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The Quarantine Question

“The Quarantine Question” on Art Journal Open

For their post on Art Journal Open, “The Quarantine Question,” guest editors Dana E. Katz and Lisa Pon asked colleagues—historians of art, architecture, landscape, and culture; visual artists and musician-musicologists; curators and museum educators—to answer the following question as of summer 2021: “How has the past year’s quarantine affected your professional life?”

An introductory essay frames the twenty-one responses received by the editors. It draws on the plague hospitals and ghetto of early modern Venice to provide historical context for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, especially for the social-distancing measures taken to mitigate its effects. The contributions that follow afford a mosaic of perspectives on what one of the contributors refers to as l’époque covidienne. They range from discussions of art projects sparked by the pandemic to rich descriptions of COVID’s personal and professional impacts—and the difficulty of disentangling them. Read the article here.
Relevant research areas: Medieval, Renaissance, Contemporary