Long-form Research Essays
by Darcy Olmstead Nikita Gale’s 2022 installation, entitled END OF SUBJECT, at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker gallery is a wreck. It features a set of enormous bleachers, some bent and smashed, strewn haphazardly across the gallery (fig. 1). Visitors are invited to sit wherever they can, but any position on the cold metal is uncomfortable, […]
by Elizabeth Mangone At the end of the Civil War in 1865, formerly enslaved Black Americans had a burgeoning hope to receive the rights which were promised by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Yet, despite the emancipatory purpose of the Civil War, inequality persisted in legal, cultural, and social spheres. One […]
by Xiaoli Pan A haunted house, an ancient crime, a rationalist skeptic—British politician and writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1803–1873) short story La Maison hantée (The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain, 1859) is the perfect textual source for Odilon Redon’s lithographic accompaniment printed during a period when the artist was working with […]
by Amy DeLaBruere Distant in time and place but connected through the concept of color studies, nineteenth-century British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) both placed the application, modification, and interpretation of color at the center of their artistic methodologies. This bridge between Turner’s painting and Stevens’s poetry establishes shared […]
by Madison Whitaker From Sunday, July 28 to Sunday, August 11, 2013, the exterior of Essex Street, an art gallery in New York City, was closed to visitors (fig. 1). A sun-faded red awning hung above the entrance, signaling not to the space behind the graffitied metal shutters, but instead to the text above: “HUAN […]
by Jake Matthews The world is not only what you make it but how, why, and for whom you make it. For the Karrabing Film Collective, seeing is a generative act in itself. The group was founded in 2013 in the Belyuen community of Australia’s Northern Territory in the wake of heightened policing and incarceration, […]
by Emily Beaulieu As the earliest surviving Christian featherwork of postcolonial New Spain, Mass of Saint Gregory offers an unparalleled site through which to examine an early moment of cultural exchange between the Aztec Empire and Spanish colonialists (fig. 1). Mass of Saint Gregory was made in 1539 for Pope Paul III under the direction […]
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 […]
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 […]