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notes about contributors
Bailey Benson is a doctoral student at Boston University, where she studies the art and architecture of ancient Rome. Her research interests include the role of women in ancient Greece and Rome, the articulation of identity and memory in the ancient world, and the archaeology of the Roman East.
Daniel Healey is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His dissertation is on stylistic retrospection in Roman art and visual culture.
Cortney Anderson Kramer is a second year Art History and Material Culture PhD student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she studies vernacular art-environments.
Christopher Lacroix is a second year MFA student at the University of British Columbia, and has a BFA from Ryerson University. His research and practice investigates queer and gay subject formation and the ways in which these subjectivities are performed. Lacroix is a recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Jeff Paul is a graduate student in the Department of Art History at Columbia University. His research focuses on contemporary art and visual culture with an emphasis on mass media, linguistics, and digital technology. He works at David Zwirner and Artsy, and previously held positions at Artnet, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Adobe.
Jessica Rosenthal is a second year MA student at Williams College, where she studies nineteenth and twentieth-century art, focusing on works on paper. Her interdisciplinary research looks at discourses from art therapy as a way to challenge tropes of art associated with mental illness. She is also the Education Intern at the Clark Art Institute.
Madison Treece is a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on contemporary Chicanx, Latinx, and Latin American visual culture with an emphasis on politics, borderlands, and the colonial body.
Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity
Leighton House Museum, Kensington, London
July 7 - October 29, 2017
At Home in Antiquity presents works by one of Victorian Britain’s most acclaimed classicizing painters, the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), in the home and studio of another—his friend and colleague Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896). As a painter of antiquity, Tadema distinguished himself by depictions of the quiet, quotidian aspects of ancient life. His subjects feast, pine, and loll in meticulously researched domestic interiors or atop breathtaking Mediterranean promontories. The Leighton House is well suited to the show’s domestic emphasis, which argues that “home” was just as integral to Tadema’s working methods as it was to his painted subjects. Tadema, like Leighton, painted from purpose-built London studio-houses, which brought the lives of his whole family into intimate and fertile contact with his work. The exhibition rehabilitates his “Victorians in togas,” revealing them as the compelling personages of his wife Laura, also a painter, and his daughters, whose own artistic endeavors were nurtured by a lively familial enterprise of art-making.[1] Displaying many of Tadema’s greatest works, the show also provides views of his homes, pieces of his furniture, and paintings made by his family and friends.
Editors’ Introduction
In SEQUITUR’s open issue, the articles embody an eclecticism in method and content, highlighting diverse material that, when placed together, speak to one another and facilitate a rich and productive dialogue. By assembling a varied selection of contributions, the open issue presents a broad spectrum of graduate scholarship that draws connections and sparks conversation.
Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
February 3 – August 13, 2017
The Smith College Museum of Art serves as the third and final venue for the exhibition Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis Near Pompeii.[1] Housed in a single, large gallery on the museum’s ground floor, the exhibition hosts a rich collection of over two hundred objects, many of which have never been displayed outside of Italy. The display effectively exhibits the opulent lifestyle of the wealthiest Roman citizens through a collection of rich jewelry, sumptuous marble sculptures, and reconstructions of lavish domestic wall painting.
La Marchande d’Amour : The Commodification of Flesh and Paint
Niçois watercolorist and oil painter, Gustav Adolf Mossa (1883-1971) exaggerated and satirized popular nineteenth-century motifs by coating his compositions with caricature. In turn, his oeuvre is slippery, referencing multiple—even conflicting—styles and tropes especially evident in the watercolor La Marchande d’Amour (1904) (Figure 1). Mossa crowds La Marchande d’Amour with references ranging from classical subjects to stereotypical modern masculine types with a critical and comical wit. His multilayered pastiche satirizes artistic production, comparing it to the commodification of flesh enacted by a Venus-like merchant who butchers and sells female cupids to a sea of waiting male customers. By comparative analysis, I will argue that Mossa’s complex layering of recognizable artistic motifs, including classical iconography and modern types, supports a self-reflexive interpretation of the production and commodification of art as akin to prostitution.
Am I doing this right?
Am I doing this right? (2017) is the result of a near six-hour performance in which I read a year’s worth of journal entries phonetically backwards in a pitiful and misguided attempt to review myself and achieve self-actualization. As my voice grew coarse, I drank water and as I drank water I needed to pee. Dedicated as I was to this fruitless attempt at self-reflection, I stubbornly continued to read my journal, wetting my pants rather than take a break. With a shutter release in hand, I photographed myself each time I released urine, choosing to capture moments of paradox in which my body is in an abject and vulnerable state, yet stable and in control.
The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now
The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
April 7, 2017 – January 28, 2018
In the National Portrait Gallery’s ongoing exhibition, The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now, the first face that you see is your own. Your likeness, dark and indistinct, is reflected through a red and black American flag, hung vertically. The image is displayed on the glass surface of twin pillars that mark both ends of the exhibition’s hallway (Figure 1). The symmetrical layout of the space echoes this mirroring effect: three doorways parallel one another, each threshold marked with the name of the contributing artist whose work the room contains.
EXO EMO
Greene Naftali, New York
June 29 – August 11, 2017
EXO EMO, curated by Antoine Catala and Vera Alemani, gathers thirty-one works by over nineteen artists and collectives, occupying three divided spaces at Greene Naftali as well as the hallway, front office, and even restroom of the gallery. The exhibition’s ambiguous title and the absence of any wall text leaves the viewer with only a cryptic press release for textual guidance. The document is made up of a series of solicitations by the curators for a short sentence or two from each artist about their respective emotional relationship to their work. Collectively, these statements allude to the show’s organizing themes of consumerism, consumption, and commodification. The exhibition itself presents an ambitious, though somewhat disjointed, array of works that “vacillate between horror and humor,” as one contributor attests.[1]
The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts
The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington D.C.
October 22, 2016 – February 20, 2017
In October 2016 the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries unveiled the groundbreaking exhibition The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. As the first display of Qur’ans from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in the United States, this landmark exhibition was effective in introducing the art of the Holy Book of Islam to a wide audience. The exhibition featured more than sixty Qur’ans from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Arab world, showcasing the breadth of Qur’an production and the stylistic variances that existed across the Islamic world.[1] Through the display of an array of Qur’ans embodying various levels of artistry, this exhibition was successful in bringing Islam’s Holy Book to life.[2]
Trashed: Rejection and Recovery in the History of Art and Architecture – The 33rd Annual Boston University Graduate Student Symposium
Trashed: Rejection and Recovery in the History of Art and Architecture – The 33rd Annual Boston University Graduate Student Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture, March 24-25, 2017
This two-day event was generously sponsored by The Boston University Center for the Humanities; the Boston University Department of History of Art & Architecture; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston University Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association; and the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery.
As one of the longest running graduate symposia in the country, the 33rd annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture hosted six graduate scholars who presented papers that explored the processes of rejection and recovery in the history of art, as inspired by the theme “Trashed.” The symposium began on Friday, March 24, at Boston University Art Galleries at the Stone Gallery with a keynote address from Dr. Joanna Grabski, Professor and Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at Denison University. Her talk, “Thinking with Objects: Visibility, Imagination, and the Art of Remaking in Dakar’s Creative Economy,” highlighted the process of recuperation by contemporary Senegalese artists, who draw inspiration from the crowded stalls of Dakar’s Colobane Market. Playing clips from her 2012 documentary, Market Imaginary, Dr. Grabski showed the scale of secondhand goods offered by the famed market, in which vendors rightfully brag that you can find anything from around the world. Previously discarded by consumer societies in America, Asia, and Europe, Colobane’s recycled merchandise finds new life and meaning in the work of Ndary Lô, Viyé Diba, and Cheikh Ndiaye.