Contemporary Art Commons^™

Silhouettes Of A Silent Female’S Authority: A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Perspective On The Art Of Kara Walker, Angelica E. Perez

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998.

In a time where one ...

Ecopsychology Revisited: For Whom Do The “Nature” Bells Toll? (In Progress), Jorge Conesa-Sevilla

Jorge Conesa-Sevilla PhD

"[...] A recurring theme in “ecopsychology,” in its present and inchoate form, is the continuation and extension of “spirit” in juxtaposition with other privileged and/or habitually preferred (perhaps even psychologically needed) practices or causes (spirituality-somethings, farcical chemistry or physics, yoga, coopted and partially understood indigenous lore, extreme diets, and various fetishes). That these mostly emotion-laden, unreasoned, and/or idiosyncratic amalgamations are prevalent says more about the psychological needs of the persons espousing these sentiments or beliefs (their hobbies or interests) than about “nature.” Certainly, it is nothing new that humans project their hopes, desperations, and wish-fulfillment thinking onto the shifting ...

Tragedy And The Vicious: Moral Education In Aristotle’S Poetics And Future Applications To Contemporary Art, Erika Brown

Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This project interprets Aristotle’s Poetics through a morally educative approach. More specifically, expanding on past research of Poetics by individuals such as Isaiah Smithson, this project will examine the affective influence of tragedy on morally unknowing audience members of vicious character types. Through the associations between the sensory experiences incorporated in a tragedy and moral messages portrayed in the plot, the vicious character can begin a process of becoming morally knowing subjects. In others words, this experience with morally charged tragedies can teach vicious characters what is morally good. Moreover, the vicious audience members can learn how what is ...

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas ...

Murakami-Ego : Collective Culpability And Selective Retention., Yun Kweon Jeong

UofL Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to argue that Murakami’s art expresses the Japanese’s psychological suffering by showing their struggle between remembering themselves as victims but forgetting themselves as aggressors. I apply the Mitscherlichs’ psychoanalisys of the Germans’s psyche to the Japanese because their people have had similar experiences. The first section examines the history of Japan surrounding WWII in order to demonstrate its effects on the Japanese people’s psyche. The second section introduces Otaku to better understand Murakami’s art. The third section examines how selective retention works on the Japanese’s psyche. The fourth ...

Let's Keep In Touch : Conversations About Access And Tactility., Whitney E. B. Mashburn

UofL Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Let’s Keep in Touch: Conversations about Tactility, a project collaboratively organized by social practice artist Carmen Papalia and curator Whitney Mashburn, presents conversations between Papalia and artists selected by Mashburn, in regard to tactile access of the chosen artists’ works. The project aims to challenge visual biases in museum engagement, through dialogue with living artists.

Carmen Papalia takes social practice in a new direction as he applies it to the topic of accessibility. Using the tool of conversation, he creates strategic infrastructural activism and prompts exploration of non-visual perception.

In this thesis, Papalia’s work will be examined and ...

Sondage Autour De L’Exposition Internationale Pour La Palestine De 1978, Nasser Soumi

Artl@s Bulletin

En 1978, une Exposition Internationale pour la Palestine se tint à Beyrouth dans le but d’exposer les œuvres d’artistes internationaux solidaires du peuple palestinien, dans un quartier contrôlé par les Palestiniens et fréquenté par des militants libanais et arabes pro-Palestiniens. Lors de l’exposition, Nasser Soumi réalisa un sondage auprès du public palestino-libanais. A cette époque, son travail artistique ne correspondait pas à l’art révolutionnaire pratiqué par la majorité des artistes palestiniens. Sa préoccupation était la problématique existentielle de l’être humain—y compris celle des Palestiniens. Au-delà du public, il s’agissait donc à travers ce ...

Past Disquiet: From Research To Exhibition, Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti

Artl@s Bulletin

An exhibition of an exceptional scale and scope took place in Beirut in the middle of the civil war and today, its archival and documentary traces have been almost entirely lost. The International Art Exhibition for Palestine opened in the Spring of 1978, comprising some 200 works donated by artists hailing from nearly 30 countries, to be a seed collection for a museum in exile. This is a transcript of a presentation of the transformation of research into an exhibition format and a virtual walkthrough of the show Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine ...

Between Paris And London: Contacts And Exchanges Of South American Artists In Europe (1950-1970), Maria De Fatima Morethy Couto Dr

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper calls attention to a network of artists, dealers, and critics from Europe and South America thanks to whom, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, Paris and London welcomed and fostered a certain form of South American avant-garde art. Accordingly, it discusses the European reception given to five South American artists active in Paris and London —Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Sérgio Camargo, Jesús Rafael Soto and Julio Le Parc—whose artistic practices were sometimes related to kineticism. It highlights the impact they had on the European art scene, as well as the role of several cultural agents who ...

L’Art Espagnol De L’Europe À L’Argentine : Mobilités Nord-Sud, Transferts Et Réceptions (1890-1920), Laura Karp Lugo

Artl@s Bulletin

Au tournant du XX^e siècle, Buenos Aires était une vitrine privilégiée pour la diffusion des artistes espagnols qui, pour promouvoir leur œuvre, ne bénéficiaient dans leur pays que d’une faible structure. Réfléchissant sur les imbrications entre la situation du marché de l’art espagnol et la réception des artistes espagnols en Argentine de 1890 à 1920 environ, cette étude contribue à éclairer les raisons de cette immigration massive et la manière dont ces circulations artistiques se sont opérées. Cet article analyse des questions d’identité et d’histoire du goût, dans une approche intercontinentale qui relève de la ...

Le Triangle Des Circulations Artistiques Transnationales, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Catherine Dossin

Artl@s Bulletin

L'étude des circulations artistiques à l’échelle mondiale est désormais un champ en pleine expansion ; mais celle des circulations transcontinentales reste un domaine plus réduit. De même, alors que les études de transferts artistiques et culturels bilatéraux sont désormais chose courante, il est plus difficile de trouver des études dans lesquelles un système triangulaire est mis en évidence – où la circulation artistique, qu’il s’agisse d’œuvres, d’artistes, d’esthétiques ou de styles, fait intervenir un nombre au moins ternaire de référentiels culturels, et où les effets de transformation, d’adaptation et de réadaptation sont donc particulièrement ...

Individualism In Portraiture: Accounting For The People In Our Lives In Identity Representation, Erin Miller

Honors Projects

This joint research and creative honors project challenges the traditional painted portrait of Western culture. I do this through a study of the history of portraiture compared to construction of identity in the contemporary world. I argue that the traditional portrait of a single and serious individual doesn’t truly express what it means to be human today. Instead, I propose that a “sociological portrait” may be more accurate because it accounts for both the large, societal constructs that shape our identity as well as our more personal and emotional states. I argue that the most accurate way to unite ...

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government ...

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

Sanitation Celebrations: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’S Performative Monument With/For/By Sanmen, Diya Vij

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

This thesis argues that Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work teaches us something new about what monument-making can be when it is socially engaged. The durational process and motivating desire to elicit gratitude for the DSNY labor force of Ukeles’s residency in the Sanitation Department raises pressing questions about the conventional nature of how monuments are typically conceived and executed and to whom these works are directed. Analysis of her three-part performance Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of New York City’s First Art Parade, just one engagement within her long-term performative monument, explicates the intricacies of Ukeles’s process-based performative ...

A Network Of Experience: Community Building And Social Restructuring In Fluxus, Margaret Sherer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis argues that the group dynamic of Fluxus and the artwork produced by the group functioned as agents in the cultivation and maintenance of a Fluxus community that developed an experimental, object-based approach to societal formation. I argue that a primary goal of Fluxus was to use their artistic production and their association to establish alternative modes of social interaction that were simultaneously plagiarizing and criticizing conventional social and political institutions.

Salvador Dalí, Surrealism, And The Luxury Fashion Industry, Chantal Houglan

College of William & Mary Undergraduate Honors Theses

My research offers a unique look at why as a surrealist artist Dalí felt the need explore the luxury fashion industry, given the fact that he achieved much of his recognition and success as a Surrealist painter. Salvador Dalí’s contributions to fashion may be entirely underrated, but I argue that they are his most truly Surrealist works of art.

Elsewhere, Amber Law

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses the work in Elsewhere, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at East Tennessee State University in the Reece Museum, located in Johnson City, Tennessee. The exhibition is displayed from March 1 through March 31, 2016 and consists of 17 color photographs and 3 videos representing a body of work that visually communicates the photographer’s interest in transient lifestyles.

The influence and research regarding the concept is communicated by a focus on artists, literature and art historical knowledge that pertain to Law’s work. The artists included are Rineke Dijkstra, Jocelyn Lee, Lise Sarfati, Stephen Shore ...

Site Responsibility : Eco-Art And Environmental Ethics In The Anthropocene., Nicholas Flint Collins

UofL Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary theory for examining the ethical dimensions of contemporary eco-art, based on the conceptual interplay between the art historical discourse of site specificity and philosophy of environmental ethics. It considers how eco-art redefines site specificity as eco-ethically-oriented site reform, and argues that eco-artists’ site-reformative actions are not only environmentally impactful and beneficial, but are also site-responsible because they realize humankinds’ moral obligations to respond to the human-caused ecological crises of the present by improving the degraded conditions of specific sites and amending site-destructive conduct. Site-reformative eco-artworks in turn yield variable propositional content that demonstrates site responsibility ...

Un-Natural Histories: The Specimen As Site Of Knowledge Production In Contemporary Art, Helen Gregory

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of the primary functions of museums is the deployment of knowledge through collected artifacts. In the case of natural history museums, these collections consist largely of preserved specimens that all share the marks of the human hand as a result of the processes of preservation and display. Such processes result in the transformation of nature into objects of material culture. Given the challenges that arise from shifting definitions of the natural history specimen in an age when life is being re-defined and re-configured, and living matter is treated as a mutable and expressive substance, I question how our perception ...