Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Through The Body: Corporeality, Subjectivity, And Empathy In Contemporary American Art, Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation considers the relationship between embodied experience, subjectivity, and empathy expressed in artworks created and exhibited in New York in the early 1990s and linked with identity politics. I focus on works that represented or evoked bodies and elicited viscerally somatic responses from viewers. As I demonstrate, the multicultural and post-structuralist interpretive frameworks applied to these artworks hinged on implicitly antagonistic notions of subjectivity which undercut the works' affective potential. In particular, such models disregarded the powerful epistemological import of corporeality in favor of discursive constructions. Through three paired case studies, I investigate how these artists engaged with emerging …

Archaeological Analysis Of The Construction Of Identity In An African American Activist Community, Corey Mcquinn

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The legacy of slavery in Albany created a racialized landscape and economy that marginalized African Americans in the years leading up to manumission in 1827 and beyond. A small enclave of African American families on Livingston Avenue provided a study group for how marginalized individuals create, maintain, and abandon urban communities. In addition, individuals in the group demonstrated well-documented involvement in the local Vigilance Committee, providing an opportunity to examine activism as a factor in the construction of racial and cultural identity. The study of identity construction on multiple scales has been pursued by anthropologists, but rarely in archaeology beyond …