Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Unknown, Gabrielle E. Valdez

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

As somebody who spent a considerable amount of time coming to terms with my own identity, I would often look to other people to try and see what makes them who they are. This is obviously impossible to ascertain from a quick glance or brief observation I make in a public space. I know almost nothing about the subjects of my paintings — and the viewer of my paintings is provided the limited information that I take away from this interaction. These brief encounters are documented as photographs taken with my phone. This body of work is a progression. As …

Half-Light, Kelly A. Stading

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

My work explores concealed emotions such as fear, disgust, rage, resentment and shame. This emotional darkness is the underbelly of life, resulting from situations where people are victims of social pressure, trying to survive with what they have, while trying to achieve social norms. The comfort of a home allows these emotional responses to surface. “Half-Light” focuses on my concealed emotions, bringing them out of the dark to be confronted.

Adviser: Santiago Cal

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 …

Inner Struggle, Hiromi Iyoda

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

My work is about the journey of discovering my identity, confronting my past memories and trying to find where I belong. This is also part of a human process that helps with healing oneself, moving through pain and to ultimately transcend and grow.

The process of art making for me has become a way of finding my own identity. Images that come into my mind and that are made by my hands may seem to have no connection at the beginning, but they all start making sense towards the end, like solving a mystery novel. War was always in my …

On Nine Mile, Allen Morris

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

The photographs of On Nine Mile were made to explore my developing relationship with the place I now inhabit. They compare the reality of a place against preconception and actual experience versus idealized expectations. I made this work to help understand a landscape to which I was transplanted and to which I had no connection. This exhibition is comprised of photographs taken at a section of untilled prairie called Nine Mile that most closely resembled my visual preconception of the Great Plains. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest surrounded by the mountains, forests, and shoreline that typify the landscape …

Line Language, Albert Avi Arenfeld

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

I consider utility and beauty in the functional pots that I make. In making pottery I continue a history of typography as ornament and a tradition of making objects by hand. My designs are informed by my personal background as well as cultural and historic influences.

The pots that I make are inspired by anthropomorphic form and architectural structure. I reference the geometry of the human body as well as buildings seen in my travels to Japan and the Middle East. The internal structure of the pot is both bones and framing, the surface of the pot is both skin …

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 …

Dear, Whoever You Are, I Don't Care Who You Are, Adrienne Smart

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

I am an observer. I have always been an observer. I was the child who sat quietly with the adults at dinner parties, listening intently to conversations both literally and figuratively over my head. I was the child my mother could count on to repeat the details she forgot from the phone conversation she had with a friend earlier that day. I was the child who knew all the names of the neighbors, their dogs, the cars they drove, the gossip being spread about them, etc. I’ve always been collecting. But to anyone outside of my trusted circle, I was …