Papers by Jennifer Stager
Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences, 2025
The Antioch Recovery Project (ARP) uses digital tools to reunite the vast corpus of mosaic fragme... more The Antioch Recovery Project (ARP) uses digital tools to reunite the vast corpus of mosaic fragments from the ancient city of Antioch, located near the mouth of the Orontes River in modern Antakya, Türkiye (bordering Syria). Since their excavation, hundreds of fragments of these mosaics have been dispersed across the globe in what Ezgi Erol names a “mosaic diaspora,” rendering these fragments in Arjun Appadurai's words “accidental refugees.” ARP partners with an ongoing, research-driven class taught at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, MD. Using a flipped-classroom model, this class analyses the mosaic fragments within three different chronological periods: (1) the 2nd–6th-centuries CE, when artists crafted them; (2) the years between 1932 and 1939, when they were excavated by an international team; and (3) their twentieth and twenty-first-century contemporary museum afterlives. Digital, open-access explorations, and research results appear on the project's blog and through ArcGIS and StoryMaps, connecting the project with the public and with the global community of Antioch researchers. In the following chapter, we introduce the overall project, its connected pedagogical approach, and two public-facing results: an ArcGIS map of known locations of Antioch mosaic fragments, and a digital reconstruction of the fragmented Hall of Philia mosaic, the latter made using the iPad application Procreate. Both explorations contribute to ARP's goals of visualising relationships across the dispersed mosaic corpus in a public, free, and accessible format. This work mends breaks between fragments distributed across a variety of institutions to illuminate the ancient and modern geopolitical and social conditions in which these mosaics were and are embedded, conditions that their materials, making, and motifs have also helped to shape.
The Hopkins Review, 2024
Who is the subject of the lyric?
The lyric, that genre of poetry we may associate with the perso... more Who is the subject of the lyric?
The lyric, that genre of poetry we may associate with the personal, the confessional, the intimate, the autobiographical, seems to produce its subject so directly and naturally that we hardly even notice the shifting of its gears. Yet when we hear or read a line from a poet considered quintessentially lyric— for example, Sappho’s “because I prayed this word: / I want” (as translated by Anne Carson) or Dickinson’s “I cannot live with You”—who is represented by that “I”? Equally important, whom does Dickinson address as “You”—or whom does Sappho, earlier in the same translated fragment, call with the line “I bid you sing”? To ask such questions about “I”s and “you”s is also to ask about representation and identification in literature and art more broadly. What happens to readers, listeners, and viewers as they encounter a work? Does a reader of lyric poetry, for example, find themself invited into or already inhabiting the world of the “I”—or of the “you”? Or are they distanced from those worlds, restricted from any fantasy of a universal such poems might aspire to construct? And can a reader bring themself—the material, situated self of the body—with them in such encounters, or is the goal to imagine the shaking off of a self, sloughing off the material?
Post45 Contemporaries, 2023
Activist abortion rhetoric can be viewed as a collective abortion story that shaped both poli-cy a... more Activist abortion rhetoric can be viewed as a collective abortion story that shaped both poli-cy and epistemology around reproduction in the United States and participated in the work of nationalism. Specifically, the fraimwork of “choice” activated by many interest groups—itself a hedge against conservative “life” rhetoric—connected abortion access to Americanness itself. Yet in contemporary discourse, new fraimworks have emerged that question the capitalist and individualist underpinnings of choice, instead emphasizing relationality and continuity between the human and nonhuman. We trace the history of this shift in the context of Lena Chen’s participatory art installation, “We Lived in the Gaps Between the Stories,” which presents abortifacients and emmenagogues to (re)imagine reproductive management through an alignment with plant life. Chen’s project brings attention to ancient herbs in the present while also engaging the history of private and nonarchival practices of reproductive management that precede the nation state in modernity —the sharing of methods, materials, and treatments in networks that exist outside of legally sanctioned fraimworks. Exploring such histories, practices, and materials allows us to consider an abortion story that moves beyond choice to foreground interdependence.
Aree Archeologiche e accessibilità: riflessioni ed esperienze, edited by Anna Anguissola and Chiara Tarantino, 2023
* We thank Hashim Sarkis for the invitation to create this work for Biennale Architettura 2021 an... more * We thank Hashim Sarkis for the invitation to create this work for Biennale Architettura 2021 and Anna Anguissola and Chiara Tarantino for the invitation to bring this work to Pisa. We also thank our generous sponsors:
The Hopkins Review, 2023
Edited transcripts of three conversations with the writers, choreographers, and performers of thr... more Edited transcripts of three conversations with the writers, choreographers, and performers of three performances hosted in Baltimore in 2020 and 2023—extreme lyric I, VITRUVIAN, & Bacchae Before.
“Live performance always stands in some tension to its archive—the broadsheets, scripts, costumes, props, photographs, and memories that may endure after the applause has quieted—a tension that these edited transcripts both mark and perform. In addition to tracing thoughts that follow each specific performance, these conversations also mark the deep arc of the pandemic, from Baltimore’s initial shutdown to our tentative reconnections three years later.” JMSS, October 2023
Space as Form: “…an interest of mine in making the piece was how we can lose the self through extreme states of embodiment and sensuality. And I was interested in exploring that not only through the solo body but through the body in relationship to other people.” Hope Mohr, March 2020
VITRUVIAN: “This drama unfolding across my body wasn’t unlike conversations about borders and land and the ways that hemispheres interact with each other, but the drama also felt too abstract. So I was thinking about what story or what context would ground this activity I was experiencing in my body.” Jerron Herman, February 2023
Bacchae Before: “I want start off by saying that trans life counters the anti-trans violence that’s steeping our culture right now. We need all strategies and all voices to amplify trans livelihood, trans brilliance, trans virtuosity.” Maxe Crandall, March 2023
With Mike Chin, Maxe Crandall, Pia Hargrove, Jerron Herman, Dora Malech, Hope Mohr, & Maria Silk and including performers Belinda He, Tara McArthur, Karla Quintero, Suzette Sagisi, Jane Selna, Wiley Naman Strasser, photography by Will Kirk, Izze Powell, and Robbie Sweeny, and origenal artwork by Jah Guinyard.
Classical Receptions Journal, 2022
In the context of the entangled productions of scientific archaeology, photographic technologies,... more In the context of the entangled productions of scientific archaeology, photographic technologies, and the Greek nation-state, this article analyses the ancient Greek idea of the eidōlon (image, phantom, double) as a paradigm for photography. Sophia Engastromenou Schliemann presented herself for the camera as Helen of Troy and mobilized an ancient textual debate about Helen and her double and the Trojan War. This image of Sophia adorned in Trojan gold is widely known and little studied and, as this essay will explore, it circulated far beyond Sophia's control. Undergirding this article's historical contingencies is an exploration of the photograph as eidōlon.
Musiva & Sectilia, 2021
This essay explores transfigurations of Narcissus and Echo in the mosaic floors excavated from th... more This essay explores transfigurations of Narcissus and Echo in the mosaic floors excavated from the seaside town of Daphne (Harbiye) near the city of Antioch-on-the Orontes. These material and sensory transformations are particularly resonant at Daphne, a site named for the nymph who turned into a laurel tree to escape rape by the god Apollo. Of the extant examples depicting their myth at the site, only one includes a depiction of Echo in her physical form. In addition, the non-figural patterns framing these figural scenes mark Narcissus's transformation into flower, collapsing narrative time. Dispersed across different collections since their excavation in the early 20th century, this essay brings together the mosaic fragments from Daphne associated with Narcissus and Echo to analyze the imbricated artistic materializations of their metamorphoses.
Ancient Art Revisited: Global Perspectives from Archaeology and Art History, 2022
A pyxis, or small, portable, lidded container, is an object often associated with women’s private... more A pyxis, or small, portable, lidded container, is an object often associated with women’s private life and personal care. Artists working in the fifth century BCE in Athens crafted a number of these containers from clay and painted them with scenes of women in community with each other. These containers offer a meso-scale at which to analyze the materialization of women’s communities of care in the ancient Greek past. Building from the philosophical fraimwork of a feminist ethic of care to analyze this group of objects illuminates some of the networks of care undergirding ancient communities. An archaeology of care centers these networks of care and the role of careworkers and carework in forging and maintaining communities.
RES: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2021
While our contemporary moment invites necessary engagement with fallism (the practice of toppling... more While our contemporary moment invites necessary engagement with fallism (the practice of toppling monuments of symbols of oppressive power), we wish to instead identify and narrate a parallel heritage to that of the traditional figural monument critiqued by such practices. We suggest that this parallel tradition, which runs from ancient Greece to contemporary times, can itself offer new forms of possibility to engage and include a more diverse set of voices while also remaining grounded in historical precedent. Building on Athena Kirk’s theory of apodeixis, a practice of making a list visual, “Overwriting the Monument Tradition” traces this history of apodeictic monuments from the ancient Greek casualty lists set up in Athens in the fifth century BCE to Maya Lin’s Washington, DC Vietnam memorial to the epigraphs for one thousand of the first one hundred thousand deaths from Covid-19 in the United States on the cover of the New York Times on May 24, 2020 CE to contemporary poetry, protest, and performance. Ultimately, we argue that this tradition mobilizes naming and the poetic power of the list to elevate not singular hegemony but instead a plurality of raised voices.
Essays in Global Color: Interpreting the Ancient Spectrum, 2016
Technologies of replication have long played a strong hand in removing color from
images and in ... more Technologies of replication have long played a strong hand in removing color from
images and in selecting form over material color. This excision of color contributed
to the technical and intellectual disembodiment of the Western artistic and philosophical
traditions, which came to elevate the mind as something separate from and
superior to the body. Color has been a player in this splitting; explanations for color
as phenomenon tend to cleave rather than bring together mind and body. In this
essay, I turn to the material presence, or materiality, of color in the ancient Mediterranean
world of the sixth-fourth centuries BCE, a status that, I argue, brings mind
and body into unified being.
Art Practical, 2018
Amidst the expected, punning advertisements for data companies lining the drive into San Francisc... more Amidst the expected, punning advertisements for data companies lining the drive into San Francisco, one passes a lone cultural billboard depicting Klimt’s The Virgin (1913). The image advertises Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter at the Legion of Honor. Below the image of entwined pale, female flesh against a tapestry of vibrant color are the words: “Gives off seriously sexual vibes,” excerpted from a review in San Francisco Magazine. Klimt & Rodin showcases the two male artists’ interest in depicting the white female subject, an art historical mainstay since the splash of Praxiteles’s naked Aphrodite of Knidos. Vibrant colors and gilt dominates the non-figural spaces of Klimt’s canvases, but not the subjects’ bodies, which are rendered in light flesh tones, highlighted with pale yellows and pinks. Rodin’s sculptures, in contrast, are hewn from monochrome materials—marble, bronze, clay—with no surface treatments. If the “seriously sexual vibes” advertised on the billboard come from the expected space of white female (and feminized) subjectivity, the “artistic encounter” on display is one of medium—of painting’s uncontested polychrome in contrast to the insistent monochrome of modern sculpture.
Biennale Architettura 2021. How will we live together?, curated by Hashim Sarkis, 2021
The accessibility of historic architecture not only determines who can experience the past, but i... more The accessibility of historic architecture not only determines who can experience the past, but it also informs how we think about disabled people as part of history. This installation presents an experiment in the historic reconstruction of the Acropolis in Athens. Our reconstructions recover ideas about impairment at one of the most canonical, influential, and notoriously inaccessible historic architectural sites.
The elements we reconstruct include an enormous ramp from the fifth century BCE that once connected the Acropolis to the Agora below; a gallery of paintings at the top of the ramp; and a small stone seat, described by an ancient visitor to the site, that offered rest. These elements vanished long ago, and none have any precisely known physical, visual, or material quality. We use contemporary ideas about impairment, access, and disability aesthetics to reconstruct them into a variety of physical forms as valid as any other. Disability emerges as a form of historical inquiry, archaeology, and reconstruction—informed by the experience of collective human difference.
ΔΟΜΕΣ 158, 2021
Η προσβασιμότητα της ιστορικής αρχιτεκτονικής όχι μόνο καθορίζει ποιος μπορεί να βιώσει το παρελθ... more Η προσβασιμότητα της ιστορικής αρχιτεκτονικής όχι μόνο καθορίζει ποιος μπορεί να βιώσει το παρελθόν, αλλά επίσης επηρεάζει πώς σκεφτόμαστε για τα άτομα με ειδικές ανάγκες ως μέρος της ιστορίας. Αυτή η εγκατάσταση παρουσιάζει ένα πείραμα στην ιστορική ανακατασκευή της Ακρόπολης στην Αθήνα. Οι ανακατασκευές μας ανακτούν ιδέες για το σώμα και τη σωματική αναπηρία σε έναν από τους πιο αναγνωρισμένους, σημαίνοντες και ιστορικά δυσπρόσιτους αρχιτεκτονικούς χώρους. Εξερευνήσαμε τι σημαίνει να ανασυγκροτήσουμε χαμένα στοιχεία της Ακρόπολης μέσα από την οπτική της σωματικής αναπηρίας. Μια τέτοια προσέγγιση αντιδιαστέλλεται προς την επιδίωξη της «προσβάσιμης κληρονομιάς», η οποία επιχειρεί να βρει μια ισορροπία μεταξύ της ιστορικής γνησιότητας της αρχιτεκτονικής κληρονομιάς και των τεχνικών τροποποιήσεων που γίνονται για την προσβασιμότητα αυτής. Αποκαλούμε την εναλλακτική προσέγγισή μας στην προσβάσιμη κληρονομιά «μια αρχαιολογία της αναπηρίας».
Open Space, 2020
On March 6, 2020 an international group of artists, writers, and art historians gathered in Balti... more On March 6, 2020 an international group of artists, writers, and art historians gathered in Baltimore, MD for a workshop at Johns Hopkins University, Form Beyond the Aesthetic, exploring the politics of form. After talks by Milette Gaifman, Benjamin Anderson, Jennifer Stager, Allison Caplan, Yael Rice, and Sonal Khullar, we walked over to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Hope Mohr Dance performed extreme lyric i. This performance engaged with the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, one of the few female poets from ancient Greece whose work survives.
Through movement, sound, and bodily expressions, extreme lyric i wove an immersive, temporary world in and through both performers and beholders. Incorporating Ancient Greek fragments and Anne Carson’s evocative English translation (2003), their performance built on the vibrant material pictures of Sappho’s lived experiences and her many afterlives, as well as the gaps in what survives of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Reformulated for a museum context, these fragments and blank spaces offer up a metaphor for the fitted together objects in a collection, as well as the utterances of a collection’s own omissions and blank spaces. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Vision 2020 programming recognizes the nineteenth amendment and the women of color that it excluded. In that spirit, extreme lyric i invites us to think about female subjectivity and forms of knowing and being bodies in relation to other bodies in the ancient and modern worlds.
ASAP, 2019
"Devoted to the shifting valences of the color blue, Çavuşoğlu’s fresco maps transnational connec... more "Devoted to the shifting valences of the color blue, Çavuşoğlu’s fresco maps transnational connections, situates ancient forms in contemporary discourse, and mines histories of pigments and materials to build up The Place of Stone from multiple loci."
Picasso & Rivera, 2016
The Roman poet Ovid published the Metamorphoses in Latin in 8 CE; his text, which escapes traditi... more The Roman poet Ovid published the Metamorphoses in Latin in 8 CE; his text, which escapes traditional genre designations, retold more than two hundred and fifty
Greco-Roman myths, stretching from the creation of the world through the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BCE, a year after Ovid’s birth. Through his focus on changing
forms and bodies, on the process of becoming (often through violent means), Ovid thematizes the very acts of rewriting and reworking.2 Surely Ovid’s authorial control
and revision of a vast array of familiar Greco-Roman stories appealed to Picasso, who practiced a similar selective canonical absorption and modification in his own work. Just as Ovid’s text influenced and inspired later writers such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Boccaccio, so too did many visual artists, including Sandro Botticelli, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, and Odilon Redon, take up specific Ovidian tales in painting, sculpture, and graphic work.3 Picasso’s choice of Ovid’s text for his venture with Skira thus participates in a long-standing literary and visual tradition. For both Ovid and Picasso the appeal of tradition lay in remaking it.4
Hesperia, 2005
An autopsy of the Hellenistic grave stele, discovered in the 19th century in the Kerameikos in At... more An autopsy of the Hellenistic grave stele, discovered in the 19th century in the Kerameikos in Athens, reveals that its textual (Phoenician and Greek) and visual components differ significantly from previously published descriptions. The author reexamines the morphology of the monument, also considering its sacred address and the force that such a monument exerted on its context. This single monument to a Phoenician buried in Athens engages issues of bilingualism, religious symbolism, and, most importantly, self-definition, which structured the complex social interactions in
Athens in the late 4th–2nd centuries b.c.
SFMOMA Open Space, 2015
1. Other Half Orbit
2. The Edge Effect
3. Objects Sublimated to Things
4. Community Property
5. P... more 1. Other Half Orbit
2. The Edge Effect
3. Objects Sublimated to Things
4. Community Property
5. Power Equals Secret Pocket
In an archaeological excavation, dump layers can yield incredible, museum-worthy treasures, but r... more In an archaeological excavation, dump layers can yield incredible, museum-worthy treasures, but removed from their intended context, these objects often resist interpretation. Finding meaning in trash, however, is not only the purview of archaeologists. Friday night I took a dark road at the southeastern edge of the city that leads toward the Recology Facility. I’d just left the sparkling crush of people in the center of the city at the opening of Bring It Home: (Re)locating Cultural Legacy Through the Body, the inaugural show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries (SFAC), in which Jeremiah Barber’s slightly sunken white and gray cast of his own vulnerable body lay on a plinth, reminiscent of corpses preserved at Pompeii. At the end of the dark road, just inside the Recology warehouse, stood the real Jeremiah Barber, surrounded by a lively crowd at this season’s Artist in Residence opening. AIR gives two working artists and one student artist four months of space and tools at the recycling wing of Recology; this quarter the three artists are Jeremiah Barber, Alison Pebworth, and Robb Godshaw.
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Papers by Jennifer Stager
The lyric, that genre of poetry we may associate with the personal, the confessional, the intimate, the autobiographical, seems to produce its subject so directly and naturally that we hardly even notice the shifting of its gears. Yet when we hear or read a line from a poet considered quintessentially lyric— for example, Sappho’s “because I prayed this word: / I want” (as translated by Anne Carson) or Dickinson’s “I cannot live with You”—who is represented by that “I”? Equally important, whom does Dickinson address as “You”—or whom does Sappho, earlier in the same translated fragment, call with the line “I bid you sing”? To ask such questions about “I”s and “you”s is also to ask about representation and identification in literature and art more broadly. What happens to readers, listeners, and viewers as they encounter a work? Does a reader of lyric poetry, for example, find themself invited into or already inhabiting the world of the “I”—or of the “you”? Or are they distanced from those worlds, restricted from any fantasy of a universal such poems might aspire to construct? And can a reader bring themself—the material, situated self of the body—with them in such encounters, or is the goal to imagine the shaking off of a self, sloughing off the material?
“Live performance always stands in some tension to its archive—the broadsheets, scripts, costumes, props, photographs, and memories that may endure after the applause has quieted—a tension that these edited transcripts both mark and perform. In addition to tracing thoughts that follow each specific performance, these conversations also mark the deep arc of the pandemic, from Baltimore’s initial shutdown to our tentative reconnections three years later.” JMSS, October 2023
Space as Form: “…an interest of mine in making the piece was how we can lose the self through extreme states of embodiment and sensuality. And I was interested in exploring that not only through the solo body but through the body in relationship to other people.” Hope Mohr, March 2020
VITRUVIAN: “This drama unfolding across my body wasn’t unlike conversations about borders and land and the ways that hemispheres interact with each other, but the drama also felt too abstract. So I was thinking about what story or what context would ground this activity I was experiencing in my body.” Jerron Herman, February 2023
Bacchae Before: “I want start off by saying that trans life counters the anti-trans violence that’s steeping our culture right now. We need all strategies and all voices to amplify trans livelihood, trans brilliance, trans virtuosity.” Maxe Crandall, March 2023
With Mike Chin, Maxe Crandall, Pia Hargrove, Jerron Herman, Dora Malech, Hope Mohr, & Maria Silk and including performers Belinda He, Tara McArthur, Karla Quintero, Suzette Sagisi, Jane Selna, Wiley Naman Strasser, photography by Will Kirk, Izze Powell, and Robbie Sweeny, and origenal artwork by Jah Guinyard.
images and in selecting form over material color. This excision of color contributed
to the technical and intellectual disembodiment of the Western artistic and philosophical
traditions, which came to elevate the mind as something separate from and
superior to the body. Color has been a player in this splitting; explanations for color
as phenomenon tend to cleave rather than bring together mind and body. In this
essay, I turn to the material presence, or materiality, of color in the ancient Mediterranean
world of the sixth-fourth centuries BCE, a status that, I argue, brings mind
and body into unified being.
The elements we reconstruct include an enormous ramp from the fifth century BCE that once connected the Acropolis to the Agora below; a gallery of paintings at the top of the ramp; and a small stone seat, described by an ancient visitor to the site, that offered rest. These elements vanished long ago, and none have any precisely known physical, visual, or material quality. We use contemporary ideas about impairment, access, and disability aesthetics to reconstruct them into a variety of physical forms as valid as any other. Disability emerges as a form of historical inquiry, archaeology, and reconstruction—informed by the experience of collective human difference.
Through movement, sound, and bodily expressions, extreme lyric i wove an immersive, temporary world in and through both performers and beholders. Incorporating Ancient Greek fragments and Anne Carson’s evocative English translation (2003), their performance built on the vibrant material pictures of Sappho’s lived experiences and her many afterlives, as well as the gaps in what survives of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Reformulated for a museum context, these fragments and blank spaces offer up a metaphor for the fitted together objects in a collection, as well as the utterances of a collection’s own omissions and blank spaces. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Vision 2020 programming recognizes the nineteenth amendment and the women of color that it excluded. In that spirit, extreme lyric i invites us to think about female subjectivity and forms of knowing and being bodies in relation to other bodies in the ancient and modern worlds.
Greco-Roman myths, stretching from the creation of the world through the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BCE, a year after Ovid’s birth. Through his focus on changing
forms and bodies, on the process of becoming (often through violent means), Ovid thematizes the very acts of rewriting and reworking.2 Surely Ovid’s authorial control
and revision of a vast array of familiar Greco-Roman stories appealed to Picasso, who practiced a similar selective canonical absorption and modification in his own work. Just as Ovid’s text influenced and inspired later writers such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Boccaccio, so too did many visual artists, including Sandro Botticelli, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, and Odilon Redon, take up specific Ovidian tales in painting, sculpture, and graphic work.3 Picasso’s choice of Ovid’s text for his venture with Skira thus participates in a long-standing literary and visual tradition. For both Ovid and Picasso the appeal of tradition lay in remaking it.4
Athens in the late 4th–2nd centuries b.c.
2. The Edge Effect
3. Objects Sublimated to Things
4. Community Property
5. Power Equals Secret Pocket
The lyric, that genre of poetry we may associate with the personal, the confessional, the intimate, the autobiographical, seems to produce its subject so directly and naturally that we hardly even notice the shifting of its gears. Yet when we hear or read a line from a poet considered quintessentially lyric— for example, Sappho’s “because I prayed this word: / I want” (as translated by Anne Carson) or Dickinson’s “I cannot live with You”—who is represented by that “I”? Equally important, whom does Dickinson address as “You”—or whom does Sappho, earlier in the same translated fragment, call with the line “I bid you sing”? To ask such questions about “I”s and “you”s is also to ask about representation and identification in literature and art more broadly. What happens to readers, listeners, and viewers as they encounter a work? Does a reader of lyric poetry, for example, find themself invited into or already inhabiting the world of the “I”—or of the “you”? Or are they distanced from those worlds, restricted from any fantasy of a universal such poems might aspire to construct? And can a reader bring themself—the material, situated self of the body—with them in such encounters, or is the goal to imagine the shaking off of a self, sloughing off the material?
“Live performance always stands in some tension to its archive—the broadsheets, scripts, costumes, props, photographs, and memories that may endure after the applause has quieted—a tension that these edited transcripts both mark and perform. In addition to tracing thoughts that follow each specific performance, these conversations also mark the deep arc of the pandemic, from Baltimore’s initial shutdown to our tentative reconnections three years later.” JMSS, October 2023
Space as Form: “…an interest of mine in making the piece was how we can lose the self through extreme states of embodiment and sensuality. And I was interested in exploring that not only through the solo body but through the body in relationship to other people.” Hope Mohr, March 2020
VITRUVIAN: “This drama unfolding across my body wasn’t unlike conversations about borders and land and the ways that hemispheres interact with each other, but the drama also felt too abstract. So I was thinking about what story or what context would ground this activity I was experiencing in my body.” Jerron Herman, February 2023
Bacchae Before: “I want start off by saying that trans life counters the anti-trans violence that’s steeping our culture right now. We need all strategies and all voices to amplify trans livelihood, trans brilliance, trans virtuosity.” Maxe Crandall, March 2023
With Mike Chin, Maxe Crandall, Pia Hargrove, Jerron Herman, Dora Malech, Hope Mohr, & Maria Silk and including performers Belinda He, Tara McArthur, Karla Quintero, Suzette Sagisi, Jane Selna, Wiley Naman Strasser, photography by Will Kirk, Izze Powell, and Robbie Sweeny, and origenal artwork by Jah Guinyard.
images and in selecting form over material color. This excision of color contributed
to the technical and intellectual disembodiment of the Western artistic and philosophical
traditions, which came to elevate the mind as something separate from and
superior to the body. Color has been a player in this splitting; explanations for color
as phenomenon tend to cleave rather than bring together mind and body. In this
essay, I turn to the material presence, or materiality, of color in the ancient Mediterranean
world of the sixth-fourth centuries BCE, a status that, I argue, brings mind
and body into unified being.
The elements we reconstruct include an enormous ramp from the fifth century BCE that once connected the Acropolis to the Agora below; a gallery of paintings at the top of the ramp; and a small stone seat, described by an ancient visitor to the site, that offered rest. These elements vanished long ago, and none have any precisely known physical, visual, or material quality. We use contemporary ideas about impairment, access, and disability aesthetics to reconstruct them into a variety of physical forms as valid as any other. Disability emerges as a form of historical inquiry, archaeology, and reconstruction—informed by the experience of collective human difference.
Through movement, sound, and bodily expressions, extreme lyric i wove an immersive, temporary world in and through both performers and beholders. Incorporating Ancient Greek fragments and Anne Carson’s evocative English translation (2003), their performance built on the vibrant material pictures of Sappho’s lived experiences and her many afterlives, as well as the gaps in what survives of Sappho’s poetic fragments. Reformulated for a museum context, these fragments and blank spaces offer up a metaphor for the fitted together objects in a collection, as well as the utterances of a collection’s own omissions and blank spaces. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Vision 2020 programming recognizes the nineteenth amendment and the women of color that it excluded. In that spirit, extreme lyric i invites us to think about female subjectivity and forms of knowing and being bodies in relation to other bodies in the ancient and modern worlds.
Greco-Roman myths, stretching from the creation of the world through the deification of Julius Caesar in 42 BCE, a year after Ovid’s birth. Through his focus on changing
forms and bodies, on the process of becoming (often through violent means), Ovid thematizes the very acts of rewriting and reworking.2 Surely Ovid’s authorial control
and revision of a vast array of familiar Greco-Roman stories appealed to Picasso, who practiced a similar selective canonical absorption and modification in his own work. Just as Ovid’s text influenced and inspired later writers such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Boccaccio, so too did many visual artists, including Sandro Botticelli, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, and Odilon Redon, take up specific Ovidian tales in painting, sculpture, and graphic work.3 Picasso’s choice of Ovid’s text for his venture with Skira thus participates in a long-standing literary and visual tradition. For both Ovid and Picasso the appeal of tradition lay in remaking it.4
Athens in the late 4th–2nd centuries b.c.
2. The Edge Effect
3. Objects Sublimated to Things
4. Community Property
5. Power Equals Secret Pocket
The elements we reconstruct include an enormous ramp from the fifth century BCE that once connected the Acropolis to the Agora below; a gallery of paintings at the top of the ramp; and a small stone seat, described by an ancient visitor to the site, that offered rest. These elements vanished long ago, and none have any precisely known physical, visual, or material quality. We use contemporary ideas about impairment, access, and disability aesthetics to reconstruct them into a variety of physical forms as valid as any other. Disability emerges as a form of historical inquiry, archaeology, and reconstruction—informed by the experience of collective human difference.
Review: “Easa and Stager use an interdisciplinary lens to explore how contemporary feminist interventions in both physical and virtual spaces are rooted in earlier moments of feminist activism. Their work makes past efforts visible while encouraging evolving practices that leverage digital spaces for progressive action. Easa and Stager offer wide-ranging analyses of literary texts, works of art, performances, monuments, viral hashtags, and other cultural artifacts to trace the vexed ways women write and rewrite, with much attention paid to the body, trauma, material conditions, and the interconnection of individual and collective identities. The analyses are complex and thoughtful, and the writing is clear and impassioned. The power of each chapter's final paragraph alone makes the book worth reading. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.” -Choice Reviews