What is 'Jewish' about Jewish art? Art and identity on late ancient sarcophagi from Rome

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity

Combining Language and Vision with a Multimodal Skip-gram Model

We extend the SKIP-GRAM model of Mikolov et al. (2013a) by taking visual information into account. Like SKIP-GRAM, our multimodal models (MMSKIP-GRAM) build vector-based word representations by learning to predict linguistic contexts in text corpora. However, for a restricted set of words, the models are also exposed to visual representations of the objects they denote (extracted from natural images), and must predict linguistic and visual features jointly. The MMSKIP-GRAM models achieve good performance on a variety of semantic benchmarks. Moreover, since they propagate visual information to all words, we use them to improve image labeling and retrieval in the zero-shot setup, where the test concepts are never seen during model training. Finally, the MMSKIP-GRAM models discover intriguing visual properties of abstract words, paving the way to realistic implementations of embodied theories of meaning.Comment: accepted at NAACL 2015, camera ready version, 11 page

Levels of reality: portraiture in African art

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

Lying with the Saints: Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Bodies in the Succorpo of San Gennaro

In January 1497, when the powerful Carafa family translated the relics of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, to the city's cathedral, a devastating plague that had ravished the region is said to have immediately ceased. The presence and miraculous power of the saint's relics give meaning to the Succorpo, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa's funerary chapel in the cathedral. This magnificent foundation serves two functions: first, it is the private funerary chapel of Carafa and select members of his family; second, it is the locus of the cult of San Gennaro himself. My thesis examines the chapel's dual functions and explores the iconography of its decoration. I present new propositions regarding the architectural plan and artistic attributions of the chapel, and I provide a close reading of the portrait sculpture of Cardinal Carafa in the Succorpo, considering how its strategic placement informs our understanding of the program and its meaning

2004 Fanshawe College Fine Art Faculty Exhibition Catalogue

This exhibition of work by current and recent faculty reflects the interests and philosophy of education of the Fine Art Program at Fanshawe College, March 26 - May9, 2004Thames Art GalleryChatham Cultural CentreChatham, Ontariohttps://first.fanshawec.ca/famd_design_facultystaffpublications_fineart_facultycatalogues/1000/thumbnail.jp

Prairie Lawyer

The object is a bronze portrait bust of a beardless Abraham Lincoln. It is a limited edition (35 castings) bronze portrait sculpture originally sculpted as a commission for the Lincoln Home National Historic site in Springfield Illinois, USA.https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/fvw-sculpture/1000/thumbnail.jp

Melissa Ichiuji: In the Flesh

When she dances, acts, sculpts, sews or films, artist Melissa Ichiuji presents the human figure in political and personal terms, examining its various states of desire or distortion. This exhibition In the Flesh presents three discrete recent bodies of Ichiuji’s work: a series of busts of political figures from the 2012 election season entitled Fair Game, a trio of life-sized sculptures of female bodies, and lastly, Everything to Lose, a film and corresponding photographs of the artist donning an elaborately sculpted costume. Despite seeming differences in medium and subject in this exhibition, Ichiuji works with similar materials and artistic practices in each. She sculpts with fabric and pantyhose and does not hide raw, purposefully crude stitches and seams. Because the pantyhose stands in for flesh; bits of thread under the surfaces look like veins, and gestures seem animated, Ichiuji’s heads and bodies are paradoxically naturalistic and doll-like. “My background as a dancer and an actor,” Ichiuji explains, “informs the physicality of my figures.” Mimeticism, or the evocation of the “real” body, in Ichiuji’s work is mesmerizingly fraught. One sees abstraction and strange realism at once. Her political portraits are uncannily accurate; life-size sculptures approximate the presence of a live figure, and her own body in performance and film hypnotically and paradoxically is obscured and revealed. The perceived fantasy implicit in her work chafes against the viewer’s detection of the “real.” This friction can be seen in how Ichiuji’s real body—her hand, her upper back, her own curves and flesh—is perceptible through the doll-like costume she wears in Everything to Lose. Likewise, from the Fair Game series, one can recognize Newt Gingrich’s characteristic smile through a tangle of women’s underwear, and the distorted figures in her larger-scaled sculptures appear on the brink of movement. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1011/thumbnail.jp