Editors’ Introduction
In SEQUITUR’s open issue, the articles embody an eclecticism in method and content, highlighting diverse material that, when placed together, speak to one another and facilitate a rich and productive dialogue. By assembling a varied selection of contributions, the open issue presents a broad spectrum of graduate scholarship that draws connections and sparks conversation.
The featured essays reveal how artists employ visual tactics to satirize and critique. Cortney Anderson Kramer unpacks strategies of intermixed motifs and language in Gustav Mossa’s watercolor, La Marchande d’Amour (1904). Kramer argues that Mossa reimagines The Cupid Seller, a famous Pompeiian fresco, in visual terms that marshal the specter of prostitution in a pointed satirical commentary on the exploitation of the female body in service of the commodification of art. In her essay, Madison Treece explores the gendered spaces of Zapatista Embroidery collectives, autonomous territories where Zapatista woman embrace their indigenous values and imagine new futures. Calling on the scholarship of Judith Butler, Treece argues that embroideries produced in these workspaces serve as speech acts whose utterances work towards the dismantling of oppressive global and national systems.
In the visual essay category, Christopher Lacroix’s Am I doing this right? transforms a roughly six-hour performance into the digital format of a .gif. Utilizing SEQUITUR’s online platform, the .gif’s endless repetitions translate the vulnerability of a performance that falsely attempts self-actualization and explores queer identity.
The first two exhibition reviews discuss antiquity in the display of ancient Roman artifacts and the enduring influence of classicism on a nineteenth-century Victorian artist. Bailey Benson reviews the exhibition Leisure and Luxury in the Art of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii at the Smith College Museum of Art. Benson reveals how the exhibition’s rich display of reconstructed villa frescos and luxurious assembly of jewelry expose the ostentatious luxury of elite Roman citizens. In his review of At Home in Antiquity at the Leighton House Museum, Daniel Healey analyzes the assembled work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the artist’s long-held fascination with classical subject matter and ancient life.
Our final two exhibition reviews consider the impact of 9/11 and its aesthetic repercussions. In his review, Jeff Paul writes about the contemporary group show EXO EMO, held at the Greene Naftali gallery space in New York. Paul discusses the exhibition’s themes of consumerism and commodification as well as its use of abject aesthetics in a post-9/11 dialogue. Jessica Rosenthal reviews the National Portrait Gallery’s ongoing exhibition The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now. Rosenthal reflects on the Gallery’s success in presenting a formally varied group of psychological portraits depicting American servicepeople.
The contributions to SEQUITUR’s open issue ultimately coalesce around the concept of openness itself. By placing an exploration of female empowerment, political resistance, and embroidery within an indigenous tribe next to a critique of art’s commodification through classical imagery and prostitution and the physical utilization of one’s body as a site of vulnerability and self-preservation, new connections emerge, and, hopefully, deepen the ways in which various art practices and histories can interact and relate.