Divination Mirror

Bronze mirror

Mirror with "TLV" Pattern

Mirror with Jaguar or Coyote Mosaic

Mirror Back with Great Goddess

Mirror (Shinjūkyō) Based on Han Dynasty Prototype with Cosmological Design

Created by Reina Gattuso. 
Many ancient peoples viewed mirrors as magical. They believed mirrors were portals to the spiritual realm or tools with which to divine the future. 
There is a scientific explanation for how mirrors reflect light, of course. But this knowledge doesn’t stop their luminous surfaces from seeming magical. Across time and place, human beings have viewed reflective surfaces as portals to the divine or to the future. 

The first mirrors were likely the reflective surfaces of still water. Human-made mirrors entered the archaeological record around 8,000 years ago in Anatolia.1 Most societies associated mirrors with beauty and personal grooming. But some also attached a deeper ritual significance to them. 
 
This collection features ritually significant mirrors from ancient cultures around the world. Ancient Chavín-Cupisnique people likely used mirrors for divination, and buried mirrors with their dead.2 Aztec peoples, meanwhile, included small mirrors as part of royal regalia,3 while ancient Etruscans ritually smashed mirrors they included in tombs4. Ancient cultures in China and Japan decorated mirrors with symbolism that situated their users at the symbolic center of the cosmos.5 
 

Citations: 

1 Castro, Joseph. “Who Invented the Mirror?” Livescience, 28 March 2013, https://www.livescience.com/34466-who-invented-mirror.html. Accessed 25 May 2022. 
2 “Mirror.” Dallas Museum of Art, https://collections.dma.org/artwork/3288058. Accessed 25 May 2022. 
3 “Mirror with Jaguar or Coyote Mosaic.” Art Institute Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/132675/mirror-with-jaguar-or-coyote-mosaic. Accessed 25 May 2022. See also “Mirror Back with Great Goddess.” The Cleveland Museum of Art, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1989.65. Accessed 25 May 2022. 
 
4 De Grummond, Nancy T. “On Mutilated Mirrors.” Votives, Places and Rituals in Etruscan Religion. Brill, 1 Jan. 2008. https://brill.com/previewpdf/book/edcoll/9789047442622/Bej.9789004170452.i-292_012.xml. Accessed 25 May 2022. 
 
5 “Mirror with “TLV” Pattern.” Art Institute Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/10522/mirror-with-tlv-pattern. Accessed 25 May 2022. See also “Mirror (Shinjūkyō) Based on Han Dynasty Prototype with Cosmological Design.” The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44835. Accessed 25 May 2022.

Magic Mirrors

Carved white jade leaf cluster ornament

Snuff Bottle in the Shape of an Eggplant

Two Monkeys on Two Peaches

Lotus-Leaf Dish

Carved white jade leaf for bowl and stand

Carved white jade flower form bowl and cover with stand

Bottle in the shape of a gourd

Vase

Gourd-Shaped Snuff Bottle with a Butterfly, Trailing Tendrils, and Fruit Branches

Created by Reina Gattuso. 
Ancient Chinese people believed jade could confer immortality. They obtained nephrite, one of the two minerals geologists call jade, from Turkestan and Siberia. In modern times, they also obtained jadeite from southeast Asia. Chinese scholars associated jade with courtly virtues including integrity, persistence, and moral purity.1 

In the Qing Dynasty, when most of the jade objects in this collection were made, artists carved particularly elaborate jade forms. They employed tools and abrasives to impart ornate designs on the extremely hard stone.2 Depictions of fruit, flowers, and vegetables were popular. 

Plant varieties hold spiritual meanings within Daoism and Buddhism. The lotus symbolizes spiritual growth from the mud of worldliness to the blossom of enlightenment.3 The peach symbolizes immortality.4 The gourd represents a wish for numerous offspring.5
 
Jade ranges in color from brilliant apple green to subtle grayish blue to pure white. Artists took advantage of this natural tonal variation to create startlingly lifelike vegetation. Their seemingly miraculous skill transformed an unyielding material into juicy lettuce leaves, plump peaches, and translucent lotus blossoms.

 
CITATIONS 


1 Lyons, Elizabeth. “Chinese Jades.” Penn Museum, 1978, https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/chinese-jades/. Accessed 16 April 2022. 
 
2 “Chinese Jades.” 
 
3 “Lotus.” Philadelphia Museum of Art, https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/318939. Accessed 26 April 2022. 

4 Sun, Jason. “Chinese Hardstone Carvings.” The Met, June 2016, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hard/hd_hard.htm. Accessed 16 April 2022. 

5 Howard, Samantha, “Myth and Magic in the East Asian Ivory and Jade Collections.” Text modified by Glenn Roadley. The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, 2 May 2021, https://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/myth-and-magic-in-the-east-asian-ivory-and-jade-collections/. Accessed 16 April 2022.

Fruit, Flowers, and Vegetables in Chinese Jade

Loie Fuller

Loie Fuller, from the Actors and Actresses series (N45, Type 1) for Virginia Brights Cigarettes

Miss Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller

Created by Noa Rui-Piin Weiss Loie Fuller is a modern dance icon, but relatively few photographs of her remain. Ironically, this follows from her dedication to preserving ownership over her work. Fuller was invested in maintaining control of her artistry by pursuing copyright for her performances. When she did seek out documentation, she preferred posing for staged, portrait-style photographs. Yet the most common representations of her are posters and drawings created by other artists. The proliferation of promotional materials made by venues and dancers imitating her work have created tension in the archive. In the end, we are forced to reckon with Fuller’s oeuvre through the exact thing she strove to avoid: other people’s transcriptions of her vision.

Mi'Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, Ed.D. is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist who moves between realms of oral history, art, media & ritual to produce forward-facing cultural projects and events. As a Huntington Library Short-Term Fellow, Mi'Jan is researching Octavia E. Butler's archives. She is also a 2023 Fulbright Specialist Awardee, a 2023-2024 New America Us@250 inaugural Fellow, and an expert speaker for the U.S. Department of State. 

Previously, Mi'Jan curated and hosted Unfinished Network's 2022 salon on the theme of multiracial democracy with CNN's Van Jones and MSNBC's Maria Teresa Kumar, and led the Gloria Steinem Initiative's public policy digital storytelling pilot at Smith College.

One of Mi'Jan's greatest joys is connecting to audiences through her story-rich talks at a range of institutions, from Carnegie Hall to the Institute of American Indian Arts to SXSW. Making history contemporary, personal and futures-dependent, she surfaces the stories that need to be heard.

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A small tin box with a sliding lid, partially opened to reveal a piece of paper covered in handwriting.

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Free Black Women’s Private Pleasures and Rest

Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is a Puerto Rican curator and writer, and currently Assistant Curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum. Previously, she was the 2018–2020 Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and has also worked at the Video Data Bank and The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. She has collaborated with several film festivals, and was selected to be the Inaugural Curatorial Fellow for the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 2021. She is a member of Blue Sky/The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts Exhibitions Committee and is Michigan state representative for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. She holds an MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BA from the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez.

Interior view, Treasury Department exhibits in the United States Government Building.

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Panorama of Possessions: Film, Photography, and the War of 1898

Wendyliz Martinez is 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She earned a PhD in English and African American Studies at Penn State University. She is a City College of New York and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow alumnus. She is writing about how Black girlhood is represented in film, social media, and literature. Particularly, she is interested in how Afro-Caribbean women writers depict Black girlhood compared to U.S. Black women writers. She also researches Black portrait photography from the 19th Century and beyond and its influence on Black visual culture. 

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A young girl looks out of the window of a log cabin. The window is covered with newspapers.

Reconstructing Black Girlhood: Reading Photos Alongside Journal Entries

Shweta Sachdeva Jha is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is an Associate Professor of English at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Her research lies within interstices of histories, archives and literature anchored by a feminist core. She did her doctoral studies as a Felix Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research publications range from studies of contemporary children’s picture books in India, history of tawa’if (courtesans and Nautch Girls) in colonial India to digital archives on college women and twentieth century genre fiction in Urdu by Muslim women. Recently awards and small grants have helped her begin a new journey into digital history, archives and writing on the visual arts. 

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Bathing Women: Desire, Wonder, and Water in Versions of a Persian Tale

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is a Taiwanese-American artist/curator and writer based in Kamberri/Canberra, Australia. Her research and interdisciplinary practice is informed by her heritage with a focus on contested histories and collective memory. She is interested in varying forms of creative collaboration and the use of text as visual material. 

Liu is Publication Manager at _Art Monthly Australasia_, Australasia’s flagship visual arts publication, and the Events & Collections Officer at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University (ANU), where she manages the centre's gallery and collection.  

She holds a Master of Museum and Heritage Studies and a double degree with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts (French & International Relations) from the ANU. Liu studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris on exchange in 2019. 

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Illustrating Taiwan: Travelogues and Their Visual Narratives

keondra bills freemyn is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a DMV-based archivist, writer, Wikipedian, and former diplomat originally from South Central, Los Angeles. keondra serves as Archives Director at Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists and operates the small press 67th Street Storytellers. A poet, essayist, and scholarly writer, she is author of the poetry collection _Things You Left Behind_ and is founder of Black Women Writers Project, a digital archival initiative highlighting the contributions of Black women and gender-expansive writers to the literary canon. Her research interests include digital archiving, memory work, and Black cultural production.

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A sepia tone carte-de-visite of a young woman, captured at the Ball & Thomas Photographic Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Standing in front of an elaborate outdoor backdrop, a dark-haired woman poses before the camera, slightly smiling, dressed in a floor length checkered dress with her hair styled in a chignon. She holds a feathered dark hat in her proper left hand, with her proper right hand resting on the high back of an ornate wooden chair. The front of the chair, which faces the camera, features a patterned fabric seat, scroll and floral carvings, and an oval painting of a man and child on the chair’s back.

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