Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: Learning From Frank Furness: Louis Sullivan In 1873; Furness In Space: The Architect And Design Dialogues On The Late Nineteenth-Century Country House; Frank Furness: Making A Modern Library--From Gentleman's Library To Machine For Learning; Frank Furness: Working On Railroads; Building A Masterpiece: Frank Furness' Factory For Art; Face And Form: The Art And Caricature Of Frank Furness, Robert Wojitowicz

Art Faculty Publications

The article reviews several exhibitions on architect Frank Furness, including "Frank Furness: Making a Modern Library--From Gentleman's Library to Machine for Learning," on view at the Kroiz Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania from October 5, 2012 to January 18, 2013, "Frank Furness: Working on the Railroads" on view at the Library Company of Philadelphia from September 17, 2012 to April 19, 2013, and "Building a Masterpiece: Frank Furness' Factory for Art" on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" from September 29, 2012 to December 30, 2012.

Science Fictional Transcendentalism In The Work Of Robert Smithson, Eric Saxon

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In studies of American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973), scholars often set the artist’s early abstract expressionist and Christian iconographical paintings apart from the rest of his body of work, characterizing this early phase as a youthful encounter with the enduring legacy of abstract expressionism in the late 1950s to early 1960s as well as a temporary preoccupation with ritualized Catholic imagery. This thesis argues for the inclusion of this early phase into Smithson’s career as a foundational period in which he established the set of problems that artistically engaged him throughout his life: issues of temporality, materiality, and universal entropy. …

''Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!'': Reclaiming Richmond's African Burial Ground, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

By treating spatial conflict as one way communities wrestle with the memory and legacy of slavery, this article unites critical landscape analysis, a tool of legal geography, with legal and cultural analysis and recent scholarship on African American reparations. A slave cemetery lay beneath a parking lot in Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood of downtown Richmond that was once a major slave-trading hub. In recent years, controversy arose over the site’s use, generating racially charged local debate and two failed lawsuits seeking to preserve the site. This article examines the significance of the African Burial Ground controversy by analyzing its symbolic, …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

Crooked And Narrow Streets, Amy Johnson

Art Faculty Scholarship

In The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston (1920), historian and social reformer Annie Haven Thwing documents the development of Boston's streets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She illustrates her text with stock photographs depicting these ancient alleys lined with nineteenth-century tenement buildings. This juxtaposition of colonial and modern Boston through text and image privileges the city as a historical site, significantly doing so at a time when Bostonians were grappling with the concerns of twentieth-century urbanism, such as overcrowding, urban reform, and historic preservation.

Negotiating Postwar Landscape Architecture: The Practice Of Sidney Nichols Shurcliff, Jeffrey Scott Fulford M.D., M.P.H., M.L.A.

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

While documentation of the work of a select group of modernist landscape architects of the mid-twentieth century is available, little is known about the professional contributions of transitional landscape architects active in the period following World War II. Using selected projects framed by existing literature covering contemporary social, economic, political, and artistic influences, this study examines the career of one such transitional figure, Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (1906-1981). Project descriptions and analysis measure the scope of Shurcliff's work and the degree to which he contributed to the discipline and its transition to modernism, thereby augmenting the history of landscape architecture practice.

Wallpaper Mania, Ellen Corrigan

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Text panels from "Wallpaper Mania," a local exhibit in support of the Booth Library installation of the National Library of Medicine traveling exhibition The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper," on display September 23-November 2, 2013.

The Publicity Of Monticello: A Private Home As Emblem And Means, Benjamin Block

Summer Research

This paper examines how the private home of Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, was, in fact, designed and constructed in many ways as a public building. By examining how Jefferson created the spaces that would have been visited by guests to Monticello, one can see that visitors were intended to have meaningful, affecting experiences at the home. I have broken down the study of these experiences into two parts: the first examines Monticello as a personal emblem of Jefferson’s aesthetic and political philosophy; the second explores Monticello as a means to crafting Jefferson's personal vision of America. I argue that Jefferson intended …

Korbel Sawmill Research Notes, Susie Van Kirk

Susie Van Kirk Papers

No abstract provided.