In his essay “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau describes the interplay between the proper names of streets and the materiality of pedestrians’ movements through them. The very movement of pedestrians, de Certeau argues, recodes those streets’ meanings and grants them a social life that outlives and reconfigures what they were originally named for: “[T]hese names make […]

In “towards a geography of art,” Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann describes the work of American art historian George Kubler and his efforts to reconfigure art history’s approach to both of its eponymous analytical lenses. Kubler, unlike his contemporaries, considers “questions of physical geography in relation to material, centers and traditions” (222), thus re-configuring the study of […]

Luzio’s piece delves into the aesthetics of the ivory Christian figures that circulated through the networks of trade established within the colonies of the Portuguese empire in order to unsettle understandings of space. The very title of the piece “The ‘Orient’ in the ‘New World’” points towards the essay’s gestures of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. However, […]

This weekend I visited the Queens Museum to see the Mierle Lederman Ukeles retrospective on her career as a feminist performance artist.  Her works, particularly her Maintenance Art Performances, have always been engaged with ecology and the infrastructure of cities. Two of the exhibitions components were incorporated into the Queens Museum’s famous Panorama of the […]

Hi everyone, NYC Digital Humanities week is Feb. 6-10. There are a ton of free workshops — including some on mapping! Thought you might be interested in checking it out. NYCDH Week By the way, is there a way we can add a new category (like “events” or “resources” or “interesting links”) for things we […]