Installation view at Elmhurst Biennial

Artist-Designer John Preus

Artist John Preus maintains a professional design studio that uses 2nd hand materials, including discarded furniture from closed Chicago Public Schools.
Icebergs in Antarctica

Antarctica: Love of a Cold Climate

Can images make us love an unlovable place like Antarctica?
Harem Pool Jean-Léon Gérôme [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Other Orientalism: Colonialism in the Caucasus

For centuries, the Caucasus was to the Russian Empire what the Middle East was to the British and French: a savage land to be dominated and a romanticized Other against which Russia could define its own “European” identity.
Sarah Webster Fabio

Sarah Webster Fabio: Mother of Black Studies

Poet, teacher, musician, and scholar of black literature, Sarah Webser Fabio, helped build a Black Arts movement on the West Coast.
Easter Card ca. 1907

The Easter Bunny, or, Why We Love Rabbits

The human fascination with rabbits, including the Easter Bunny, is long and deep. But why rabbits? 
Luise Adelgunde Victoria Gottsched

Traduttore, Traditore: Is Translation Ever Really Possible?

Translator, traitor, goes the Italian expression, although something may be lost in the translation.
Violette Personified NYPL Collections

Personification Is Your Friend: The Language of Inanimate Objects

Studies have shown that anthropomorphizing not only helps us learn. It also serves a social function, helping us feel connected.
Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave. This is a replica of the painting from the Brno museum Anthropos. The absence of the mane sometimes leads to these paintings being described as portraits of lionesses.

Reinterpreting The Chauvet Cave Paintings

Do France’s Chauvet Cave paintings depict a contemporary volcanic eruption? Recent research argues that they do. 
Artist Faith Ringgold poses for a portrait in front of a painted self-portrait during a press preview of her exhibition, "American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Ringgold explains her "confrontational art" _ vivid paintings whose themes of race, gender, class and civil rights were so intense that for years, no one would buy them. "I didn’t want people to be able to look, and look away, because a lot of people do that with art," Ringgold said. "I want them to look and see. I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America." (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Power in the Painting: Faith Ringgold and her Story Quilts

Through a didactic retelling of history, artist Faith Ringgold uses her story quilts to reframe the past.
Dandy pickpockets, diving published in The caricature magazine, or Hudibrastic mirror, by G.M. Woodward, vol. 5, Folio 75

Bowie, Wilde, and the Fin de Siècle Dandies

Exploring the David Bowie/Oscar Wilde/French bohemian dandies connection.