Category: feature essays

From Perfume to Smoke: Transforming Salubrious Scents in a Renaissance Perfume Burner

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The Allure of Vision: The Act of Seeing in Albert van Ouwater’s The Raising of Lazarus

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David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and (Other) Worlds Past a “Pre-Invented Existence”

by Gillian Yee When Peter Hujar died from AIDS-related complications on November 26th, 1987, David Wojnarowicz’s first inclination was to photograph his mentor and former lover’s body in excruciating detail. In the chapter “Living Close to the Knives,” from his memoir Close to the Knives, he recounts his experience with Hujar’s death: the rapid decline […]

Echoes of Shamanism: Reimagining Tradition and Chance in South Korea

by Hamin Kim As part of its New Year’s event, Hyundai Artlab commissioned artist Maia Ruth Lee to create a set of symbols predicting fortunes for 2024. This virtual project, titled Glyphoscope 2024, invited participants to select three cards from a set of twenty, each resembling ancient hieroglyphs (fig. 1). The experience, similar to drawing […]

Il Perdono di Gesualdo: Art, Sin, and Salvation

by William Chaudoin Carlo Gesualdo, Conte da Venosa (c. 1566-1614)—composer, murderer, and patron of the arts—commissioned the Florentine painter Giovanni Balducci to create the altarpiece, Il Perdono di Gesualdo (fig. 1), in an attempt to alter his own fate. Gesualdo’s plan of intricate, multidimensional patronage is central to his desire to exercise control over what […]

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

by Gilda Posada Amalia Mesa-Bains was one of the first Chicana artists to work with digital print. I interpret Mesa-Bains’s printmaking process as a contemporary Chicana/o/x amoxtli, or manuscript. Reading Mesa-Bain’s printworks as an amoxtli that holds sacred memory and knowledge speaks to how Chicana/o/x artists like Mesa-Bains are rebuilding and rewriting the sacred books […]

Dangers of Response: “I modi” and its Censorship

by Iakoiehwahtha Patton Erotic imagery comprised a significant portion of artistic production in Renaissance Italy. It is within this cultural context that the reclining nude became an archetype and a contested site where censorship could be enacted. The nude was particularly criticized for its sinfulness, so much that in the late fifteenth century, the Dominican […]

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 […]