J. Cabelle Ahn | Harvard University (original) (raw)

Papers by J. Cabelle Ahn

Arts, 2023

On 8 September 2022, Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non... more On 8 September 2022, Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in collaboration with Arsnl, the in-house platform by the Artist Rights Society (ARS). Taking Stella’s foray into the NFT-space as a starting point, my article focuses on an emergent trend by artists engaging with Web3: the effort to bridge the physical and the digital by giving tangible form to NFT artworks and what this suggests for the future of digital materiality.

Master Drawings 2 (Summer 2023), pp. 266-272, 2023

Review of the catalogues and exhibitions related to the three-part presentation of Jack Shear's c... more Review of the catalogues and exhibitions related to the three-part presentation of Jack Shear's collection at The Drawing Center, NY.

Bloomsbury Art Markets, 2023

Five entries for the Art Market Dictionary, including the history of Galerie Cailleux and Jean-Lu... more Five entries for the Art Market Dictionary, including the history of Galerie Cailleux and Jean-Luc Baroni

Inside the Exhibition: Temporalità, dispositivo, narrazione, edited by Gloria Antoni, Matteo Chirumbolo, Gianluca Petrone, Célia Zuber (Rome: Artemide Editore, 2022), pp. 43-56, 2022

Article examining the 1797 exhibition of Old Master drawings at the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louv... more Article examining the 1797 exhibition of Old Master drawings at the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, and its relationship to strategies of exhibition making.

Intermédialités, themed issue on “Returning (Nostalgia),” edited by André Habib, Suzanne Paquet, Carl Therrien, no. 39 (Winter 2022), 2022

This article examines how the pace of technological progress has continued to accelerate the pace... more This article examines how the pace of technological progress has continued to accelerate the pace at which nostalgia is conjured and commodified. It undertakes a comparative study of sculptures by three contemporary artists, Daniel Arsham, Alicja Kwade, and Kathleen Ryan. I argue that their sculptural practices are ideal case studies to unpack the cultural mobilization of nostalgia in this specific moment of technological acceleration and the resulting ecological perils of this progress.

Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Édouard Kopp, Kristel Smentek, and Elizabeth Rudy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), pp. 78-84, 2022

Catalogue essay for Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Mu... more Catalogue essay for Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Museums, MA, September 16, 2022–January 15, 2023). This essay charts the primacy of the graphic arts in geographical thinking and foregrounds the hidden systems of mythmaking embedded in the discipline in order to reconsider the very geography of the Enlightenment.

New Perspectives on Abraham Bloemaert and his Workshop, Volume II of Gouden eeuw: New Perspectives on Dutch seventeenth-century Art, edited by Léonie Marquaille, (Turnhout: Brépols, 2022), pp. 233-251, 2022

The article traces the collection and reception of Abraham Bloemaert's works in eighteenth-centur... more The article traces the collection and reception of Abraham Bloemaert's works in eighteenth-century France. By charting Bloemaert’s artistic legacy through institutional, public, and private spaces, we may consider his works at the threshold of debates concerning reproduction and exhibition of art in this period as well as trace an alternative narrative of the collection and reception of Northern Art in eighteenth-century France.

Journal18, 2022

This article examines representations of Nouvelle France in eighteenth-century French history pai... more This article examines representations of Nouvelle France in eighteenth-century French history paintings to consider how French colonial ambitions and subsequent nostalgia incited by the permanent loss of “French Arcadia” at the end of the Seven Years’ War were given visual form, and how this elegiac vision of Nouvelle France and its occupants were formulated as a reaction against the deleterious racial discourses concerning the French Caribbean colonies.

Thresholds 50, "Before/After," edited by Jola Idowu, Ardalan SadeghiKivi, Meriam Soltan and Antonio Pacheco (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), pp. 143-159, 2022

This essay focuses on a series of sculptures Daniel Arsham has been producing since 2019 in colla... more This essay focuses on a series of sculptures Daniel Arsham has been producing since 2019 in collaboration with the storied Atelier de moulage de la Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN) in Saint-Denis. Arsham's revisions to classical statues generate parallels between his contemporary relics and the temporal paradoxes involved in the restoration and conservation of classical statues, and ultimately serve as a productive lens to unearth the historic roots of fictional archaeology.

Sequitur, 2020

Review of "Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de ... more Review of "Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France," at The Morgan Library & Museum (January 31–September 13, 2020)

Journal18, 2019

Review of "De geur van succes. Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, bloemenschilders in Parijs," at ... more Review of "De geur van succes. Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, bloemenschilders in Parijs," at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands from 26 April to 25 August 2019.

Athanor 32 (Florida State University: Museum of Fine Arts Press, 2014), pp. 53-63, Sep 2014

Essay based on my MA Thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, examining drawings by Jean-Charles... more Essay based on my MA Thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, examining drawings by Jean-Charles Delafosse in the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Wellesley Undergraduate Honors Thesis on Walton Ford: This thesis examines a selection of work... more Wellesley Undergraduate Honors Thesis on Walton Ford:

This thesis examines a selection of works by the contemporary American artist Walton Ford (b. 1960). Ford’s watercolors and prints feature life-size depictions of birds and animals in the style of eighteenth-and nineteenth century naturalists. His works are filled with not only embedded visuals with external reference points, but also with dense inscriptions drawn from art history, literature, and cultural histories. As such, this project tackles his works through the following seven chapters:

In Chapter One, I introduce Walton Ford and offer a cursory archaeology of his artistic strategies. This initial exegesis is followed up in Chapter Two with a detailed investigation into the prominence of the nineteenth-century naturalist John James Audubon in Walton Ford’s works, from his textual references to actual appropriations of Audubon’s images. Chapter Three continues the investigation into the discipline of natural history itself, by examining Ford’s creation of his own “unnatural history” through subversive elements and quotations. Chapter Four takes a deconstructive approach to the tensions between written words and visual images with regard to understanding and formulating narratives. Chapter Five examines Ford’s images in relation to the canon of animal fables, and to their subsequent sociopolitical implications. Chapter Six examines historicism as a theme and issue in contemporary art. To conclude the project, I entertain the complexity of the interpretative process itself in regard to vision and history.