Dear Readers,
The Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal is thrilled to present its Fall 2024 Digital Issue! With nearly 100 submissions for this second issue, we are proud to publish outstanding examples of undergraduate contributions in art history and art practice.
This issue’s featured works are as wide-ranging as their contributors, who hail from institutions from coast to coast of the United States as well as Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan — as writers carefully listen in on conversations between cultures, temporalities, and materialities, the word transcendent comes to mind for the contributions in this issue.
Encounters transcending cultural and geographical lines abound: take, for example, Riva Mikhlin’s examination of papal power at play in an Italian artist’s portrait of a Japanese samurai, or the life of a thirteenth-century Andalusi musician textile traced by Iris Bednarski.
Transcendental visualizations of faith through artistic innovations are explored in Peiyuan Chen’s discussion of death scenes in the Hōnen Shōnin Eden and Paulina Gąsiorowska’s analysis of paradoxical sensory experiences encoded in the Lindisfarne Gospel’s carpet pages.
This issue’s contributors interrogate transcendences across multiple materialities, too: Madisyn Schweitzer investigates the interplay between architectural framing and the Virgin Mary’s body in Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, and Emma Huerta considers the nuances of art conservation of works of performance art in contrast to less ephemeral mediums with the case study of Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks.
In a more modern context, Kate Snashall’s platforming of the legacies and activism stitched into the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Maeve Sullivan’s presentation of Brook Andrew and Christian Thompson’s subversion of the colonial gaze through a subversion of traditional photographic processes, and Jimena Luque’s examination of textile’s material implications in Judy Chicago’s Birth Project all witness to materialities both harnessed and transcended for advocacy.
But these transcendences don’t end with the issue’s written work: cross-cultural storytelling and material collaborations are also central in the featured artworks. Learn more about these interactions in the artists’ own words by clicking on the images for each work.
I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture and our faculty advisory committee for continuing to support the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal, and especially to Marcus Mayo, HUAJ Staff Advisor, and Emily Ware, HAA Director of Administration and Operations. Further, this issue would not have been possible without HUAJ’s eight staff editors, to whom I am incredibly grateful for their efforts in making this issue a reality.
On behalf of the Fall 2024 team, thank you for reading this issue of the Harvard Undergraduate Art Journal!
Marin Gray, Editor-in-Chief