Digital Commons Network^™

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Spooky Stuff, Petra A. Szilagyi

Theses and Dissertations

A real imaginal exploration of the aesthetics of the supernatural.

Spit In My Mouth: Queer Intimacies, Material Intra-Actions, And Sensuous Becoming, Gm Keaton

Theses and Dissertations

This document describes my multidisciplinary art practice as it intersects with New Materialism, Queer and Affect theory, Ecology, and my embodied and experiential knowledge as a queer subject. The writing is divided into two categories. One is more theoretical, thinking through these different discourses. The other realizes them through relationships and intra-actions between my material kin and me. With these two modes of writing,I propose that embodied and felt knowing is as valid and illuminating as more traditional forms of knowledge. These sections are interdependent and resist linear logic, offering relational meanings to each reader as they find their way …

Yeezus Is Jesuz: Examining The Socio-Hermeneutical Transmediated Images Of Jesus Employed By Kanye West, Daniel White Hodge

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Kanye is enigmatic in many ways. His continuous reference to deity while still embracing a person like 452 makes him worth the study and effort to explore his contribution and effect in the Hip Hop cultural continuum. This article investigates, Kanye West from a theological and spiritual standpoint to provide insights from his theological aesthetics. While the ever-growing field of Hip Hop studies begins to explore religion in Hip Hop, the present work seeks to address this and develop new theologies/theories that fit both a Hip Hop and Black theology context. While the formal discipline of theology in the United …

Drawing As Language, Rebecca B. Whitson

Theses and Dissertations

All too often, the “I can’t draw” sentiment is believed by both the frustrated adolescent and adult alike. This is especially evident within the school environment. This paper aims to discuss how visual art --specifically drawing-- is structured, formed and expressed as a type of language, similar to a verbal, written, or physical one. This may give hope to even the most reluctant drawer that they can learn how to draw, opening another means of communication. An individual attains fluency when they are adept at drawing through the use of expression, technical, and observational skills, through practice and motivation, and …

Cultivating A Democratic Community In The Elementary Art Classroom, Kelly Fergus

Theses and Dissertations

Cultivating a more socially just, democratic classroom community is a best pedagogical practices qualitative case study. This study is designed to explore how three Virginia elementary art teachers define and create a democratic classroom community, inside their art rooms, through the implementation of various instructional strategies within the physical, social-cultural, and pedagogical spaces of their classrooms. Such instructional strategies may include a shift in power dynamics, student-centered art, choice-based art, and a big idea/real-world issue-orientated curriculum (ex: visual culture, social justice, democratic pedagogies). Each of the three selected participants were interviewed and asked to describe their classroom practices as well …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Below The Neck, Above The Knees, Desiree Dawn Kapler

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the act of violation in the context of trauma and healing through the use of personal narratives and experimental film. My research allows personal storytelling to transform into a larger and more universal theme of generational trauma and dysfunction. Through a feminist lens, I challenge social norms of body autonomy for the sick and abused, capitalism’s social effects on the poor, and passed down maternal lessons from the women who are doing the best that they can with the lives and opportunities that they have been given.

This work is created in spite of the labels my …

Pebbles Is A Girl That Doesn't Know Anything, Grace A. Kubilius

Theses and Dissertations

I am not quite sure how to be a woman. It’s complicated, contradictory and highly surveilled. I make videos, sculptures and wearable objects that attempt to rationalize my female identity. The body is a sustained fixture in my work: as an armature, as an absent actor for constructed environments, as fragment and as the literal inclusion of my image. It is through these various modes of dis/embodiment that I negotiate the complexities of gendered existence. Crumbling ceramic and paper objects, pieced fabric forms, videos, beauty products, and delicate flowers reference splintered narratives and unwieldy terrains. I consider the idea of …

New Patriarchies: A Turbulence Of Source And Subject, Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public …

Psychic Fax On Vibrate, Received On Phantom Limbo, Jake Borndal

Theses and Dissertations

I offer a cloud of observations about language and art. I will prioritize my questions about how language operates in art, the way it functions within my own studio practice, and locate aesthetic interstices throughout. There will be insights gleaned from the various orderers of order (Lacan, Saussure) and orderers of disorder (Derrida, Agamben), walks in terra-incognita, and even some poetry on my part. I will take this chance to orient myself among different structures and deconstructions that have piledup around language, aesthetics and art.

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …

Anonymous: The Occupy Movement And The Failure Of Representational Democracy, Jan Jagodzinski

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this essay I try to make the case that the Occupy Movement can be thought through as a Post-Situationist art event which requires that it be thought of in terms of its pragmatic effects and what it can ‘do’ in relation to its viral spreading around major urban centers of the globe. I further try to make my case by utilizing the conceptual tool kit of Deleuze and Guattari; hence such ideas as sense-event, territory, virtual, and actual are part of this repertoire. I then try to further the complexity of Post-Situationism by including hacktivism and exploring the importance …

(Pre)Determined Occupations: The Post-Colonial Hybridizing Of Identity And Art Forms In Third World Spaces, Amanda Alexander, Manisha Sharma

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, we present the effects of globalization on art forms in Peru and on teacher identity in India while exploring hybridization as an ongoing global paradigm in both contexts (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1979). Peruvian art forms are continuously shifting as global cultures meld and become more technologically connected, which ultimately brings about questions of authenticity. The identities of Indian art educators are evolving, and shifting indicating an assemblage or structure containing many parts working together to perform a particular function. In realizing its function, the structure can be named or its form made visible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). …

Warm Compression – Damp Gestures, Melanie Mclain

Theses and Dissertations

Thoughts on vulnerability, emotions, social interaction, self-awareness, skin, touching, bodily functions, and the combination of all these ideas into a confined space filled with heat and humidity just enough to leave you feeling damp and perhaps a bit sore.

Auto Tune, Dana Ollestad

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an overview of the source material, methodologies, artistic influences, and conceptual decisions that inform my artwork and characterize my art practice. Utilizing participation (audience, community, viewer), I engineer experiences and encounters for the general public. Whether through directed physical interaction or implicit reaction, I create open-ended situations or environments that I may influence, but not fully control. The democratic cede of authorial control, as well as the heightened risk and unpredictably in my work, instigates a more positive, non-hierarchical social model in which every viewer is an “author,” who produces content and communication signals, and has a …

The Three Principles (For -2012), Nikolai Noel

Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing alchemy as an allegory for the political, social, cultural history and present of the Caribbean, I discuss critical themes, approaches, methodologies their development, application and evidence in my thinking and art practice.

Art And The Human Condition: Incorporating Visual Analysis Of Artworks Into A Undergraduate Pre-Medicine Curriculum, Elizabeth Fuqua

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project presents a sample class session for the course, "The Human Condition: An Arts Perpective" (ARTH 361), which will be a part of the optional Medical Humanities minor for the pre-medicine students at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Dr. Margaret Lindauer, Associate Professor of Art History at VCU has directed the development of this course. She oversaw the creation of the preliminary syllabus, which includes readings and assignments relevant to the course. The Tour presented in this thesis project provides a model for planning other class sessions, some of which will be developed by Museum Studies graduate students, some …

The Terror Of Creativity: Art Education After Postmodernism, Jan Jagodzinski

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This essay addresses two problematics. The first concerns the question of creativity, which has become a key signifier for art and its education in the 21st century. I try to situate this interest in creativity within the broader context of neoliberalism and capitalist designer capitalism. The second problematic addresses the term ‘after postmodernism,’ which has left us in a state of relativity by rejecting universality. My interest is to show how these two problematics are at play in the well-known documentary film, Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim. An attempt is made to expose the structure of this film …

Fenced In/Out In West Texas: Notes On Defending My Queer Body, Ed Check

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article, I utilize autoethnography to describe and reflect upon my experiences as a queer artist, associate professor, and activist living in West Texas (1996-2012). To date, I believe there exist too few testimonies in art education that document how queer educators/artists manage myriad social, political, and everyday issues in their lives and workplaces. Such stories are necessary if I am going to equip present and future art teachers with anti-homophobia classroom strategies. I believe such stories are also necessary to counter cultural homophobia and violence and let queer students and teachers know they do not stand alone. Stories …

Decolonizing Development Through Indigenous Artist-Led Inquiry, Christine Ballengee-Morris, James Sanders, Debbie Smith, Kryssi Staikidis

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this article four university art educators explore theories of self-determination and describe decolonizing, approaches to research that are built on mutual trust. As researchers we recognize that (re)presenting the stories of others—especially across international and transcultural boundaries—is both problematic and an ethical challenge. We acknowledge the risks that participants assume when sharing their stories, and follow the culturally sensitive strategy of having collaborating indigenous artists lead the research.

The Unprecedented Event: Acknowledging Badiou’S Challenge To Art And Its Education, Jan Jagodzinski

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In terms of this year’s journal theme, ”unprecedented,” there is no other contemporary philosopher who has a more radical notion than Alain Badiou when it comes to theorizing the new; that is, the emergence of an unprecedented Event ex nihilio—not novel or innovative, but free of the authority of any prior example—to make a truth claim. For art educators, especially for the Social Caucus, Badiou offers a challenge to what has largely captured the theoretical writing in this journal — namely aesthetics and representation. As well intentioned as these theorizations have been concerning identity politics and critical theory stemming from …

Seasons, Paula Golden

Theses and Dissertations

A sense of place and time has been the unconscious focus of my adult life. While living in Hawaii I often searched for ancient rock carving sites. These art forms have the ability to convey the mystery, magic and history of previous times. I use human figures, beads and various textiles with similarities to these petroglyphs as a powerful metaphor for my search to find a place that is home

Gerald Donato: Reinventing The Game, Gerald Donato

Anderson Gallery Art Exhibition Catalogues

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCUarts) Anderson Gallery, Richmond, Virginia, and at Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, in 2007.

Reading Objects: Collections As Sites And Systems Of Cultural Order, Alice Wexler

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The political nature of making personal and cultural meaning of objects (both ordinary and aesthetic) is the site where transactions between our innate need for order and environmental influences, such as consumerism, are made. Valuing objects leads to the phenomena of collection, a subject that has been of interest in education and psychology since the nineteenth century. I ask how the private collections of children, and later adults, lead to systems of labeling, grouping, and display of art and artifacts in the art and natural history museum. In the age of the meta museum, how do educators question the museum's …

(Un)Becoming Working Class? Living Across The Lines, Ed Check

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I am writing this piece as a white self-identified gay male raised working class associate professor in art who is actively reconnecting with my past/roots, trying to better understand my sense of isolation in academe and my slowly seething anger directed at many of my academic colleagues. By working class I mean 2nd and 3rd generation Polish-American, devout Catholic, white privilege, contractor father, housewife mother, large family, in and out of poverty at times, racist with no real information. By academe I mean working for six years to achieve and be granted tenure at Texas Tech University in visual studies.

Schooled In Silence, Patricia M. Amburgy, Wanda B. Knight, Karen Keifer-Boyd

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What is not said, is often more powerful than what is spoken about diversity, difference, and identity in U.S. classrooms. Examples are everywhere: Although no students of color may be enrolled in a course at a prominent research university, members of the class do not believe there is such a thing as institutional racism. A handful of women are discussed in course textbooks, all authored by men, but no one thinks it odd that only men have written accounts of women's achievements that appear on the syllabus. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people do not speak for themselves, either, in …

David Freed, Printmaker: A Retrospective, David Freed

Anderson Gallery Art Exhibition Catalogues

"This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition David Freed: Printmaker: A Retrospective, curated by Ted Potter, August 31-October 28, 2001. Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts." --p. 4.

Tear Down These Walls: New Genre Public Art And Art Education, Gaye Leigh Green

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Public genre art education follows the lead established by the professional art world to engage the public with artforms that depart from traditional media usage and intentions to encourage collaboration, the demystification of art processes, and societal reconstruction. Termed new genre public art, Suzanne Lacy (1995) described in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art a new sensibility exhibited in the past three decades by artists who deal with the most profound issues of our time “in manners that resemble political and social activity but is distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility”.

The Clash Between The Sacred And The Profane: An Examination Of Controversial Art In The Postmodern Era, Rosalie H. Politsky

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Using mythic criticism, this paper examines the current cultural and religious in stability that may serve as the impetus for the appropriation of ancient religious myths and symbols by various visual and performance artists. The paper concludes with implications of ritual, personal mythology, and controversial art for art education.