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Why does Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy feel controversial? At first, the answer seems obvious. Helen has occupied the Western imagination for thousands of years, becoming what Christopher Marlowe later called “the face that launched a thousand ships,’ and generations of Western paintings, sculptures, textbooks, films, and popular retellings have taught modern audiences to…
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When Fred Wilson created Mining the Museum in 1992, he did something deceptively simple. He entered the Maryland Historical Society, studied its collection, and rearranged what was already there. He did not need to invent a new historical record. The objects existed. The records existed. The history existed. What Wilson changed was the relationship among…
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I am African American on both sides of my family, with roots in the United States extending back more than five generations. I was born in New York City, a place that has always been home. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, my family decamped from New York to Saint Lucia, and for an adventurous period…
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Romare Bearden’s 1977 Black Odyssey begins with Homer, but its most important question reaches far beyond Homer. In his series of collages based on The Odyssey, Bearden reimagines Odysseus, Penelope, Circe, the Cyclops, and the Mediterranean world through Black figures and an artistic vocabulary shaped by African, African American, Caribbean, and modernist traditions. At first…
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This summer, a number of seemingly unrelated experiences kept bringing me back to Homer. An epic film, time spent researching and working in a museum, and a summer of studying rhetoric, philosophy, reason, and debate gradually began to connect. What first looked like separate experiences started raising the same questions about Classics, memory, interpretation, and…
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Classical Mosaic 