From the earliest known artworks to the practices of the present, themes of survival and persistence mark important terrain for artists and art historians. Art can confront the finality of death but also challenge that finality, carrying traces of individual and cultural life from generation to generation. Art can exhume and reanimate histories and cultures presumed dead. Some art finds its life in its own dissolution or finds its place in history erased; other work becomes itself in the museum collection or the archive, where its preservation can make – or manipulate – the stories told about worlds past. As art historians, material culturists, archaeologists and artists, we turn to surviving objects of culture to make sense of the world as it was, is, and can be.

From the earliest known artworks to the practices of the present, themes of survival and persistence mark important terrain for artists and art historians. Art can confront the finality of death but also challenge that finality, carrying traces of individual and cultural life from generation to generation. Art can exhume and reanimate histories and cultures presumed dead. Some art finds its life in its own dissolution or finds its place in history erased; other work becomes itself in the museum collection or the archive, where its preservation can make – or manipulate – the stories told about worlds past. As art historians, material culturists, archaeologists and artists, we turn to surviving objects of culture to make sense of the world as it was, is, and can be.