part series on human relics and Victorian mourning jewelry–master jeweler and art historian Karen Bachmann will explore the development of the memento mori,objects whose very raison d’être is to remind the beholder that they, too, will die. Bachman will trace the symbolism and iconography of the memento mori and death’s head imagery in both Medieval and Renaissance art, focusing on jewelry. She will also discuss the development of the “portable relic” — a wearable form of body part reliquary, will be the focus of this lecture. The importance of hair in contemporaneous art of the period will be addressed, as well as the development of bereavement jewelry with hair. Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry is a series which will explore in lectures and a workshop the history of the preservation of human remains for reasons sacred and profane, culminating in the flowering of Victorian hair art mourning jewelry, or jewelry which incorporates the hair of the beloved dead.

Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry is a series which will explore in lectures and a workshop the history of the preservation of human remains for reasons sacred and profane, culminating in the flowering of Victorian hair art mourning jewelry, or jewelry which incorporates the hair of the beloved dead.

Lecture One: “Speaking Reliquaries” and Christian Death Rituals (June 13, 7:00 PM) Lecture Two: The History of the Memento Mori and Death’s Head Iconography (June 14, 7:00 PM) Lecture Three: The Victorian Love Affair with Death and the Art of Mourning Hair Jewelry and Morbid Anatomy Going Away Party (June 17, 7:00 PM)

Workshop: Victorian Hair Jewelry Workshop with Master Jeweler K. B.  (June 14, 15 & 16 1 – 5 PM)

K. B.
Karen Bachmann is a fine jeweler with over 25 years experience, including several years on staff as a master jeweler at Tiffany & Co. She is a Professor in the Jewelry Design Dept at Fashion Institute of Technology as well as the School of Art & Design at Pratt Institute. She has recently completed her MA in Art History at SUNY Purchase with a thesis entitled “Hairy Secrets; Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry”. In her downtime she enjoys collecting biological specimens, amateur taxidermy and punk rock.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society at – please click here to buy tickets

“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

Vadim Kosmos on Curious Cabarets of the Belle Epoque

Wednesday 11th September 2012
Doors at 6 pm, Show commences at 7 pm

While we may all have seen Eugène Atget’s 1898 famous photograph of Cabaret de L’Enfer’s façade at 53 boulevard de Clichy, with its malevolent maw threatening to devour all who dared to step within its damnable interior. But how did this most macabre of cafés originate and what went on within? Tonight’s talk will illuminate the origins of Fin de Siecle Paris’ craze for morbid drinking dens including L’Enfer’s less well known, but no less sinister, sister establishments; Le Ciel, Neants & Truands.

Born in Istanbul of Ukrainian/French heritage – Screen writer, DJ and authority on French popular culture Vadim Kosmos is the Store manager of the Last Tuesday Society/‘Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors’ and Gallery director for Viktor Wynd Fine Arts.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

 Please click here to buy tickets

Neapolitan Cult of the Dead
with C. A.

10th June 2013
Doors at 6:30 / Talk begins at 7:00 pm
Ticket price £7

.. Naples, the most macabre of cities. Naples, the mouth of Hades. The dead are played with there like big dolls…
—The Necrophiliac – Gabrielle Wittkop

Naples is a unique city in which the sacred and the profane, Catholicism and paganism, beauty and decay blend and contrast in intriguing ways. No practice illustrates this tangle of ideas better than what is known as “The Neapolitan Cult of the Dead” in which devout Catholics–generally poor women–adopt anonymous skulls found in charnel houses and clean, care for, and sometimes house them, offering up prayers and offerings to shorten that soul’s time in purgatory before reaching paradise, where, it is hoped, it will assist its earthbound caretaker with special favors. The macabre artifacts of this cult can be seen in the Cimitero delle Fontanelle (see above) and the crypt of the church of Saint Mary of Purgatory. In tonight’s illustrated lecture, Italian artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio will elucidate this curious and fascinating “Neapolitan Cult of the Dead” and situate it within a the rich death culture and storied history of Naples.

C. A.
C. A. is a visual artist working with video and animation. Her work has included collaborations with performance artists, composers, musicians and writers, and has been shown in a number of venues including national and international film festivals, galleries and site specific events. She also runs The Light & Shadow Salon is a place for artists, writers and audience to meet and share ideas about the past, present and future of the moving image in all its forms.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society – please click here to buy tickets

Music Driving Women Mad: The History of Medical Fears of its Effects on Female Bodies and Minds
Illustrated lecture with Dr. James Kennaway

4th June 2013
Doors at 6:30 / Talk begins at 7:00 pm
Ticket price £7

For many doctors since the eighteenth century, women’s supposedly weak nerves made them especially vulnerable to over-stimulation, which could lead to a variety of complaints from the vapours to neurasthenia. One surprisingly common focus of these concerns was music. Over the past few centuries, countless physicians and writers have asserted that music could cause very serious medical problems for the ‘weaker sex’. Not only could it bring on symptoms of nervousness and hysteria, it could also cause infertility, nymphomania and even something called ‘melosexualism’. This talk will give an outline of this strange debate, using the raciest stories to be found in gynaecological textbooks.

Dr James Kennaway
Dr James Kennaway is a lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He has previously held posts at Stanford University, the University of Vienna and the University of Durham. His book “Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease” was published last summer.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society at – please click here to buy tickets

“It is true, the spoken word enlightens both the spirit and the soul. Indeed, the HENDRICK’S Master Distiller can often be heard talking at length to her ‘two little sweeties’ – the delightful and peculiarly small copper pot stills from which the most unusual gin flows.”

PROFESSOR HEARD’S MOST EXTRAORDINARY MAGIC LANTERN SHOW
with Mervyn Heard First performance begins at 7pm Second performance begins at 9pm Ticket price £10

12th June 2013 Professor Heard is well known to patrons of the Last Tuesday Lecture programme for his sell-out magic lantern entertainments. In this latest assault on the eye he summons up some of the weirdest, most inappropriate and completely baffling examples of lantern imagery, lantern stories and optical effects by special request of Morbid Anatomy. These he will present on a magnificent mahogany and brass magic lantern projector perfectly suited for the purpose.

Mervyn Heard

Mervyn Heard is the author of Phantasmagoria- The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern(2006), was responsible for designing the phantasmagoria instillation for the Tate Britain’s Gothic Nightmare (2006), and has staged bespoke magic lantern performances worldwide in playhouses, cinemas, department stores, museums, tents and dissecting theatres.

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated ‘Morbid Anatomy’ Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks take place at The Last Tuesday Society – please click here to buy tickets