Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho

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

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.^[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create …

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 …

The Rug's Topography, Rana Young

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

My complex relationship with photographs began when I was young. I remember tearing images out of publications and bringing them to my dad prepared with questions. Where I grew up, normative values defined by anatomy at birth impacted an individual’s gender perception and performance. Raised by a single father, I experienced a non-traditional family structure in my home. Seeing photographs portraying the “wholeness” of family contradicted my reality. Those psychological impressions provoked my curiosity and propelled me to solve the mystery of what existed beyond the scene depicted.

In retrospect, my search for missing context stems from an interest in …

Man To Man, Chadric Devin Harms

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

In athletics, the phrase “man-to-man” refers to a type a defense: one where a single player is paired against another individual. They are in constant competition, and as rivals they relentlessly compare themselves to one another. This colloquial expression, which I use as the title of my thesis, also draws attention to the gendered term “man” as a social construction and signifies the diversity and complexity that exists between one representation of masculinity and another.

Throughout my childhood I felt an overwhelming responsibility and pressure from my stepfather and the small, Midwestern community in which I grew up to participate …