Reports from Researchers Working in the Field, in Archives, and on the Ground
by Mew Lingjun Jiang This report focuses on a single Kannon zushi (観音厨子 or a portable shrine dedicated to a bodhisattva) decorated with karuta (from the Portuguese carta, or patterned playing cards). This piece is located at Nose Kannon Hall (野瀬観音堂 Nose Kannon-dō) in Sannohe, Aomori, Japan (figs. 1-a and 1-b). The study, done remotely […]
by Rosanna Umbach and Amelie Ochs Initiated by Irene Nierhaus and Kathrin Heinz in 2015, Wohnseiten is a research project based at the Mariann Steegmann Institute Art & Gender in cooperation with the University of Bremen, Germany. It has been developed in the Institute’s main research field wohnen+/-ausstellen (“dwelling+/-exhibiting”), which addresses the visualization of the […]
by Manuel van der Veen This brief research report concentrates on the operation of visual superimposition, which today attains an unexpected topicality through the technology of augmented reality (AR). My doctoral research project relates the art-historical procedure of trompe-l’œil to AR.1 Both techniques want to embed images naturally into the real environment, and subtly make the […]
Known collectively by the name of their lead planner and architect, the eighteen Ernst-May-Settlements are residential developments containing almost 15,000 houses and apartments around Frankfurt, Germany (fig. 1). Constructed mainly between 1925 and 1930, they were a response by the recently-elected socialist government of the city to a housing crisis triggered by rapid population growth […]
Plaster sculptures appeared in nineteenth-century homes, studios, museums, and schools, and their use and reception varied in each of these contexts. My dissertation considers the works of two American artists, both of whom worked with and displayed plasters in their studios, and had close ties to the museums displaying plasters to a wider public. To […]
Textiles are thought to be soft objects, saturated with care and memory. Present at our most vulnerable moments, they dab at tears, wipe up messes, swaddle fragile bodies, cover nakedness. The weight of a quilt comforts us, its formal familiarity promises continuity. I investigate the persistence of these textile narratives, their alignment with cultural constructions of femininity, the […]
Three years after opening the innovative galleries devoted to Greek epics, theater, and the symposium, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) debuted another permanent installation of 250 additional objects from its robust collection of antiquities.[1]The spacious gallery, Daily Life in Ancient Greece, prompts visitors to engage with the remarkable material culture of Greek day-to-day […]
Adolf Loos’s 1927 design of a house for Josephine Baker has never been assigned a site because it was never built.[1] Numerous biographies, book chapters, and academic papers acknowledge that Baker lived on Avenue Bugeaud in the sixteenth arrondissement in Paris in the years between 1926 and 1928, but none of these works offers a […]
Women have always been active in the Islamic cultural sphere as patrons of architecture. In the fall of 2016, I began collecting records of Muslim women’s patronage in the Islamic world to document their longstanding involvement.[1] The database covers a broad range of buildings: religious, secular, civic, residential, or some combination of all four. This […]
I relate to David Maljković’s (b. 1973 Yugoslavia, present day Croatia) characters in Scene for a New Heritage (2004-2006), a video trilogy set in the year 2045 about young men—“heritage-seekers”—on a road trip to Vojin Bakić’s 1981 Monument to the Partisans at Petrova Gora. I, too, grew up surrounded by monuments to a repudiated regime—in […]