Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Silent Salesmen," Skeptical Consumers: American Images In A Divided Berlin, 1949-67, Lauren Richman

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the visual language of American cultural images disseminated in Cold War Berlin and investigates how such institutional, lens-based media played a role in the country’s grappling with its postwar identity. Divided Berlin, with porous borders from 1949 to 1961, embodied a “final frontier,” “Western showcase;” a synecdoche of larger American geopolitical interests during a time when information and images defined the Cold War. Existing art historical studies of Cold War-era visual propaganda emphasize the prototypical East/West, communist/capitalist dichotomies, but often do not focus on the impact of the United States as Germany’s most prolific western occupier.

Across …

Traces Of Identity: Portraiture In The Work Of Teresa Margolles, Alexandra M. Perez

Art History Theses and Dissertations

Teresa Margolles, born in Culiacán, Mexico, is a socially engaged conceptual artist whose work examines the causes and consequences of death from the 1990s to the present in her home country. Margolles’s work has been largely discussed in the context of death and violence, and this thesis expands upon this literature by including the concepts of identity and portraiture. By examining how Margolles’s installations, sculptures, and photography use material remains to display identity and memorialize victims, this thesis argues that Margolles not only creates memorials, but also portraits of the fallen victims.

Using the frameworks of portraiture, the index, and …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Thesis/Thesis Document 2, Jessamyn Plotts

Art Theses and Dissertations

Thesis/thesis document 2 explores the subversive power of the painted image, made by a physical performative act. Such acts are not confined to the production of the art object, but expand across the landscape, involving the minds, bodies, and things of culture adjacent to the making process. Following the thinking of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Thesis/thesis document 2 understands painting not as the container of a finite, legible message, but as a physical platform for the conveyance of perceptual, personal, and experiential ambiguity. Made in this way, painted images offer a powerful alternative to the proliferation of propaganda and advertisement …