Welcome to After the Art’s seventh issue.
We hope you enjoy these four essays:
“Art in the Age of Amateur Reproduction” by Michael Sheehan
“This Little Map” by Deborah Goodman
“Pilgrims” by Martha Anne Toll
“Voicing the Choir” by Anna Smith
We’ve also started a Facebook page, which you can follow for posts about future issues as well as exhibits, articles, books, essays, and sites that might be of interest. Continue reading “After the Art – Issue 7 – March 2020”
by Michael Sheehan
“It was like / a new knowledge of reality.”
– Wallace Stevens
A few ago I found myself more or less by accident sitting in the cinema-dark of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel of the Menil Collection looking at or meditating on the wall of repeated amateur portraits that is Francis Alys’ Fabiola Project, a massive wall of hundreds of amateur replicas of the same absent original, Jean Jacques Henner’s lost 1885 portrait of Saint Fabiola.
by Deborah Goodman
This little map, modest and spare, shows the small expanse of my hometown, Urbana, Illinois, as it was in 1869. It was drawn by panoramic-map artist Albert Ruger, who helped develop this new form of cartography, producing maps of towns and cities in 22 states. Many of the street names in the Urbana birds-eye view remain the same today.
by Anna Smith
It was twilight when we started rehearsal, but now I can’t see the colors in the stained-glass windows; there’s not enough light in the sky. We’re in the sanctuary of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton. It’s late October, moving into winter.
After the Art 