Medium Studies

Medium Studies are short essays that focus attention on materials, media, and techniques.

Volume 5: Issue 1

Medium Studies Colonial Materiality: Silver’s Alchemy of Trauma and Salvation Helen Hills

Embedded in power relations, coloniality, and matters of purification, early modern silver was a particularly generative site. Might its peculiar paradoxes be usefully thought in terms of a materiality of trauma?

Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion

MAVCOR began publishing Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion in 2014. In 2017 we selected a new name, MAVCOR Journal. Articles published prior to 2017 are considered part of Conversations and are listed as such under Volumes in the MAVCOR Journal menu.

Medium Studies Tears of the Sun: The Naturalistic and Anthropomorphic in Inca Metalwork Emily C. Floyd

Why did the Inca approach metal so differently from other sculptural media, most notably stone?

Medium Studies Printing the Body of Christ on Fabric Suzanne Karr Schmidt

While most Renaissance and Baroque engravings, etchings, and woodcuts were printed on paper, some extraordinary impressions were produced on silk or linen. Contact relics provided a devotional inspiration for the most evocative of these prints on fabric.

Medium Studies Chalkware, Plaster, Plaster of Paris Sally M. Promey

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Europe and the United States, chalkware accomplished for three-dimensional devotional objects what chromolithography managed for images in two dimensions.