Besides being the name of the heroine in The Tempest and the warning policemen read to the people they’re arresting, Miranda was the corn snake I owned from 1998 until her death in February 2010. I’m interested in snakes and I write about them a lot (see my novel, Lady of the Snakes, for instance), partly because of how deep and ambiguous their roots are in the culture. On the one hand, the serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, resulting in those anchors of human existence: sex, shame, hard work, pain in childbirth, and death. On the other, the Greeks venerated snakes as symbols (and sometimes actual vehicles) of healing, which is why you see pictures of them spiraling up staffs on the doors of ambulances and emergency rooms (caduceus). Because they shed, snakes symbolize rebirth. This wealth of associations, along with the visceral human response to the sight of one, makes the snake a natural mascot for a blog about a contemporary art museum. Doesn’t it?

Also, they’re beautiful. If you don’t believe me, check back often to see the rotating body of snake images—some made by members of ICA’s own installation crew!—exhibited on this site.

The image you see up there right now is from a painting by the 16th-century German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder. Cranach was much beloved by Marcel Duchamp, who I think of as the presiding genius of contemporary art. Duchamp once posed as Cranach’s Adam for a photograph by Man Ray, and he later made a series of etchings from details of Cranach’s work.

The name Miranda is derived from the Latin word “mirare”—to admire—and can mean watchtower, or vantage point. More literally it means something worth looking at, something worthy of admiration. I hope that will be as true of this blog itself as it is of its subject: the work in and workings of the Institute of Contemporary Art here at Penn.

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Rachel Pastan is ICA’s Staff Writer. When she’s not composing grants or retrieving dangling participles, she blogs about what goes on at a small but fabulous university-affiliated art museum. In her spare time she writes novels and teaches fiction writing. For more information, visit www.rachelpastan.com.