As many of us are counting down the days until Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holiday (or just counting down the days until some well-deserved time off), we’ve been decorating, baking, wrapping presents, and more. As we count down the days, I took a look at some more holiday traditions with early modern histories! TheContinue reading “(More) Early Modern Holidays”
Tag Archives: art
Art News Round-Up: November 2022
Stay up to date on the latest news from the art world! This month: more repatriation of Benin Bronzes; art and mental health; Indigenous women artists and a poisoned land; a new book on a remarkable artist who rose from fairground attraction to renowned artist; and how video games are offering new opportunities for historicContinue reading “Art News Round-Up: November 2022”
Duchess of Osuna and Goya’s Witches
Francisco Goya’s paintings of witchcraft are recognizable to many in and out of the art world. The images play upon well-known and accepted tropes of witchcraft; old crones bent over the lifeless bodies of young children, the worship of Satan in the form of a black goat, as well as the witches’ flight. They playContinue reading “Duchess of Osuna and Goya’s Witches”
The Fight Continues: Museum Strike in Philadelphia
In August 2021, I shared a blog post which looked at the increase in museum workers striking and unionizing across the United States. Over a year later, another major museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), is in the news as their workers have gone on strike. After two years of failed union negotiations, workersContinue reading “The Fight Continues: Museum Strike in Philadelphia”
The Portrait of a Monarch
The death of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8th has sparked a world-wide response, a mixture of grief at the loss of a beloved leader contrasted with voices drawing attention to the role the monarch had in the continuation of violence and oppression against the people colonized by the British. There is much that couldContinue reading “The Portrait of a Monarch”
Reframing History: Marie Bashkirtseff
Self-Portrait of Marie Bashkirtseff I recently started reading Jennifer Higgie’s “The Mirror and the Palette” which examines self-portraiture by women artists over the last 500 years. While reading the book, I came across an artist that I was completely unfamiliar with but for a brief period of time was considered one of the most famousContinue reading “Reframing History: Marie Bashkirtseff”
Art News Round-Up – August 2022
Stay up to date on the latest news from the art world! This month’s round-up includes exciting new uses of technology to bring art to life, a huge new photography archive of Black American life, restitution, and protests! British Museum proposes new ‘Parthenon partnership’ with Greece in bid to end deadlock over Marbles – TheContinue reading “Art News Round-Up – August 2022”
Art and the Black Body: The Reckoning of Museums
It is by no means a new revelation that so much of Western art history was built and founded on the backs of Black and enslaved bodies. Whether it is in the way artists and patrons utilized their slaves’ bodies as accessories in paintings, the enslaved labor that provided profit for wealthy slave owners toContinue reading “Art and the Black Body: The Reckoning of Museums”
Reframing History: Anne Seymour Damer, the “Sappho of Sculpture”
When discussing female artists who rejected traditional gender norms, many art historians reference Rosa Bonheur, but before Bonheaur was the so-called “Sappho of Sculpture” Anne Seymour Damer (1748-1828). Damer was an English sculptor, described by English writer, art historian, and politician (and her god-father) Horace Walpole as a “female genius.” In addition to sculpting, sheContinue reading “Reframing History: Anne Seymour Damer, the “Sappho of Sculpture””
Reframing History: Brass Memorial of Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham
On the floor of the side aisle of The Assumption of Blessing Mary and St. Nicholas church in Etchingham, England, a brass from the 1480s commemorating two women buried together may be a reminder of an important and close connection between the two and a rare example of a same-sex relationship in the Early ModernContinue reading “Reframing History: Brass Memorial of Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham”
Renaissance Reframed 