Skull, bone, and skeleton sculptures are now on morbid display in a Delco exhibit

Socrates, supposedly, said philosophy “is about nothing else but dying and being dead.”

Ancient monks kept skulls on their desks to remember their mortality and former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig kept it simple when he sang, “I want your skulls.” I’m right there with them, a lover of horror and collector of skull tattoos who dressed as the “skeleton at the banquet” at Burning Man and generally bummed everyone out I met there.

So when I found out Pennsylvania tattoo artist Michael J. Kelly’s bold skull/skeleton/grim reaper paintings and drawings would be on display at a Delaware County show called “Skulls 2024,” I sped over to the Aston Mills Arts gallery in a reclaimed historic mill to take a quick tour.

The exhibit, which runs through Nov. 3, features skull, bone, and skeleton sculptures, paintings, drawings, and “assemblage.” Veronica Batter, an artist and president of Aston Mills Arts said the holiday season was an impetus for the show.

“Halloween’s obviously a good time to do this,” Batter said in the gallery Tuesday. “There’s a lot of ways people can approach an exhibit like this, whether it’s serious or kind of tongue-in-cheek, like the dancing skeletons. It’s about confronting your own mortality, but you don’t have to do it in a negative way.”

Last year, the gallery hosted an exhibit called “100 Skulls.”

On Friday night, Philadelphia author Josh Hitchens will perform “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” at the gallery, with refreshments. Tickets for that event are $32.64 and available here.

The gallery is free to the public from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and is located at 3100 Mount Rd 2nd floor, Aston, PA 19014.