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In Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene's Untitled #68, a woman appears to sleep inside a couch. Eyes closed, her face looks tired yet tense, like she is caught up in a bad dream. The work plays with visibility; the woman is illuminated by light, but the cushions balance on top of her like they are meant to her from the world as she rests. Behind the couch is complete darkness; this couch appears to be not in a home but in a vacuum. It’s an otherworldly scene, even more so due to the woman’s soft white dress with lace detailing...

"Soon, it will no longer be possible to delegate one's death to others. It will no longer be possible for that person to die in our place. Not only will we condemned to assume our own demise, unmediated, but farewells will be few and far between. The hour of autophagy is upon us and, with it, the death of community, as there is no community worthy of its name in which saying one's last farewell, that is remembering the living at the moment of death, becomes impossible.⁠" —Achille Mbembe, "The Universal Right to Breath," translated by Carolyn Shread (Critical Inquiry...

Andrea Eis (American, b. 1952)Antigone and Kreon47 x 32.5 inDiptych, archival pigment prints on cotton rag mounted on aluminumGift of Van Hillard, Davidson College Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Emeritus The torso is the true abode of the mind. That is, according to the Ancient Greeks; (φρήν/phrḗn) may be translated as "mind, resolve, will, heart" and refers anatomically to the abdomen. On the left, Kreon’s abdomen resembles the kind of stone-faced masonry meant to fortify cities—and fortification was precisely the concern of this king of Thebes in the Sophoklean tragedy Antigone. The contention between the two characters above, Kreon and...

Ruth Asawa (American, 1926-2013)Untitled (S. 152), 1962Copper wireOn loan from the collection of Michael ’85 and Alison Hall Mauzé ‘84 Ruth Asawa, born in 1926 to Japanese immigrants, started life in California as the middle child of seven. Her parents were farmers, and she started working on the farm before and after school at the age of six. Growing up through the Great Depression, Asawa already had a difficult life on top of the discrimination she faced as a Japanese American. When World War II started, Asawa and the rest of her family were placed into internment camps in Arkansas....