Rods in the Fire

Moving backward before I move forward. I moved back home. Reorganizing my life and mind. Clearly neither has been interesting enough to write about over the last three months but now that I have literally nothing to do I guess I'll try to fill in a rough sketch of what I did/what I'm doing/what I will do.



I finished my senior thesis on the murals of San Bartolo. This has been my primary vocation for the last year. Thinking about and ultimately writing a way too long tome on this subject, I won't bore you with details but you can bore yourself by reading the whole thing (without images, which are semi-classified, email me if you want to see anything specific) here: Ancient Art & Contemporary Agency.









The process of nerding out included presenting a short paper on the same topic at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November. This entailed a pre-Thanksgiving flight to San Francisco, unexpected engagement as panel chair, one mission mission, and numerous museum trips with Belize friend Emily Gable.









Saw SF Moma for the first time, checked out this ladder that's forever as well as an ad or two.





Then at the Asian Art Museum we saw this crazy exhibit on ancient grave goods from Afghanistan, heavily funded by National Geographic so somewhat sensationalized but actually worth the hype. Pretty much all that exists in terms of Bronze Age Afghanistani art, so if you're in the area you should check it out. No photos allowed unfortunately. Was able to flick this cool Zhang Daqian forgery and a strange collection of miniature bottles from Japan.







After that it was a maelstrom of writing over thxgvg break, then several weeks of presenting and tying up loose ends. Boring stuff. So to continue the theme I'll wrap up with some highlights from my most recent visit to the Boston MFA. Went with Alex Dow et al to check out this Assyrian exhibit, which was unfortunately already closed. Instead saw an insane exhibit of portraits by Yousuf Karsh, who photographed pretty much every significant figure of the first half of the 20th century. Wandered around some chambers of the museum I usually avoid, which was cool, I took a class on Baroque art this semester so I had a somewhat heightened appreciation for a lot of the stuff I usually visually tune out, though European art still kind of bores me. This painting of the 7th plague of Egypt (above) is insane though. The artist studied early drawings of French explorers in Egypt to reconstruct the architecture, weird re-appropriation of ancient art. Also this steam google maps is cool.



So I guess that's pretty much it. Oh yeah, and I graduated. It snowed for three days straight immediately before my departure from Boston, a nice sendoff I guess. For now I am laying low. Looking for something interesting to do in somewhere interesting to be, let me know if you are on the same page with that. I have NO PLANS and no loan payments for about six months.


In texas for now,
Josh