Welcome to After the Art‘s fourth issue!
We hope you enjoy these three essays:
“Hair Art” by Anna Leahy
“Katrina and I” by Ashten Shope
“Points of Reference: I Am Here” by Corinna Cook Continue reading “After the Art – Issue 4”
by Anna Leahy
At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, I am disappointed that I cannot take photographs of the specimens on display. At first, I think it is out of respect for the dead that photography is prohibited, for many of the artifacts are human bodies or body parts. But you can see the Soap Lady, the Hyrtl Skull Collection, and the case of slides of Albert Einstein’s brain on the museum’s website. The museum’s Instagram is brimming with unnerving images. I end up taking notes on the contents of the cabinets. After meandering the permanent collection, which the museum has called “disturbingly informative,” I wander into the room that’s used for temporary exhibits and find Woven Strands: The Art of Human Hairwork, a gathering from private collections of bouquets, wreaths, jewelry, and other keepsakes made of human hair, glass beads, and wire. As opposed to our flesh, our hair doesn’t decay, so hair is good material for sculpture. In the nineteenth century, this type of domestic artwork became a popular form of mourning, a physical part of themselves that women left behind and other women reshaped. Continue reading “Hair Art”
by Ashten Shope
It feels like my body is spinning, barreling toward no destination in particular, as I walk. My thoughts are flung out by the centripetal force of my spin as my sympathetic nervous system takes over and guides my footfalls. I grasp the door handle of the East Carolina University Art Gallery and step inside. On my right are ceramics and resin pieces. My eyes land on two resin vaginas, one red and one gold. I look into their labia as if they are the eyes of great hurricanes. I turn away and look at the piece I came to see; I make landfall. The white curls and swirls and twirls of garbage capture the rhythm of my mind as I stare into the eye of the sculpture Remember Me, Katrina. Continue reading “Katrina and I”
by Corinna Cook
The mountain doesn’t know you’re an expert.
This is how my family reminds each other that life alongside mountains must by necessity be humble. By necessity alert. The tear-shaped island in Alaska on which I grew up has steep, rainforested mountainsides. It has dark, rocky shores. And it has a two-lane bridge to the mainland, where the rest of town is a capital city busy with state politics but rimmed by an icefield so that no road links our community to any other community. Because of this, we have a special responsibility to take care of each other.
Welcome to After the Art‘s third issue!
We hope you enjoy these three essays:
“Certain Imperfection: Revisiting Zetsu No. 8” by Nina Gaby
“Girl on the Beach” by Nora-Lyn Veevers
“The Chapel of Man and All That Endures” by Daryl Farmer Continue reading “After the Art – Issue 3”
by Nina Gaby
Somewhere in the barn I still have the coil-built turquoise vase I made in high school, junior year. By junior year I was already drunk on pilfered vodka or high on cough syrup by homeroom, plotting and planning my escape, creating mayhem in the house so I could get mad and run away. Continue reading “Certain Imperfection: Revisiting Zetsu No. 8”
by Nora-Lyn Veevers
Joaquin Sorolla painted this sun-soaked oil in 1910 on the coast in Valencia, Spain. I discovered Sorolla in the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga, Spain two years ago. I love the luminosity of his paintings. A young girl stands on the shore and looks out; the waves fold in on each other; her body toasts in the heat of the day and her gaze rests on a horizon. Continue reading “Girl on the Beach”
by Daryl Farmer
Bookstores, for me, are sacred spaces and it’s my practice to visit them wherever I go, even in countries where I don’t speak the language. I hold the books in my hands, open them, look at words I don’t understand. In Quito, Ecuador, we – my wife Joan and I – discovered just such a place, connected to a coffee shop half a block from our hotel in the quiet neighborhood where we were staying. The shop owner was very kind, and in him I found a kindred spirit, a fellow lover of books, and astronomy, and travel. I told him we had two days to spend in Quito, and asked what we should see. He pulled a book from the shelf, and handed it to me Continue reading “The Chapel of Man and All That Endures”
by Rebecca Fish Ewan
My first impression of Iceland formed in 1980, my college freshman year, when I learned in geology class that Iceland was the youngest land on Earth. Young in the sense that new ground emerged from a molten womb all day and every day without end. I yearned to visit this infant place. It took thirty-six years to realize this desire and by then I had heard that people lived there too.
To prepare for my trip to Iceland, I bought a map and a small stack of books—The Sagas of Icelanders, Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, Oddný Eir’s Land of Love and Ruins, Eva Heisler’s Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic, Alda Sigmundsdóttir’s The Little Book of Hidden People and The Little Book of Icelandic, as well as the Iceland Pocket Guide. I listened to bits of books read in Icelandic, tried to learn phrases and words, hoping to find an occasion on my travels to say bergmálor sindrandi, words for echo and shimmering that seemed to emerge from the landscape like magma. I was convinced that the best way to get to know a country was through its landscape, literature and language.
Continue reading “Reading Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Poetry After Visiting The Visitors”
After the Art 