Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Maru Ceballos’ #Dante2018 Illustrations

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Maru Ceballos is a visual artist known for her striking, inky, horror style. During the #Dante2018 social media initiative, Ceballos created a variety of pieces based on the Divine Comedy, and her work was used as promotional art by Museo Mitre for the exhibition “Los círculos del Dante.” Pictured above are a few of her pieces from this series. Clockwise from the top right is an illustration for Paradiso, an illustration for Purgatorio, a portrait of Dante, and an illustration for Inferno.

“Maru Ceballos, autora/ilustradora de los libros Los Idiotas y Muertos de Amor y de Miedo es diseñadora gráfica y desde hace un par de años ha trabajado sobre la Divina Comedia ilustrándola. ‘Si bien lo había intentado hace mucho, no lo había leído antes,’ confiesa Maru que arrancó con una edición en verso que después perdió, pero no fue hasta hace un par de años que retomó su lectura, esta vez con una edición en prosa. ‘Fue así que agarré el libro y empecé a leer. Pero no lo hice en función de ilustrarlo. En realidad me dieron ganas de ilustrarlo cuando lo empecé a leer. Me rompió tanto la cabeza el manejo de imágenes visuales que tiene el Dante que empecé a hacer esquemas, porque la obra es larga, compleja y muy simbólica. Cuando avancé en la lectura me di cuenta que ameritaba una ilustración más conciente y empecé de cero, prestando atención a los simbolismos.'” — Interview with Barbi Couto, “La Divina Comedia, un libro para descubrir y descubrirse,” La nueva Mañana (July 3, 2018)

To view more of Maru Ceballos’ artwork, you can follow her on VSCO, Instagram, and Twitter.

Relatedly, you can read an interview with Maru Ceballos here.

See other posts related to #Dante2018 here.

Contributed by Pablo Maurette (Florida State University)

“Wandering from the Straight Path of Clarity,” review of “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists”

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“You may feel, at times, as if you’ve been handed a map, and then told that the map may or may not be accurate, may or may not relate to anything in the real world, may or may not be entirely a fiction, or a random design concocted by some clever trickster to mislead you. That is how the title of a new show at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art — ‘The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists’ — relates to the work on view, by more than 40 artists from 18 African countries.

“The exhibition is shoehorned into spaces not quite big enough for anything to breathe comfortably, filling temporary galleries, stairwells and passage spaces on four floors of the mostly subterranean museum. The current exhibition, curated by Simon Njami, is slightly smaller than the original Dante exhibition he presented in Frankfurt last spring, but it still sprawls, both in its physical layout (the route through its various rooms requires careful navigation) and intellectually.

“Consider one of the best works in the show, a large-scale drawing by Julie Mehretu, in which a finely etched suggestion of architectural facades is overlaid with a storm of delicate lines, smudges and erasures. In the catalogue, published in conjunction with the Frankfurt display, her work is listed as belonging to the ‘Purgatory’ part of the presentation; in Washington, it is in the ‘Inferno’ room. It isn’t the only work to migrate from one celestial realm to another, and those migrations suggest that the basic template borrowed from Dante is not to be taken too seriously.” […]    –Phillip Kennicott, The Washington Post, April 17, 2015

See also our post on the first iteration of Njami’s exhibition, featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s museum.

Le LA du Monde a film directed by Ghislaine Avan

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“Tap-dancer, choreographer, and video artist, Ghislaine Avan has been working since 2006 to achieve a choreographic and transmedia work inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“The diptych includes a choreographic ensemble of 10 pieces entitled Seuil (Threshold), and a film entitled Le LA du Monde, the result of filming, since 2006, people around the world, from all backgrounds, nationalities and in all languages, reading an excerpt from Dante’s poem.”

Of the project’s goals, the artist lists the following:

  • “Celebrating on September 14, 2021, the 700th Anniversary of Dante’s death.
  • “Realizing/Creating a worldwide installation entitled Divine Babel: the simultaneous screening of the film Le LA du Monde with the 100 cantos of the Comedy projected on 100 screens, located in 100 different places around the world.
  • “Representing all continents to make this Babel truly divine.”

View the English trailer for “Le LA du Monde” on YouTube.

Contributed by Ghislaine Avanghi

Galway 2020: Poet Rita Ann Higgins compares it to Dante’s Inferno

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“Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins has said her city has left it ‘too late’ to appoint a new artistic director for its controversial European capital of culture 2020 project, and should set up a team of artists to provide a creative lead instead.

“Ms Higgins, who is a member of Aosdána, has also called on the Galway 2020 board to ‘take the project by the scruff of the neck and come out fighting.’

“The poet has compared the project’s current state to the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno in a new piece of work she has published this week.

“The poem, entitled ‘Capital of Cock-a-Leekie Inferno (9 circles of 2020 Hell)’, tracks the course of the project since Galway secured the European capital of culture designation in 2016, and focuses on recent funding cuts to artistic groups accepted for the bid book.” […]    –Lorna Siggins, Irish Times, October 17, 2018

Chris Orr, Divine Comedy – not waving but drowning (2018)

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chris-orr-divine-comedy-not-waving-but-drowning“As part of the ongoing Academicians in Focus series, The Miserable Lives of Fabulous Artists exhibition presents around 28 new unique works on paper by Chris Orr RA. His eclectic range of subjects includes some of the great names from art history, such as John Constable, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso, all of whom he depicts using a characteristically humorous visual language. With extraordinary attention to detail, Orr portrays each artist in a scenario that elaborates inventively around well known elements of their life and art.

“‘Artists have a lonely job and success is often elusive,’ says Orr. ‘Life in the studio is not all it’s cracked up to be, but it is there that dross can be turned into gold. Each of my Miseries is subjected to the cliché and reputations that haunt them.

“‘In his paintings and etchings Reginald Marsh gave us a vision of a dystopian ‘utopia’ in Manhattan and on Coney Island Beach. […] There are photographs of Marsh drawing at Coney Island, dressed in a grey flannel suit – a very different outfit to the holidaymakers. He stands like Dante on his epic journey, observing the bodies of the tormented souls around him.'” — Artwork description from Royal Academy Shop

See more of Chris Orr’s work on his website.

Contributed by Claudia Rossignoli

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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