Perspectives on Place

The editors introduce the varied investigations of place through archaeological inquiry and research, projects of restitution and decolonization, community-based conservation, site-specific artworks, and re-creations of artistic sites and architectural settings. 

Robert Motherwell’s first printmaking project challenges the understanding of printmaking as a mobile art form—reproducible, portable, and easily recontextualized. Instead, it should be understood by the places it depicts, the location where the pages are held, and sites of its care and display.

Artist Leong sees the haunting towers known as dīuláu, built between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Sze Yup region west of Macau and Hong Kong, as sites of community, power, and security—and as symbols of the Asian diaspora.

An interdisciplinary account of the origins of a monumental stained glass window, its deinstallation from its original location in a Rhode Island church, and the complex, collaborative efforts to develop and realize its new setting at the museum.

An investigation of the iconography of the Mythical Killer Whale in Nasca ceramics, geoglyphs, and petroglyphs, reveals the importance of the position of the viewer in indigenous visual culture and meaning-making.

The discovery, characterization, classification, and restoration of paint colors in the Brazilian church Conceição dos Militares during a recent conservation intervention affords insights relevant to the conservation of other Baroque interiors.

The author offers the practice of dramaturgy as a model for the institutional restaging of site-specific work, such as Drifting Producers, created by the artists’ collective Flying City in Seoul, South Korea, and relocated to the Netherlands.