Papers by Cristiana Pagliarusco
Altre Modernità, 2015
I consider the life of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American Modernist painter and writer, a... more I consider the life of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American Modernist painter and writer, as a series of windows through which she looks at the world and, at different stages, force and nourish the conquest of her identity as American, woman and artist. From the places of her childhood to the opaque period of 'confine' in New York, as Stieglitz’s wife and woman-artist, O’Keeffe plans her evasion, looking for a space of her own where to find the center of her individuality. The opening to the world is embodied in the multiple perspectives that New Mexico offers, in its physical and mental spaces. At Ghost Ranch, and in Abiquiu, O'Keeffe finds the natural sources of a work that brings back originality and discipline. The present work, articulated within visual studies, literature and culture, considers O’Keeffe’s modernism from a new transcendentalist perspective. The analysis is based on a selection of letters between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz (1913-1946), O'Ke...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Francesco Guccini imbues his songs and writings with autobiographical accounts that display an in... more Francesco Guccini imbues his songs and writings with autobiographical accounts that display an inclination to reveal both the actual and the imaginary in himself and his own world. The article highlights the influence that US culture and literature have exerted on this representative Italian singer-songwriter, whose work spans at least two generations, in an attempt to show how he has played a key role in the transmission and circulation in Italy of a certain mythification of "America". The article analyzes three songs to argue that Guccini has overcome the delusions of "the American dream" in order to pursue, even within the fragility of our precarious lives, a behavioral ethics inspired by a dialogue that still seeks to explore a land of human possibilities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
carte sensibili
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Altre Modernità, rivista di studi letterari e culturali, Università di Milano, Jan 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Talks by Cristiana Pagliarusco
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper presents a long-term research project on over 550 poems so far inspired by the life, p... more This paper presents a long-term research project on over 550 poems so far inspired by the life, paintings, and writings of the American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe. It intends to show how these poems have interpreted, de-codified and translated O’Keeffe’s subjects into words by making room for new meaningful images, thereby expanding what O’Keeffe meant to do with her art, rather than to provide equivalents of it. The study on this large bulk of writing on Modernist art borrows the term “radicant” from Nicolas Bourriaud’s aesthetic theories to capture the essence of the Modernist artist who set her roots in motion in order to approach art in heterogeneous contexts and formats, transplanting and thus sharing new creative behaviors.
By exploring the development of ekphrastic writing in the 20th and 21st century in Anglophone countries, but also in non-Anglophone cultures—as in the case of women poets like Indian Gujarati Sujata Bhatt, Asian American Cathy Song, Kuwaiti Syrian Shurooq Amin, and Egyptian Iman Mersal--this study analyzes the extent to which poetry prompted by O’Keeffe’s paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her work but also an encounter between what W. J. T. Mitchell called two “paragonal” media that expand the interpretation of art expression on the one hand, and the scope of ekphrastic poetry on the other. The wide number and range of international poets and artists involved in this study (more than 80 to this point) opens up new ways of understanding the literary, artistic and ethical values of the arts reaffirming their connecting and radicant power. The growing transnational community of poets related to O’Keeffe shows how the shared process of selecting and emphasizing in multimedia expressions help engage and activate authors and audiences in their appealing quest for the essence of things and in their chase to disentangle the complicated facets of contemporary existence.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The poem “Restoring O’Keeffe” (Totem 2007) by African American 2015 Pulitzer Prize poet and acade... more The poem “Restoring O’Keeffe” (Totem 2007) by African American 2015 Pulitzer Prize poet and academic Gregory Pardlo is inspired by the affective relationship between the Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer. Gleaning from their correspondence in the 1930s, Pardlo investigates race and gender in the early decades of twentieth century’s New York City by voicing O’Keeffe’s obsessions for her artistic womanhood and Toomer’s preoccupation with his racialized literary expectations.
Supported by the critical views of Yale Professor Camara Dia Holloway, the African-American art scholar who analyzes the impact of race on art and aesthetics in late XIX and XX centuries American Art, I intend to show how Pardlo voices O’Keeffe’s resistance to the artistic “whiteness” imposed by her husband and patron Alfred Stieglitz, and her opening up towards different, often creolized cultures that eventually drove her to create her own affiliated community with the Native and Hispanic Americans in New Mexico. Pardlo draws O’Keeffe’s commitment to multi-racial communities from her friendship with Toomer, who was also seeking a space suitable for his own body and creative mind outside the literary, artistic and social structures conditioned by racial, gender and sexual stereotypes. Pardlo’s poem restores and recolors O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's bodies, souls and art in their search for a place where they can freely assert themselves in relation with diversities rather than the establishment. Pardlo’s poem shares O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's belief that art must shape culture and identity in a way that legislation and/or political activism could not equate. By reading O’Keeffe and Toomer from his own blackness, Pardlo provides a genuine vision of two mobile, diasporic profiles within their own nation, thus expanding the social efficacy of a politics of affective relationships as theorized by Leela Gandhi.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Home Cultures, 2023
“The cooking has been done for you in the garden; it’s merely finished in the kitchen,” the Engli... more “The cooking has been done for you in the garden; it’s merely finished in the kitchen,” the English biodynamic gardener Alan Chadwick used to say. These were ideas that Georgia O’Keeffe, the American modernist painter, already had in mind when she decided to devote large attention to the creation of vegetable and fruit gardens in her houses in New Mexico between the 1930s and 1940s. When Chadwick, “the gardener of the souls,” started using his Biodynamic Method of organic gardening and farming in North America in the late 1960s, Miss O’Keeffe was already deeply engaged in an agricultural project that had seen her teaching, prodding, cajoling, and strictly guiding her many assistants and guests in New Mexico. Through her idea of hard work applied in any creative context, O’Keeffe anticipated, following the studies of Adelle Davis, an ecology of food instead of an economy. A strong believer in the energy coming from the patient and enduring cultivation of the earth, in its reproductive power comparable to the work and labor of childbirth, O’Keeffe used her adobe gardens, kitchens and cooking habits as a sort of mystical places where labor turned into blessing, giving birth to beauty. Through the reading of O’Keeffe’s letters and books inspired by her life and work, this article intends to analyze the beginning of an ecological, though aesthetically refined, politics of gardening and food in the hands and mind of the modernist artist. O’Keeffe nimbly moved from the stylish urban class-conscious foods and flats of New York City, in the first decades of the century, to the revolutionary culture of local production in the Southwest. In her garden cultivation and food rituals, O’Keeffe reproduced the spiritual landscape that nourished the body and the soul of men and women, both engaged in the prodigious creative project. In addition, her strong relationship with the Indigenous allowed her to rediscover the organic bases of civilization, the “sober reality” (Norman Brown) that helped her fulfill the meaning of her work: giving birth to beauty.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Cristiana Pagliarusco
Talks by Cristiana Pagliarusco
By exploring the development of ekphrastic writing in the 20th and 21st century in Anglophone countries, but also in non-Anglophone cultures—as in the case of women poets like Indian Gujarati Sujata Bhatt, Asian American Cathy Song, Kuwaiti Syrian Shurooq Amin, and Egyptian Iman Mersal--this study analyzes the extent to which poetry prompted by O’Keeffe’s paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her work but also an encounter between what W. J. T. Mitchell called two “paragonal” media that expand the interpretation of art expression on the one hand, and the scope of ekphrastic poetry on the other. The wide number and range of international poets and artists involved in this study (more than 80 to this point) opens up new ways of understanding the literary, artistic and ethical values of the arts reaffirming their connecting and radicant power. The growing transnational community of poets related to O’Keeffe shows how the shared process of selecting and emphasizing in multimedia expressions help engage and activate authors and audiences in their appealing quest for the essence of things and in their chase to disentangle the complicated facets of contemporary existence.
Supported by the critical views of Yale Professor Camara Dia Holloway, the African-American art scholar who analyzes the impact of race on art and aesthetics in late XIX and XX centuries American Art, I intend to show how Pardlo voices O’Keeffe’s resistance to the artistic “whiteness” imposed by her husband and patron Alfred Stieglitz, and her opening up towards different, often creolized cultures that eventually drove her to create her own affiliated community with the Native and Hispanic Americans in New Mexico. Pardlo draws O’Keeffe’s commitment to multi-racial communities from her friendship with Toomer, who was also seeking a space suitable for his own body and creative mind outside the literary, artistic and social structures conditioned by racial, gender and sexual stereotypes. Pardlo’s poem restores and recolors O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's bodies, souls and art in their search for a place where they can freely assert themselves in relation with diversities rather than the establishment. Pardlo’s poem shares O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's belief that art must shape culture and identity in a way that legislation and/or political activism could not equate. By reading O’Keeffe and Toomer from his own blackness, Pardlo provides a genuine vision of two mobile, diasporic profiles within their own nation, thus expanding the social efficacy of a politics of affective relationships as theorized by Leela Gandhi.
By exploring the development of ekphrastic writing in the 20th and 21st century in Anglophone countries, but also in non-Anglophone cultures—as in the case of women poets like Indian Gujarati Sujata Bhatt, Asian American Cathy Song, Kuwaiti Syrian Shurooq Amin, and Egyptian Iman Mersal--this study analyzes the extent to which poetry prompted by O’Keeffe’s paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her work but also an encounter between what W. J. T. Mitchell called two “paragonal” media that expand the interpretation of art expression on the one hand, and the scope of ekphrastic poetry on the other. The wide number and range of international poets and artists involved in this study (more than 80 to this point) opens up new ways of understanding the literary, artistic and ethical values of the arts reaffirming their connecting and radicant power. The growing transnational community of poets related to O’Keeffe shows how the shared process of selecting and emphasizing in multimedia expressions help engage and activate authors and audiences in their appealing quest for the essence of things and in their chase to disentangle the complicated facets of contemporary existence.
Supported by the critical views of Yale Professor Camara Dia Holloway, the African-American art scholar who analyzes the impact of race on art and aesthetics in late XIX and XX centuries American Art, I intend to show how Pardlo voices O’Keeffe’s resistance to the artistic “whiteness” imposed by her husband and patron Alfred Stieglitz, and her opening up towards different, often creolized cultures that eventually drove her to create her own affiliated community with the Native and Hispanic Americans in New Mexico. Pardlo draws O’Keeffe’s commitment to multi-racial communities from her friendship with Toomer, who was also seeking a space suitable for his own body and creative mind outside the literary, artistic and social structures conditioned by racial, gender and sexual stereotypes. Pardlo’s poem restores and recolors O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's bodies, souls and art in their search for a place where they can freely assert themselves in relation with diversities rather than the establishment. Pardlo’s poem shares O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's belief that art must shape culture and identity in a way that legislation and/or political activism could not equate. By reading O’Keeffe and Toomer from his own blackness, Pardlo provides a genuine vision of two mobile, diasporic profiles within their own nation, thus expanding the social efficacy of a politics of affective relationships as theorized by Leela Gandhi.
After an introduction to the development of ekphrastic writing, and a summary of the principal aesthetic and critical theories that deal with the intriguing intersections between visual and verbal media, the book provokes reflection on the reasons why O'Keeffe often showed reticence towards the world of words. Subsequent chapters analyse the extent to which poetry prompted by O'Keeffe's paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her art but also an encounter between media that expand the interpretation of her art. The book confirms that in visual art as well as in poetry, the shared process of selecting and emphasizing helps artists get at the essence of things and, thus, disentangle the complicated facets of existence.
The intimate poems of Jacobs and Mersal not only revise the traditional and popular representation of a woman's life and art—in this instance, Georgia O'Keeffe's intense biography and paintings--but also suggest their use of the verbal medium as a form of personal revision, in which a reconfiguration of the visual and of the limitations that it has often imposed may finally help break the oppressive barriers of physical, political and social expressions.
In turn, Amin’s work, as a painter and poet, suggests the importance and the ambivalence of the act of seeing and showing, an interesting parallel when the discourse deliberately aims at discussing the role of women as both objects of art and subjects of their own artistic process. Braid, as a carpenter and poet, insists on the backgrounds that inspired the painter's works: the ekphrastic poems become the stage directions that guide us through the painted scenes of a common shared stage that is life. Like a true carpenter, Braid evokes and verbally crafts the life events of the artists—O'Keeffe's and Emily Carr's—using a strong and effective figurative verbum which renders the recollection of the "described" object almost needless. Is this one further attempt to say that there is more beyond what is seen and shown? And again, are these women poets and artists trying to reassert that there is more than one single perspective, more than one single-angled, "ocular-centric" view of what one may see, look at, or show? How far has this feminist approach in ekphrasis gone in reconfiguring and revolutionizing the dualism and supremacy of one medium (the masculine verbal) over the other (the feminine visual) through their own art? One of the possible answers is: faraway, but not without consequences.
This contribution aims to show how O’Keeffe’s rooms in New York opened the door to the beginning of a new way of making art, and to a new way of conceiving women’s spaces. The paper cross-examines the reading of O’Keeffe’s painting and early career life through poetry. Christopher Buckley’s poem “59th Street Studio” (Flying Backbone) casts a private gaze into O’Keeffe’s rooms; Cathy Song’s “Black Iris—New York” (Picture Bride) draws the reader into some domestic moments of the artist’s life; Alicia Ostriker’s “O’Keeffe” (The Little Space) pictures the artist ready to show her Midwestern “fist.” The poets help us visualize the minimalist space O’Keeffe was imagining in New York, in her attempt to capture patches of sky from its streets and her windows. By stripping away details, hollowing out shapes, and carving out her role as an artist—a process that Kate Braid reproduces in her book of poems Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr—O’Keeffe dismantled the walls of her patriarchal house, and profession. Space expanded in her new order. She trespassed the boundaries of stereotyped feminine realms that led her to the open, transnational houses–her adobes in New Mexico–where she boldly changed the nature of domesticity, and art.
By exploring the development of ekphrastic writing in the 20th and 21st century in Anglophone countries, this study analyzes the extent to which poetry prompted by O’Keeffe’s paintings provides not only accurate and eulogistic descriptions of her work but also an encounter between what W. J. T. Mitchell called two “paragonal” media that expand the interpretation of art expression on the one hand, and the scope of ekphrastic poetry on the other. The wide number and range of international poets and artists involved in this study (more than 70 to this point) opens up new ways of understanding the literary, artistic and ethical values of the arts reaffirming their connecting and radicant power. The growing transnational community of poets related to O’Keeffe shows how the shared process of selecting and emphasizing in multimedia expressions help engage and activate authors and audiences in their appealing quest for the essence of things and in their chase to disentangle the complicated facets of contemporary existence.
Pardlo recognizes O’Keeffe’s desire to blend with these multi-racial communities in her relationship with Toomer’s who is equally engaged in a common effort to find a most suitable nature for himself in a world still conditioned by racial and gendered bonds. Through his poem, Pardlo restores and recolors O’Keeffe’s and Toomer's natures as they share their search for a place where they can stop being objects of art in order to assert themselves as its own subjects. Sharing the artists’ belief that art must affect and take responsibility in shaping an ecological culture and identity in a way that legislation and/or political activism could not equate, Pardlo’s poem represents an intervention on the artistic global panorama of the twentieth and twenty-first century. His original reading—coming from his own “blackness”—provides a genuine vision of both O’Keeffe’s and Toomer’s diasporic profiles within their own nation, and expands the social efficacy of an ecopolitics of affective relationships as theorized by Leela Gandhi.