Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Or To Be Eaten Alive, Christopher Williams

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

“or to be eaten alive'' is a multimedia exhibition in which I merge my own coming of age story with a mythological ecology. In this work I reclaim my queer identity by communing with my past selves in a fantasy world created through the lens of Queer Ecology and Queer Eco-Futurism. The visuals in this exhibition obscure reality. They are abstractions of the landscapes I occupy—particularly the Tallgrass prairie and Ozark ecoregions. Through a speculative, fantasy world the exhibition introduces moments of adoration, death, fracturing, growth, joy, and failure. I form, draw, color and arrange the work embracing mistakes and …

The Midwestern Aristocracy: Anders Zorn's Portraits In Gilded Age St. Louis, Rebekah Hoke Brown

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

To the American aristocracy of the Gilded Age, painted portraits functioned as pictorial symbols of one’s taste, power, and status. This thesis evaluates the motivations of a provincial elite in St. Louis, Missouri, and sees their taste for portraits by Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, as the result of the intersection of myriad cultural and ethnic allegiances. Situating Zorn as a trans-Atlantic artist, this thesis functions as a patronage study, evaluating the portraits and goals of specific St. Louis patrons and analyzes Zorn’s role as an active agent in the art market, leveraging his public persona to establish aesthetic authority over …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

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

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

The Use Of Egyptian Blue In Funerary Paintings From Roman Egypt, Margaret Sather

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

This paper explores the use of the synthesized pigment Egyptian blue in the encaustic and tempera funerary portraits of Graeco-Roman ruled Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Recent developments in non-destructive imaging analysis technology have aided research institutions and museums in detecting the presence of this pigment. New questions have arisen based on these findings of Egyptian blue in the depiction of flesh and hair of these subjects, particularly because blue is so rarely used as a standalone pigment in works of this category. These analyses have challenged assumptions that Egyptian blue was a rare and valuable pigment during the …

Take Your Time, Terry A. Ratzlaff

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

I see the world not as one seamless world but as a world composed of other worlds, built on top and within one another. They exist harmoniously, bound not by space but by time. In an instant I can move from one world into another where I can exist in two worlds simultaneously—in space, I am here. In time, I am there.

Worldmaking is a conceptual process of seeing connections and making distinctions within our lived reality.1 It is a process of dividing and organizing parts into collections that represent different narratives. Only through suitable arrangements can we handle vast …

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

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

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

Of Water Jars And Women: A Re-Evaluation Of Fountain House Imagery On Late Archaic Black-Figure Hydriai, Christopher Askew

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

From approximately 530 to 500 BCE, images of fountain houses became popular subjects on black-figure hydriai produced in or around ancient Athens. These scenes often involve groups of unidentified women gathering around a fountain spout, typically attached to an ornate architectural structure, in order to fill their water jars. Although isolated pottery sherds depicting these scenes have been discovered in Greece, approximately seventy-five of these scenes have been identified on Attic hydriai depicting such scenes were discovered in Etruscan tombs. Past scholarship has categorized these images either as genre scenes, which represent a domestic activity characteristic of everyday life, or …

Patronage And Portable Portraits: Early English Miniatures: 1520-1544, Ashley Owens

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

This thesis examines function and patronage of early sixteenth-century portrait miniatures by Lucas Horenbout (d. 1544) and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543). Portrait miniatures, a unique form of portraiture emerging in the sixteenth century, have a long tradition in England, but hold an ambiguous place within art history because of their size, variety, and multifaceted function. Scholarship on the topic of early English portrait miniatures defines and discusses the tradition as it applies to the Elizabethan miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), the first major English-born artist. Therefore, the miniatures prior to Hilliard have been studied as predecessors to his works …

Between Global And Local: Geometric Patterns Of Gallic Roman Mosaics, Rebecca Salem

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

It is often assumed that mosaicists working in different parts of the Roman Empire utilized specific repertoires of geometric patterns, specific to that locality, which formed distinct regional styles. Accordingly, scholarship has sought to assign particular layouts and ornamentation to different areas around the Empire: illusionistic patterns mimicking architectural elements such as coffering in the Eastern Roman Empire, black and white scenes of imagery with no geometric designs in central Italy, and large figural scenes bordered with geometric patterns in North Africa. But this existing model of regional difference does not explain the similarities that can also be seen. For …

The Talismanic Seal Stone Of Crete: A Re-Evaluation., Catherine Stram

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

This thesis presents a re-evaluation of the talismanic seal stones of Crete. Its purpose is to present previous scholarship on these seal stones, introduce the reader to a new way of recording and viewing seal stones through Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and to offer the data from a study on 384 talismanic seal stones.

Seals were small stones or pieces of wood or ivory with intaglio, meaning designs were cut into their surface in order to create a relief when stamped in wet clay or a similar substance. They served several purposes: as identification, as a way of showing ownership, …

Viewing Heaven: Rock Crystal, Reliquaries, And Transparency In Fourteenth-Century Aachen, Claire Kilgore

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

This thesis examines reliquaries and objects associated with medieval Christian practice in fourteenth-century Aachen. The city's cathedral and treasury contain prestigious relics, reliquaries, and liturgical items, aided by its status as the Holy Roman Empire's coronation church. During the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1349-1378), reliquaries, pilgrimage, and architecture reflect late medieval interests in vision, optics, and transparency. Two mid-fourteenth century reliquaries from the Aachen Cathedral Treasury, the Reliquary of Charlemagne and the Three-Steepled Reliquary, display relics through rock crystal windows, in contrast to the obscuring characteristics of earlier reliquaries. Not only do the two reliquaries visually …

Shattered Ceilings: Roof Tile Analysis On Survey Archaeology Projects, Rebecca Salem

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

Finding a roof tile on an archaeological survey demonstrates that a structure had previously stood nearby. Rarely found in their entirety, tiles are fabricated from terracotta, which, while durable when in its proper place, breaks when falling from a roof. The nature of these fragmentary finds has made tile analysis limited and tiles are often not included in publications or only a select few are included with ceramic finds. Additionally, unlike pottery with its typographic chronology, roof tiles have restricted dating potential. However, there are several specific types of tile that can greatly help with dating. Though limited, some of …

The Origins And Identity Of Roman Mithraism, Charles R. Hill

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

This thesis is a reassessment of scholarship concerning the origins of the cult mysteries of Mithraism in its Roman form during the Imperial Period. While much has been published in the debate over the cult’s true origins, we are still left without a satisfactory answer. The present work is an attempt to reconcile some of the arguments posed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries with those of the later 20^th and 21^st centuries, focusing mostly on the cult’s art and iconography in Mithraea, the central spaces of Mithraic worship. First will be a summary of …

Representing Propaganda: Anti-Tyrannical Art Of The Greek, Roman, And French Populist Agendas, Katherine Norgard

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

History is often shaped to fit certain agendas. Regular, flawed individuals become heroes and martyrs. The truth is often more complicated, as proven by the fact that Harmodios and Aristogeiton gained their fame by publicly slaughtering a well-liked ruler for encroaching on their pederastic relationship, Brutus gained his fame by murdering Julius Caesar for getting too close to his mother (and sister), and Jean-Paul Marat was exalted and worshiped for violence-inciting journalism.

Harmodios, Brutus, and Jean Paul Marat all serve as symbols of equalitarianism. Their public portrayals were crafted to be symbols that fit the [needs of] revolutionary agendas. As …

Lucas Cranach's Samson And Delilah In Northern European Art, Jacqueline S. Spackman

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

This thesis explores images of Samson and Delilah in northern Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. My research focuses primarily on Lucas Cranach’s painting, Samson and Delilah of 1528-30, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. By examining prints and decorative artworks that include the Samson and Delilah narrative, it is my goal to understand where Cranach’s painting fits into the larger art historical picture. Through examining the locations and suggested meanings of other works, I hope to establish that it is also possible to understand the intention and meaning behind Cranach’s painting. I analyze the work …

Constructing Helen Frankenthaler: Redefining A 'Woman' Artist Since 1960, Alexandra P. Alberda

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

This thesis addresses how academics, curators, and art writers in the popular press reviewed Helen Frankenthaler during her major retrospectives of 1960 (The Jewish Museum), 1969 (The Whitney Museum of American Art), and 1989 (The Museum of Modern Art). Included is an examination of how she has been written about after her death in 2012, with analysis of the changes in the language used to critique the artist and her work as influenced by the advent of feminist theory, social history, and gender theory. I examine recent exhibitions on Frankenthaler at the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, and the Albright-Knox …

Between Historical Truth And Story-Telling: The Twentieth-Century Fabrication Of “Artemisia”, Britiany Daugherty

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

This research focuses on the twentieth century rediscovery of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi by scholars, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, and artists. I argue that the various authors who told her story constructed two distinct “Artemisias,” what I identify as the “Academic Artemisia” and the “Celebrity Artemisia.” The “Academic Artemisia” results from writings by scholars focused on her 1610 Susanna and the Elders, who used approaches from formalism and connoisseurship, to feminism and iconography. The “Celebrity Artemisia” stems from popular fictions that refashioned the life and art of Artemisia according to pop culture tastes. Studying what has been said about …

Constructions Of Black Identity In The Work Of Glenn Ligon And Kara Walker, Shadé R. Ayorinde

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

In this thesis I reference artworks and installations by Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, as well as contemporary mass media images, to offer a reading of various constructions of black identity in the 1990s and into the 21^st century. I specifically note the continuation of social biases against black bodies, which in large part stems from historical conditions of 19^th century America and the lingering legacy of slavery. I also address how the absence or implied absence of the black male body, as referenced in works by both Ligon and Walker, relates to contemporary social conditions in which …

The Imperial Temple At Antiochia Ad Cragum: Aspects Of Architecture And Iconography, Geraldine S. Dobos

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

Along the northeastern Mediterranean shore lies Antiochia ad Cragum, an ancient city located in the western area of the Roman province of Rough Cilicia. It is now known as the village of Guney, in southern Turkey. The Northeast Temple is the first Imperial structure at Antiochia that has been revealed in its entirety and its reconstruction is anticipated. This excavation by the University of Nebraska (Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project, or ACARP), is directed by UNL Professor Michael Hoff.

The hypothetical reconstruction of the Northeast Temple’s geison course, which I present, emphasizes certain diagnostic features that may be used …

Serpentine Imagery In Nineteenth-Century Prints, Paula A. Rotschafer

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

This thesis explores images of sea serpents in nineteenth-century print culture that reflect an ongoing effort throughout the century to locate, capture, catalogue, and eventually poeticize the sea serpent. My research centers primarily on the sea serpent craze that occurred within the New England and Mid-Atlantic states between 1845 and 1880 and examines the following three prints: Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos, a fossil skeleton hoax, printed in an 1845 advertisement by Benjamin Owen, a book and job printer; an 1868 Harper’s Weekly illustration titled The Wonderful Fish; and Stephen Alonzo Schoff’s etching, The Sea Serpent from 1880, based on …

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. …

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 …

The Ambiguous Graveyard: Religious Sympathy And Erotic Desire In Sir John Everett Millais's The Vale Of Rest, Greg W. Spangler

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

The Vale of Rest, 1859, despite or because of its oddities—two nuns digging a grave—was in its own day understood as a touchstone for Sir John Everett Millais and his career. Its critical reception in 1859 was hostile, with charges of “ugliness,” but by 1897, it was hanging in the Tate museum. Scholars and biographers have accordingly seen it as a turning point in Millais’s abandonment of Pre-Raphaelite realism for a more aestheticized and bourgeois style. The subject of nuns has led other scholars to investigate Millais’s sympathies with the Oxford Movement, the midcentury effort to reform the Anglican …

Zoomorphic Penannular Brooches In 6th And 7th Century Ireland, Esther G. Ward

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

In this thesis the author examines the evolution, manufacture, and societal significance of zoomorphic penannular brooches, a type of metal dress fastener used in early medieval Ireland that is often decorated. The brooches examined are dated to the 6^th and 7^th centuries, during which the Irish underwent a process of religious conversion from Celtic paganism to Christianity, and social rank was paramount. It is in this social context that the brooches are examined. Despite the significance of this time of social change, brooches from this period tend to be overlooked by scholarship in favor of the more ornate …

Framing Cultural Capitalism: William Wilson Corcoran And Alice Walton As Patrons Of The American Art Museum, Kelsey E. Tyler

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

In 2011, Alice Walton opened what is now considered to be among the most important American art collections in the country, in a museum called Crystal Bridges, in Bentonville, Arkansas. What is remarkable is not only the exorbitant amount of money spent to open the museum - over $800 million dollars - but also that she was the primary financier. William Wilson Corcoran, a mid-nineteenth-century banker, in many ways is a better comparison than Morgan or Gardner, as like Walton he intended to found a museum dedicated specifically to American art. His museum, which he hoped would become a national …

Material And Motion: Phenomenology And The Early Work Of Carolee Schneemann 1957-1973, Regina M. Flowers

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

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist known for using her body in her artworks in order to engage with issues of sexuality, gender and identity. Best known for her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, Schneemann’s work is most often theorized in connection with the emergence of Feminist, Performance and Body Art, yet Schneemann has always considered herself primarily a painter. In this thesis I address the disconnect between Schneemann’s repeated insistence on her status as a painter and the scholarly discussion of her work solely in relation to the integration of her body in her performative works. The period covered …

Measured Chance, Brian R. Kluge

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

In my practice I use clay to make enigmatic, non-representational sculptures that employ reductive geometry and archetypal forms. By pressing clay into a variety of molds, it is my intention to contrast a primal crudeness with a skilled precision in my handling of the material. I fabricate objects that range in scale from handheld to human- size. In this work, I combine references to the forms of manmade things with surfaces that allude to age and wear resulting from natural patinas that occur on stone, wood, or metal. This body of work shares qualities with the Minimalist and Earth Art …

A Memory Forgotten: Representation Of Women And The Washington D.C. Arsenal Monument, Melissa Sheets

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

The Arsenal Monument in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. commemorates the twenty-one women who died while working as cartridge makers in the Washington Arsenal on June 17th, 1864. It utilizes both traditional and idealized memorial imagery, represented by an allegorical figure of Grief who stands atop the Monument’s shaft, as well as a realistic representation of the Arsenal explosion carved into the base. Erected only a year after the incident, the Monument can be interpreted as commemorating all twenty-one women by the inclusion of their names on the sides of the base. From this listing of names and the …

Stealing Horses And Hostile Conflict: 1833-1834 Drawings Of Mato-Tope And Sih-Chida, Kimberly Minor

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

The first documented Native American art on paper includes the following drawings at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska: In the Winter, 1833-1834 (two versions) by Sih-Chida (Yellow Feather) and Mato-Tope Battling a Cheyenne Chief with a Hatchet (1834) by Mato-Tope (Four Bears) as well as an untitled drawing not previously attributed to the latter. These images were produced and collected during the winter of 1833-1834 when the German Prince Maximilian of Wied and artist Karl Bodmer resided at Fort Clark in North Dakota. These drawings remained with Prince Maximilian’s estate until they were placed on long term loan …

The Logic Of Objects, David B. Eichelberger

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

The human mind assimilates information and experiences quickly and constantly, and is aided by mental systems that we rely on to function. We classify the input of our lives with extreme efficiency. Our notions about the things we encounter in the world are learned from past experiences, and these expectations help us file the data of our lives. My work is composed to create pause. I am interested in slowing down the processes of assimilation by manipulating our expectations, and extending events measured in microseconds into saturated and engaging experiences. Functional qualities, visual rhythms, and exaggerated proportions are some of …