In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how the Angolan refugees living in Zambia during the Angolan civil war used their divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. To many people, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of small articles drawn in…[Read more]

Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

Throughout historic developments, the publicly ascertained and published price of an artwork repeatedly served as a reference point for art theoretical discussion. Particular importance was attached to the auction sale price, since this financial evaluation of art was of such a public nature. While there is a long history of these ideas about the…[Read more]

The city of Lucca was never limited to the urban area within the walls. Autumn and winter would be lived in the city palazzo, with life concentrating upon commercial activities enlivened by entertainments such as music and theatre. In spring and summer life was relocated en masse to the villa. This article outlines the essentials of Lucchese…[Read more]

The garden theatre can take many forms: it can erupt forth in an explosion of water and sound as in the teatro d’acqua; it can appear carved into a hedge as a teatro di verzura; or it can calmly wait to be filled with performers as in a teatro avanti il palazzo. The garden theatre was first a feature of the Baroque garden in Italy, before f…[Read more]

The present article seeks to dig into Gustave Doré’s (1832-1883) vision of the Wood of the Suicides from his illustrations of the Divine Comedy (d. 1861), establishing a comparison between its critical reception, the works that have illustrated the chant over the centuries and Doré’s works themselves. A goal here is to glimpse if negative criti…[Read more]

This study tells the story of Architectural Forum magazine during the Time Inc. ownership period, 1932-64. Why and how did this episode in American discursive life come about? What were its failures and successes, lessons, potential legacy? In answering these questions, the author describes the unusual building industry-wide sense of community…[Read more]

This paper studies the creation, circulation, and reception of two groups of photographs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House, both taken by Hedrich Blessing. The first set, produced for a 1951 Architectural Forum magazine cover story, features curtains carefully arranged according to the architect’s preferences; the Museum of…[Read more]

This article invites us to consider the usefulness of iconography as a method to describe the subjects represented in medieval works of art. In this study, a greater emphasis has been put on investigating the epistemological implications resulting from the use of that method, and the biases that may appear in the process of transforming images…[Read more]

A short note describing the difficulties that surround the definition of “art.”

Computational analysis of the potential historical professional networks inferred from surviving print impressions offers novel insight into the evolution of early modern artistic printmaking in Europe. This analysis traces a longue durée print production history that examines the changing ways in which different regional printmaking communities…[Read more]

Computational analysis of the potential historical professional networks inferred from surviving print impressions offers novel insight into the evolution of early modern artistic printmaking in Europe. This analysis traces a longue durée print production history that examines the changing ways in which different regional printmaking communities…[Read more]

These are catalogue entries for the following works: Francisco de Zurbaran, Veronica Veil, from the Sarah Blaffer Campbell Collection Ferdinand Bol, Portrait of Sir John Hebdon, from the Sarah Blaffer Campbell Collection

Companion materials for “Introductory Digital Humanities Curriculum for the High School English Classroom,” also available on Humanities Commons.

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

This talk offers a collection of vignettes that position the relation between life and death as a central but unsolvable question for theorization in art and politics. Indeed, what to think of death in times when, yet again, the end of the world as we know it seems to be near?

This talk offers a collection of vignettes that position the relation between life and death as a central but unsolvable question for theorization in art and politics. Indeed, what to think of death in times when, yet again, the end of the world as we know it seems to be near?

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

This talk offers a collection of vignettes that position the relation between life and death as a central but unsolvable question for theorization in art and politics. Indeed, what to think of death in times when, yet again, the end of the world as we know it seems to be near?