editor’s introduction
by Isabella Dobson
We often tell friends and colleagues to “take care” and sign heartfelt letters “with love,” but rarely do we consider the transgressive potential that love and care hold. In her book, All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks recognizes images that depict love and care as powerful disruptors of the harmful media propagated by systems of domination like racism and the patriarchy.1 By representing tender moments of affection and connection, instead of violence and detachment, images imbued with love push against normative notions of gender, sexuality, race, and class.
This connection between care and its power to resist social norms is alluded to in a ceiling fresco at the Pitti Palace finished in 1589 by Alessandro Allori and his workshop (fig. 1). Standing above the viewer on a fictive balcony, three female figures practice self-care; one washes her hair in a basin, another reaches back to style her auburn mane, and a third runs a comb through her long tresses (fig. 2). Above them, a clothesline hung with drying linens also references the time and care required to wash clothes, a chore necessary for maintaining physical health and beauty. This idyllic scene of leisurely self-care is remarkable considering one contemporary poem’s characterization of the fictional washerwoman La Filippa da Calcara as perpetually available, willing, and even happy to perform the laborious task of washing clothes.2 Additionally, tools for beautification, like combs and mirrors, were often associated with vanity, a negative characteristic ascribed specifically to women.3 Thus, the preening women in Allori’s fresco subvert the expectation that they must constantly work and counteract misogynist ideas about grooming practices through their insistence on self-care. Art historian Jill Burke has suggested that such self-care practices of beautification allowed renaissance women to fight patriarchal oppression, demonstrating how care can be a form of resistance.4
Care as a transgressive and liberatory force has found powerful visual expression not just during the Renaissance, but in other periods and cultures as well. Analyzing art and material culture from the Middle Ages to the present, this issue explores the aesthetics of love and care in all its complexity, with essays on visual manifestations of love, or lack thereof, for colleagues, deities, monuments, cities, romantic partners, identities, communities, and regions. As this issue demonstrates, love can be expressed through warm embraces and fiery words, but it can also be sewn into quilts or purged through paper. Moreover, just like Allori’s washerwomen, this issue’s authors ask us to consider how acts of love and care can challenge traditional readings, values, and social norms.
Focusing on networks of care in 17th-century Netherlands, Annelies Verellen traces how women writers and artists mobilized the imagery and attributes of the goddess Athena to affectionately praise and honor the talents of their fellow female creatives. Verellen argues that early modern European women, in both their visual and written citation of Athena, consciously created a kinship network of female solidarity that fought to legitimize women’s creative endeavors in the 17th century. In expressing love and admiration for their female contemporaries, early modern Dutch women asserted a female alternative to the default male model of genius and creativity.
In her feature essay, Flavie Chantälle Deveaux likewise evidences alternative practices of female agency enacted through care and love. Examining textiles woven, embroidered, and donated by medieval women for use in both private devotional practices and the ritual of Mass, Deveaux interprets the creation and embellishment of textiles as acts of devotion to God. In addition to allowing medieval women to express their spiritual devotion, these carefully crafted textiles were worn by priests, draped over altars, and fashioned into reliquary bags, directly influencing ecclesiastical aesthetics of the Middle Ages.
Sarah Grimes further demonstrates love’s potential to affect visual culture in her essay on Helen Levitt’s photographs of the New York subway system. Taken during a period of financial crisis in the 1970s, when New York City’s subway system was dysfunctional, graffiti-covered, and often perceived as dangerous, Levitt’s photographs nonetheless capture tender moments shared between subway riders. Grimes suggests that this series of photographs constitutes an ode to the subway and New York City itself; they show Levitt’s enduring engagement with and investment in her urban community, even through difficult times.
In her research spotlight, Catherine Lennartz evaluates public reactions to The Embrace, the Boston monument dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. by Hank Willis Thomas. Modelled after an affectionate photograph of King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, The Embrace celebrates the love between the Kings and Coretta’s contributions to her husband’s nonviolent forms of resistance, but it became the subject of public outcry due to its confusing limb junctures and ill-defined goals, according to Lennartz. Despite the community outreach instigated by Thomas and his collaborators, racist and negative online comments about the monument reaffirm the need for continued conversation around how to commemorate the contributions of Black individuals with care.
Sinnae Choi’s visual essay is a record of both healing the wounds of heartbreak and the rediscovery of passionate creativity. Choi begins by detailing how, in the wake of her breakup, she finds refuge in her artistic practice. The salt granules, white pigments, and plastic skins Choi paints with comprise a rich material terrain in which she reclaims the pleasure of artistic expression. For the series of paintings illustrated with her essay, titled Sorry and goodbye, Choi renders fading impressions of her ex-partner, using the act of painting to simultaneously remember and let go of him.
Closing the issue with a discussion of contemporary networks of care, Madeline Drace interviews cross-disciplinary artist and quilter, Aaron McIntosh, about his artistic practice and 2019 installation, Invasive Queer Kudzu. Taught by his grandmother to quilt, McIntosh sees quilting as a way to connect both to multiple generations of his family and to the queer South at large. Formed through community workshops where queer Southerners quilt their own kudzu leaf and inscribe it with a story from their life, Invasive Queer Kudzu is a sprawling visual lineage of queer Southern lives, asserting their presence in a region that has historically suppressed their history and denied their rights. Drace’s interview with McIntosh reveals how archive building and community outreach can be powerful tools of care and resistance.
The resulting issue embraces an expansive definition of care, one that reaffirms the transgressive potential of stitching, sculpting, painting, and photographing with love.
____________________
Isabella Dobson is a PhD candidate at Boston University studying art of the Italian Renaissance. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Laboring Women: Picturing Female Care Workers in Italian Renaissance Childbirth Contexts,” analyzes how renaissance notions of race, class, gender, and domestic work informed depictions of female caregivers on birth trays, maiolica childbirth sets, and in devotional paintings. Previously, she has worked at the Johnson Museum of Art and the Gibson House Museum.
____________________
1. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016), 97.
2. Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Cornell University Press, 2006), 132, 141. The relevant lines of Giulio Cesare Croce’s late-16th century poem read: “And if anyone at all has a need/That I do his or her wash/I am ready and prepared,/And you’ll see how rare I am./My ladies, I am a washerwoman.”
3. Jill Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman (Pegasus Books, 2024), 59-60.
4. Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman, xi. Burke notes that beautification practices gave women an excuse “to spend time away from their often violent and sneering menfolk,” and that they could use them “in creative and subversive ways, as a space for rebellion, self-expression and experimentation.”