"Restoring the Minoans" Featured in The New Yorker

By mp4071@nyu.edu
10/24/2017

The New Yorker recently featured ISAW's exhibition Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans in the latest Goings on about Town. The review discusses the exhibition's display of Minoan material and Evansian artifacts, including a beautiful large drawing by the Swiss draftsman Émile Gilliéron (made before 1914) which exemplifies the audacity, and also the imagination, of Evans’s "reconstitution" project at Knossos. These objects are juxtaposed with Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price's two-channel video A RESTORATION, created in 2012 when she was invited to use materials from the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers to create a new piece. In A RESTORATION, "Evans’s quixotic construction of an ancient utopia becomes a dystopic metaphor for encyclopedic organizations of knowledge and human identity."

Read The New Yorker review here.

Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans is open through January 7, 2018:
Closed Monday and Tuesday 
Wednesday-Sunday: 11am-6pm
Friday: 11am-8pm; free guided tour at 6 pm
Free admission

Image: Émile Gilliéron fils
Restored View of the Queen’s Megaron
Watercolor drawing mounted on card
H. 33.5 cm; W. 47.5 cm
After the Queen’s Megaron, Knossos
ca. 1931
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford: Evans Fresco Drawing E/4 Image
© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford