Category: feature essays

Chicana/o/x Spiritual Memories: Layering in the Digital Print Work of Amalia Mesa-Bains

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Dangers of Response: I modi and its Censorship

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Folds: Female Sexuality in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë

by Isabella Dobson Arched back, clenched fist, lowered eyelids, and rumpled bedclothes: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë depicts the mythological heroine in the throes of sexual pleasure (fig. 1). In the original Greek myth, Danaë is locked away by her father after the Oracle foretells that Danaë will give birth to a son who will kill him. […]

Skeuomorphic Textiles: Stitches in Stone

by Tracey Davison This essay considers the ninth-century sarcophagus of St. Alkmund as a skeuomorphic funerary textile and its role in the commemoration and creation of a visible presence of the deceased (fig. 1).1 Now in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery in England, it was unearthed between 1967-68 during the demolition of the nineteenth-century […]

A Piece of the “Gold Blanket”: Gardiner’s Island, Captain William Kidd, and the Gifting of Family History

by Allison Donoghue Hidden away in Sylvester Manor, a seventeenth-century provisions plantation on Shelter Island, NY, lies a frayed scrap of green and yellow fabric only 4 3/8 x 2 ½ inches in size (fig. 1). Made of silk, cotton, and gilded silver thread, this cloth would have once shimmered in the light. The looping […]

Ties That Bind: Hairwork as Family Portrait in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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 […]

Cut With the Tailor Scissors: Hannah Höch’s Textile Designs and the Development of Photomontage

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 […]

The Clown at Midnight: Coulrophobia, Counterculture, and the Decadent Pierrot Mask

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 […]

Performance and Imitation: Sofonisba Anguissola’s “Self Portrait with Madonna and Child”

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 […]

A Fledgling Baroque: Featherworks from New Spain in Counter-Reformation Europe

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 […]