18 December, 2020 at 8:58 AM
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Long-form Research Essays
by Katie Elizabeth Ligmond Before the Inka were a glimmer in the cosmos, the Wari Empire dominated the Central Andes, spreading out from their capital in the Ayacucho Valley, north through the majority of the modern-day country of Peru, and south toward the contemporary Bolivian border. While today the Inka’s fame eclipses that of the […]
by Rachel Bonner In a portrait from 1793 by the painter Juan de Sáenz, the wealthy New Spanish woman Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide de Icazbalceta occupies an ambiguous space at the center of the composition, poised between a curtained void and an enclosed garden (fig.1). While her extravagant accessories and the imported textile of […]
by Nadia Gribkova In the 1970s, a thin line of blue Scotch tape began its horizontal motion across the interior of Edward Krasiński’s (1925–2004) studio apartment in Warsaw, Poland (fig. 1). It crept across the walls and windows, covered furniture, photographs, paintings, and partition curtains. At times, the line would break—only to reemerge unchanged, faithful […]
by Tyler Rockey The Renaissance artists and antiquarians who descended into the earth and into the ruins of the Domus Aurea, the palace of the first-century Roman emperor Nero, found themselves in a strange space where their present was collapsed with the ancient Roman past and surrounding them was fantastical and bizarre painted decoration. This […]
by Tobah Aukland-Peck A Model of a Devastated Town (1920) (fig. 1) revels in the minutiae of disintegration. The walls of the church in its center are blown out, with its bell tower rising precariously above. Around the church are fallen beams, burned roofs, and dead trees—all meticulously crafted by modelmakers. At London’s Imperial War […]
by Amanda Thompson One of my Cherokee elder aunts tells me baskets are living things. She believes the materials she uses in her weaving give the baskets everlasting life. “When we weave a basket, it is held close to our body so as to impart our spirit into the basket. When you give a basket, […]
by Mingqian Liu Hutongs are narrow alleyways with low-rise constructions lining both sides. These low-rise houses are called Siheyuan, or courtyard houses, a traditional type of vernacular architecture in northern China (fig. 1). Hutong neighborhoods first commonly appeared as an integral part of the capital city’s grid layout during the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368).[1] Dongsi is […]
by Rachel Kase Hendrick Avercamp’s Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, dated about 1608, is typical of the bustling winter scenes for which Dutch artists are known (fig. 1). Current scholarship generally regards such works as illustrations of the extent to which the Dutch enjoyed winter or how the ice leveled class distinctions.[1] The Dutch Golden […]
by Joonsoo (Jason) Park On August 2, 1982, a short article was published in New York Magazine with the ridiculing title, “Neighbors Say ‘Rats!’ to Forest.” The author of the article reported that the local community was complaining about the relatively unkempt, untamed appearance of a small park in Manhattan, and that a neighbor had […]
by Kate Hublou … go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.1 […]