How has the past year's quarantine affected your professional life?

The Quarantine Question

AJO readers respond to the pandemic in words, sound, and images

On the left, a woman in three-quarters view with crossed wrists holds a roll of toilet paper. She wears a toilet paper headdress and make-up to resemble Bernhard Strigel's Portrait of Martha Thannstetter. On the right is Strigel's actual painting, showing a woman in three-quarters view with crossed wrists holds a scroll. She wears a cloth headdress that covers her hair.

The Art of the COVID Copy

The practice of re-creating masterworks goes viral

The Aesthetics of Torture: Listening to Abu Zubaydah’s Interrogation Drawings

Deciphering testimonials of violence from Guantánamo Bay

Digital collage including a pair of staged, black-and-white, 19th-century photographs of a young Indigenous boy before and after being assimilated at a Canadian residential school. The image is overlaid with contemporary anticolonial writing.

The Art of the Apology: Apathy, Accountability, and the Politics of Redress

Artist Chris Bose underscores the impacts of Canadian settler-colonialism, both past and present

Collage with forty dried rose petals glued to paper with handwritten notes by the artist

Rosa enferma, Together Apart

Kaira M. Cabañas considers our vulnerable yet resilient social relations in a time of pandemic, through the lens of a work by Venezuelan artist Roberto Obregón

Sky Couture: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s BROKER and the Politics of Luxury

David Markus investigates a video work set in a Trump-branded condo and analyzes superluxury living in relation to material culture, consumer desires, and the political inclinations they index

Beyond Survival: Concluding Remarks

Sarah Kanouse brings to a close the Beyond Survival series, which probes the effects of sustained precarity, a diminished funding landscape in the arts, and institutional relations to socio-ecological urgencies

Speculative Futures: Experimental Radical Projects and the Undercommons of Funding

Using Axis Lab—the Chicago-based interdisciplinary arts organization she helped found—as a case study, Patricia Nguyen explores the intricacies of funding and establishing networks of community support

The Cost of Precarity: Contingent Academic Labor in the Gig Economy

Kristen Galvin and Christina M. Spiker discuss the adjunctification of the academy and what has been sacrificed by this new paradigm of the gig economy

Take This Hammer (After Leadbelly): Extended Version

Margo Handwerker and Richard Saxton of the collective M12 Studio offer observations and critiques of the process of applying for and reporting on grants in the United States

Beyond Survival in Art and Art History: Fifteen Futures Already Alive

Amy K. Hamlin offers fifteen propositions for “thinking otherwise”—a text that serves as a kind of imaginary syllabus asking what the future of art history might look like

Category: Texts + Documents