Long-form Research Essays
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 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 […]
by Francesca Soriano Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits (fig. 1), a sculptural installation made from glass, metal, and liquid by the Cuban-American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, is designed to evoke memories of the Cuban sugar and rum industries. When it was exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2016, […]
by Kristina Bivona Section One The Crusher I went to the exhibition alone, as I usually do. I had to wiggle my way through a gallery filled with work I really wanted to care about but hardly could. See, I am deeply informed by my time as a sex worker and smothering my way through […]
by Kristina Centore In 1952, tensions that had long been implicit within Egypt’s complex colonial power structures were brought to the fore. The 23 July Revolution of 1952, which led to the political rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, succeeded in both overthrowing the British occupation that had been in place in Egypt since 1882 and […]
Are we human? With the aim of observing the invention of the “human” category in historical layers, the Third İstanbul Design Biennial (2016) regarded the simple yet bizarre question as simultaneously urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, curators of the Biennial, conducted an archeological excavation that extends from the smallest subatomic level to […]