Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Student And Teacher Experiences With Informal Learning In A School Music Classroom: An Action Research Study, Mark C. Adams

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

Despite the ubiquitous nature of music in the lives of adolescents, school music education rarely offers experiences with the informal music making practices that are used by their favorite vernacular artists. This action research study implemented informal learning practices into the formal learning environment of my current teaching position in a rural Midwestern community, to understand more about student experiences and the educator’s role in such a classroom. The qualitative research approach used in this study borrowed from grounded theory techniques. Data collection included twenty-five total interviews with nine first-year beginning instrumentalists. Interviews were conducted in three waves, where the …

Iterations, Thomas Lowell Edwards

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

For millennia, pottery has facilitated the communal activities of eating and drinking. I use pottery as a placeholder, a metaphor for human interaction. The central core, the initial inspiration, of my sculpture is the diminishing level of connection our culture actively pursues.

I began to notice a trend of increasing disengagement in American culture after spending time abroad and observing the amount of time other cultures allotted for meals, coffee, etc. with companions. I make sculptures that comment on growing American disengagement using various formal principles of art (line, mass, scale, rhythm, and repetition). I am generally unsatisfied with a …

Closely Distant, Crisha Yantis

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

Drawing upon my own experiences and observations of the world around me I use the figure to explore what it means to be human. This body of work addresses the universal experience of anxiety through the dynamics of both personal and interpersonal relationships, specifically focusing on fear of the unknown or what subconsciously lies just out of our comfort or understanding.

Often what is unknown is also what brings about questions of our own power and what we can or cannot control. In my work, I address ideas of power and powerlessness formally through what the figures lack. Their control …

Carrying Water: A M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition By Aaron Sober, Aaron M. Sober

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

For all of us, everyday life is punctuated by moments of victory, defeat, pride, and vulnerability. The process of welcoming gain and tolerating loss is a basic lesson in proportionality. My work is a personal reckoning with the contradictions that define this very human experience. Through animal imagery, symbol, and metaphor I explore the unpredictable circumstances that form a life lived.

We engage with, and understand our own place in the world through stories. By doing so, the avatars we create reflect the scope of our experiences, both sublime and damaged. The animal protagonists who inhabit my work are placeholders …

Form In Place, Normandy Alden

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

There is a 200 acre farm in central NY state where I am building a house, a business, a family, a life. My vision for these extends beyond my own capabilities and lifespan. It is a vision of elegance, simplicity and utility. My pots are reflections of this vision, and embody the qualities of the life I seek. They are both exuberant and quiet, expansive and constrained.

The landscape surrounding my farm swoops and recedes with grace. Lines of windrows curve over hayfields, beautifully articulating undulations in topography. Nothing about this agricultural landscape is incidental. The lines and textures I …

Square With The World, Dustin Andrew Young

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

Memory influences everything in our lives. Massive amounts of information are stored from each experience and that data influences future thoughts and decisions. Included are the collective memories of daily headlines and images from pop-culture, as well as personal memories from my own history. Contemporary society is constantly inundated with emotionally charged imagery that aims to shock viewers by appealing to their sensibilities. By reworking the images to avoid shock and specificity, my artwork turns these depictions into mnemonic symbols that stir the mind with associations.

Advisor: Aaron Holz

A Language In Becoming, Camille C. Hawbaker

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

Words as I have known them are evolving concepts in the landscape of human language, where the meanings of words are interwoven with layers of history and culture. The boundaries of language are defined by words, and around the edges are instinctive sounds that precede and exceed meaning. These sounds are an interrupting force that unsettles the linguistic structure. We often use them for expression in the form of sobs, grunts, moans, murmurs, chants, obscenities and exclamations. They appear in times of spontaneous emotion that words cannot convey. They can also be used purposely, poetically, “…to shatter [one’s] judging consciousness …

Man’S Best Friend? Dogs And Pigs In Early Modern Germany, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

When Jacob Seisenegger and Titian painted individual portraits of Emperor Charles V around 1532, a dog replaced such traditional accouterments of imperial power as crown, scepter, and orb.3 Charles placed one hand on the dog’s collar, a gesture indicating his companion’s noble qualities including faithfulness.4 At the same time, another more down-to-earth meaning for the dog had become prominent in the decades before the imperial portraits: the interest in and ability to eat anything in sight. This pig-like ability resulted in dogs, alongside pigs, becoming emblems of indiscriminate and gluttonous eating and drinking during the early sixteenth century when humanists, …