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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design

The Rise Of Judaic Calligraphy In The Twentieth Century, Stephen Michael Cohen Jun 2023

The Rise Of Judaic Calligraphy In The Twentieth Century, Stephen Michael Cohen

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Excluding religiously required safrut (e.g., handwritten Torah scrolls, mezuzot, tefillin, gittin), artistic aspects of Judaic calligraphy declined after moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century. Rediscovery of medieval calligraphic techniques in late nineteenth-century Britain, plus contemporaneous typographical studies in Germany, spurred revival of artistic calligraphy. The first Arts and Crafts movement, pre-World War I German research into aesthetic letterforms, and the Bezalel Academy sparked a rise of secularized Judaic calligraphy. Growth of folk arts and ethnic pride in the 1960s and accessible photocopiers in the 1970s allowed nonspecialists to become expert calligraphers.


Warp/Weft/Word: Inscriptive Materiality, Epistemological Violence, And The Inka Khipu, Travis Sharp Jun 2023

Warp/Weft/Word: Inscriptive Materiality, Epistemological Violence, And The Inka Khipu, Travis Sharp

Criticism

Many competing theories of the Indigenous inscription practice known as the khipu have been offered, from L. Leland Locke’s long-standing postulation that khipus are accounting devices, to Walter Ong’s description of them as aide-mémoire, to Gary Urton’s more experimental theory that they constituted an early form of binary composition. Just as fraught is the history of the khipu, which were utilized by the Inka, intermediated by Spanish and Catholic authorities in their legal and religious systems, and, finally, banned and burned as seditious and sacrilegious. Contemporary khipus are primarily limited to those used by herders, but Chilean American poet-artist Cecilia …


Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes Jun 2023

Trees And Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, And The Logan Elm, Mark Alan Mattes

Criticism

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, “Logan’s Lament,” as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan’s words and deeds such as Jefferson’s book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan’s speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local …