American Art and Architecture Commons^™

The U.S.–Mexican War: Visualizing Contested Spaces From Parlor To Battlefield, Erika Pazian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S.-Mexican War[1] (1846-1848) was a watershed event that transformed the North American continent politically, socially, and ideologically. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico lost approximately half of its national territory in the north, and the United States acquired the modern states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and Wyoming. Both nations were plagued by internal conflicts after the war, and each was plunged into civil war within fifteen years of its conclusion.

During this time of turmoil, Mexican and U.S. artists created and recreated myriad images …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Painting Outside Of The Lines: How Race Assignment Can Be Rethought Through Art, Giovanni Mella-Velazquez

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

For centuries art has been used to make us think about our own human experiences. Unfortunately, works usually reflect the era which they were painted in; this has led to various artists showing, maintaining, and therefore reinforcing racist thoughts in our cultures. Art can be used to create a new narrative for our race assignments and their meanings. The idea of loving one's roots has been prevalent in many cultures, but in art form a disconnect between history and the everyday experience can arise which could miss the mark in helping us redefine our own race. Therefore, artwork which empowers …

Mammy And Aunt Jemima: Keeping The Old South Alive In Popular Visual Culture, Angela G. Athnasios

Honors College Theses

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, American popular visual culture produced racist portrayals of Black Americans. Literature, illustrations, minstrelsy, film, and television are notorious for promoting such unflattering images. Each of these media typified African Americans as exaggerated caricatures with dark skin, bulging eyes, bright-red lips, and goofy smiles. The creators of these stereotypes project their racist beliefs into popular culture. This in turn heavily influences the way other races view people of African descent, as well as how Black people view themselves. From mammies, to Jezebels, to pickaninnies, and everything in between, the message ultimately conveyed in these …

Dating Deborah Hall: A Portrait Reconsidered, Brian E. Hack

Publications and Research

The elaborate, full-length portrait of Deborah Hall (1766, Brooklyn Museum) is one of the landmarks of Colonial portraiture, having earned its place in the canon for the pictorial innovations displayed by its creator, the enigmatic William Williams (1727-1791). The dominant narrative holds that Hall, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Philadelphia printer David hall, tends her roses in an imaginary Garden of Love, surroundings Williams adapted from symbols of beauty and chastity found in emblem books of the period. The scholarly assumption is that the painting served to promote Deborah's marital suitability to potential suitors visiting the Hall residence. The current …

Making Memories: A Consumer-Based Model Of Authenticity Applied To Living History Sites, Muhammet Kesgin, Babak Taheri, Rajendran S. Murthy, Juilee Decker, Martin Joseph Gannon

Articles

Purpose: Underpinned by the consumer-based model of authenticity (CBA), this study investigated whether leisure involvement, object-based and existential authenticity, host sincerity, and engagement stimulate positive memorable visitor experiences in a distinctive commercial hospitality setting: a living history site. Methodology: Quantitative data were gathered from living history site visitors (n=1004), with partial least squares structural equation modelling used to test the hypothesized relationships. Findings: The results confirm the inclusion of the hypothesized relationships between leisure involvement, sincerity, and authenticity, relative to engagement and subsequent memorability. The findings suggest that engagement can be a predictor of positive memorable experience, contingent on CBA …

Of Homespun Opulence: An Analysis Of Jane Freilicher's Pastoral Abstraction In Parts Of A World, Grace Wolfe

Anthós

During a period of bold abstraction and American individuality, Jane Freilicher’s landscape and still-life paintings stand out for their figurative nature. Her use of color and tone to conjure the simple pleasure of life at home enrapture the viewer in a simultaneously universal yet personal experience. Upon closer inspection of her work, it becomes clear that although figurative in nature, Freilicher’s paintings abstract the pastoral to express identity in an urban environment. This essay examines Freilicher’s 1987 work, Parts of a World, in context with pastoral works throughout art history to understand the ways in which Freilicher both reflected …

Understanding The Importance Of Statues: Symbols Of Racism In Modern Society, Theresa Vanwormer

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

Whether it is a monument, statue, plaque, or mural, the values and ideologies that are memorialized on public land reflect what reality the people of a country are choosing to remember. The United States’ political and racial history has led to the creation of controversial memorials, including memorials that honor the Confederacy and its leaders, influencing moral concepts based in racism, violence, and oppression. The continued veneration of these symbols on public land sends the message to the Black community that their oppressors are honored as heroes and that the society they live in still allows for their abuse. Annette-Gordon …

Willoughby, Ginny (Fa 1379), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 1379. “Restoration and Tradition: Andy Mills’ Work on the Felts Log House,” a paper written by WKU student Ginny Willoughby about the Felts log house, a Logan County, Kentucky structure now situated on the campus of Western Kentucky University. The paper details the history and design of the house and the process of its current restoration. Includes comments from Andy Mills, interviewed by Willoughby as he performed restoration work on the house.

The Integration Of Art, Architecture, And Identity: Alfred Kastner, Louis Kahn, And Ben Shahn At Jersey Homesteads, Daniel S. Palmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the New Deal, the United States government created the Jersey Homesteads co-operative in order to help a group of Jewish immigrant garment workers from New York City during the economic downturn of the Great Depression. This dissertation examines how a 1930s utopian enclave utilized modernist art and architecture to express the radical back-to-the-land agrarian idealism and socialist ideology of its settlers. The flat-roofed, concrete buildings that housed these Jewish garment workers were designed by German architect Alfred Kastner (1900-1975), with his then unknown assistant Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974). These unornamented, functionalist buildings adapted avant-garde European architectural forms into an …

Hagan, Brooklyn (Fa 1378), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 1378. “The Felts Log House: Past, Present and Future,” a paper written by WKU student Brooklyn Hagan about the Felts log house, a Logan County, Kentucky structure now situated on the campus of Western Kentucky University. The paper details the history of the house and its restoration. Includes comments from Andy Mills, interviewed by Hagan as he performed restoration work on the house.

The Stylistic Development Of Jean Despujols (1886-1965), Kelly M. Ward

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the life and most extant works by Jean Despujols. The French and later naturalized American painter, writer, poet, philosopher, deep-thinker, and mystic was best known for his Neoclassical and academic style. This thesis briefly discusses the artist’s beginnings as a young painter at the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux and in Paris, his sketches in the trenches of the First World War, his time at the Villa Medicis after winning the distinguished Rome Prize, and his paintings and thoughts as a philosopher and political writer throughout his life. An outstanding …

The Adobe Frontier, Christopher J. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

The Adobe Frontier is a documentary film about Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello—together known as “Studio Rael San Fratello” —and their work connecting contemporary technology with the legacy of pottery making and adobe architecture in the Southwest United States.

Matson Jones, Jasper Johns, And Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking The Boundaries Of Advertising And Art, Ximena Santiago

Theses and Dissertations

Matson Jones, formed by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, has scarcely been the focus of art historical scholarship. This thesis examines works created for New York City department store window displays, revealing that the Matson Jones collaborations were rooted in intersubjectivity and challenge historical hierarchies of high and low art.

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …

Benjamin West's Hybrid Identity: The Construction And Reconstruction Of An Anglo-American Artist, Caroline Strolic

Honors College

How does one come to be known as the “father of American art,” especially after having never lived in an independent United States? The painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) is an enigma in the history of American art. Although he spent the majority of his life in London, where he worked to establish himself as the leader of the English school of painting, late in life he attempted to portray himself as a genuine American who played a major role in the development of American art. John Galt’s early biography of West, published in 1816, has proved to be instrumental in …

The Line Of Dichotomy: Standpoints And Meaning In Anne Truitt's Art, Charles J. Parsons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Some of Anne Truitt’s formal strategies—such as using the separate faces of the work to force the viewer to engage in it sequentially—build or depend on real or literal facts of the “situation” of the artwork. If this is the case, how do such works escape being reducible to their objecthood, their literal properties of size and shape? And how do they produce effects that are not mere experience or mere affective response? The answer I offer is that they depend on conventions and interpretation.

Much of my analysis focuses on the ways Truitt makes her intentions visible through form, …