Art and Design Commons^™

Racial Peeves: The Exploitation Of Microaggressions, Olivia Gabrielle Ellis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Racial Peeves: The Exploitation of Microaggressions documents my personal experience of dealing with microaggressions throughout my life, as well as the history of these racial issues. This thesis also documents the creation of my Senior BFA Exhibition of the same title inspired by 1970s Blaxploitation posters.

Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women who made notable accomplishments are underrepresented in commemoration. Some American cities have brought women to the forefront of becoming visible through commemoration in statues. This thesis compares the commemoration of historical women in four different American cities. Stakeholders hold the key to implementing and changing public policy to increase the visibility of women and people of color in public monuments. Cities which lack representation of women and people of color may learn from and follow the efforts of a leading city to achieve lasting and effective change in representing those who historically been underrepresented.

Stay Woke, Langston A. Williams

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the pages of my thesis, I comprehensively analyze the processes, intentions, and production of my thesis film Stay Woke. My examination will exhaustively probe every stage of the film from development to preproduction to production to postproduction and beyond. Individual aspects of this process including writing, casting, locations, production design, cinematography, directing, budgeting, scheduling, and postproduction workflows will be detailed. As I make elaborations in each section, I will explain my learning experiences from each day’s new tasks, challenges, and lessons. All of these things will be framed with regards to the overall goal and themes of the …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

A Concrete Water Pasteurization Device For Third World Countries, Andrea R. Murchie

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

In the rural areas of South Africa, as well as many other developing countries, people cook food and sterilize their water by heating over open fires. Many times the fires are inside of homes, which more often than not are very small. Children will often be the ones to tend to the fire, out of necessity while parents and other family members are tending to other work and needs.

The purpose of my Senior Honors Project was to design a concrete vessel that can hold water and heat the water to pasteurization (149°F) when exposed to sunlight for an extended …

Home Starts From Within, Joliza G. Terry

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Moving to Harrisonburg proved to be a culture shock for me because in the past, I had lived in areas where the levels of diversity were different and allowed me to feel more at ease. I faced the issue of feeling uncomfortable in a new-found environment and felt compelled to start a dialogue about my experience through my artwork. It was imperative for me to find a way to create a community for myself, and by doing so in my artwork, I have thrived from my experience of feeling out of place. I began making work about self-image, family and …

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

A (Dis)Assemblage Of The Gallery-Growlery, Levester R. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

A (dis)Assemblage of the Gallery-Growlery exhibition and writing presents itself as a site of a morphological exploration of language, sound, and objects in tandem with the irreducibly venting black expression. Venting, the black expression never seeks wholeness within objects or language itself for it is a thing-in-itself. Its presence affords critical reception to a residue of delimiting forms. All growls eschew verbal objects for the manifestation of pure phonetics. A growl in a gallery is the growl. The growl resounds through the physicality of the objects and gallery. Also, it unwinds the object-among-objects as the phono-present stretches the discursive …

Chere, Wilson Andres Borja

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chere is research project and a thesis exhibition installation composed of a series of drawing/paintings and short animations that explores the phenomenon of migration and the African diaspora. This exploration was originated by contrasting aspects of forced and voluntary migration in addition to Kvasnyand and Hales' idea, that "Belonging everywhere or not belonging anywhere" describes the situation among people of the African diaspora.

Through research I intersperse layers of personal history with that of my ancestors and their descendants in the Americas. As a biracial person, a self-identified Afro-descendant from Colombia, South America, I am interested in the process of …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

Narrowing The Margin: The Role Of The Black Superhero, Julian S. Strayhorn Ii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Comic books can be understood as a visualization of popular culture in the U.S. For a long time these tales were formed by a white power fantasy, circulating in mainstream culture as over-exaggerated narrations. To give an example of white power fantasy, Dwayne McDuffie, a prolific writer in popular entertainment states:

“…if I write, as I have many times, a story where Daredevil, who doesn’t have powers, gets the drop on Thor, who has unbelievable powers, people go Oh, that was so cool! Daredevil was so clever! If I have Black Panther do the same thing that’s impossible! It’s like, …

African-American Influence On The Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe: Evidence From Nineteenth Century Probate Inventories And Population Census Records Of York County, Virginia And Worcester County, Maryland, Albert James M. Mamary

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Natural Hair Styling: A Symbol And Function Of African-American Women's Self-Creation, Juliette Bowles

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Negro Art, Vera H. Richards

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

In recent years, especially in America, the Negro has been the subject of wide and varied discussions. These discussions concerns the intellectual and religious phases of his life. The Negro is inter-nationally known for his expression of music and poetry, especially for his of rhythmical phasing which is so essential to the above named arts in viewing the origin of the race. it is found that valuable material was contributed to humanity by the ancient Ethiopian tribes which the Negro has come