Long-form Research Essays
by Victoria Kenyon The hairwork album is six by four inches, unassuming, its white pages bound in brown paper and tied with black ribbon. Yet, the objects within it are powerful beyond their scale. They are portraits, but not in the traditional sense of the term; each one is made of human hair, ranging in […]
by Iris Giannakopoulou Hannah Höch (1889–1978) is best known for her participation in the Berlin Dada movement and her pioneering works of photomontage, collages made mostly or entirely from photographic reproductions. Her piece Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, exhibited in the First International Dada Fair […]
by Samuel Love Writing Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (1999), an apocalyptic account of twentieth-century Western culture, Mark Dery was sure of one thing: “all the world hates a clown.”1 In Dery’s eyes, the clown persistently haunted the waning century, resulting in the appearance of the term “coulrophobia”—an uncontrollable fear of clowns in popular discourse. The association between clowns […]
by Emma Lazerson Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) has been lauded as one of the most prolific portrait painters of the early modern period, but her devotional images have been largely understudied. This essay examines her Self-Portrait with Madonna and Child, a painting showcasing both Sofonisba’s style and that of other artists as a form of emulative […]
by Rachel Kline Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish clergy and nobility acquired hundreds of featherworks crafted by the Indigenous artists of New Spain, which arrived on merchant ships in major European port cities from Antwerp to Seville. The artistic tradition of featherwork, or amantecayotl, among the Mexica people of New Spain predated the conquest of […]
by Rowan Murry In 1922, news of Howard Carter’s rediscovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb took the world by storm. In February 1923, excavators reburied and secured the tomb while archaeologists catalogued their findings and made plans for the next excavation season. It was around this time that the excavation’s financier, who had been present at […]
by Madeline Porsella “The modernization process is complete, and nature is gone for good.” – Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) When the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (Buttes-Chaumont Park) opened in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle on April 1, 1867, the city of Paris was in the midst of a legendary […]
by Darcy Olmstead Nikita Gale’s 2022 installation, entitled END OF SUBJECT, at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker gallery is a wreck. It features a set of enormous bleachers, some bent and smashed, strewn haphazardly across the gallery (fig. 1). Visitors are invited to sit wherever they can, but any position on the cold metal is uncomfortable, […]
by Elizabeth Mangone At the end of the Civil War in 1865, formerly enslaved Black Americans had a burgeoning hope to receive the rights which were promised by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Yet, despite the emancipatory purpose of the Civil War, inequality persisted in legal, cultural, and social spheres. One […]
by Xiaoli Pan A haunted house, an ancient crime, a rationalist skeptic—British politician and writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1803–1873) short story La Maison hantée (The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain, 1859) is the perfect textual source for Odilon Redon’s lithographic accompaniment printed during a period when the artist was working with […]