OKCMOA 2026/2027 (ART)
Updated: 2 days ago
The Museum seeks curious, flexible community members to help us engage with visitors. Docents help OKCMOA deliver important programs by leading tours through the Museum, answering questions about the artwork on display, and more. I am training to serve as a volunteer docent at OKCMOA.
As a specialist professor in cultural journalism, I have explored art as a space for representing identity, politics, and history. Some of my essays have been published in peer-reviewed journals that define the link between literature and art. For example, my analysis of the relationship between Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher centers on impossible realities, recursive imagery, and mathematical metaphors for the universe.
CAVALLIN CALANCHE, CLAUDIA. POSSIBILITIES OF THE BORGES METAPHOR. Atenea (Concepc.) [online]. 2008, n. 498, pp. 45-54. ISSN 0718-0462. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-04622008000200004.
This study explores the possible relationship between the work of Jorge Luis Borges and certain mathematical representations of the universe through metaphor. We go beyond the formal linguistic study of metaphor to explore its limitless possibilities in representation as a translator of impossible realities. From “El Aleph” (1945) and the “Biblioteca de Babel” (1941), we have taken images constructed through metaphors inserted into the universe (another metaphor as well). We assume the possibility of the universe as a library, sphere, or great cyclical volume in which a series of relations are carried out in an intertextual fashion in the broad sense of the word, and that would include, as texts, both visual formats and spatial representations. A cyclical and hexagonal universe is a quality that not only appears repeatedly in Borges’ literature, but is also present in works that seem to dialogue directly with his texts, such as the drawings of M.C. Escher, or the spherical representations of Pascal, among others. The common element in all cases is the use of metaphor as a resource to represent what cannot be represented: the unknown, intangible, and infinite. This essay aims to bring us closer to an image of the universe in and through Borges’ texts and to a reading of Borges through some mathematical metaphors for the universe.
“Fictions are concentrated in the library nurtured by AI”: A Conversation with Jorge Volpi
February 17, 2025
“All I am is literature,” says Kafka in the epigraph, while Remedios Varo’s painting Creation of the Birds illustrates the cover as an admirable visual prototype. Within, multiple chapters include reflections describing Giotto’s Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Francisco de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Mustard Jar, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, and a varied succession inherited from the visual, including Pere Borrell del Caso’s Escaping Criticism. Leading us among the high-sounding consequences of existence, using words and pictures, Volpi gives us an indelible image of origins to arrive, after multiple twists of history, to the evolution of experience, of the vision of a world where the superego, ego, and id question the values and free the imagination from its immense prejudices.
