Art and Design Commons^™

Recipes For Building Relationships, Adriana Lintz

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the history of women's access to education and the issues of gender disparity in education. I focus on single-gendered schools as I write from personal experience to describe the benefits for individuals in single-gender educational systems. I cite conflicting research on how men and women learn regarding biological, cognitive, and developmental differences. I illuminate some of the benefits of single-gendered education through research, experience, and personal communications. I write about the controversies and disparities regarding education and single-gender schools. I document research on the issues women face in education and the politics of women’s bodies and minds …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

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

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

Ok I'M Perfect, Dania Skye Leibowitz

Senior Projects Fall 2023

okay i’m perfect

I make art as a way to externalize my anger in a way that won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been making art about my anxieties, my exhaustion, my fear. Some of my drawings scare me to look at, and to think of other people looking at. So then I make other things to protect myself from them, and from you.

Most of the time when I get into my studio, I don’t know what to do. I draw myself, and I make rectangles from fabric and I stuff them. The repetition of drawing and sewing grounds me until …

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 …

Do You Wanna Go Dancing?, Anthony Kascak

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transdisciplinary art work within Do you wanna go dancing? unpacks the experience and perception of my interpersonal relationships, as well as the role that touch and introspection has in my visual arts practice and everyday life. I am interested in pairing the act of looking with the sensation of touching through specific installation and arrangement of intimate imagery, ceramic fragments and frames, and manual or digitally fabricated surfaces. The negotiation of these installations orient the viewer to consider their positionality within space, as well as the extent in which distance, intimacy, and vulnerability fluctuate inside these psychological spaces.

The …

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …

Dollhouse, Whitney Goller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work in DollHouse, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition on display at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from January 25 to February 5, 2016. The exhibition was an installation consisting of five sets, each containing furniture - both 2D and 3D - and a mask with instructions relating to a room found within a dollhouse.

The sets and supporting thesis explore the ideas of social norms, feminism, and identity, and how submission to ideologies can create emptiness, while engagement can prompt social change. Topics include the process and evolution of the work and the artists who …

Performing Binaries, Humberto Reynoso

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I take a critical view of sociopolitical and cultural issues dealing with homoeroticism andgay politics. I explore gender theories in order to further understand what it means to bemasculine or feminine and how it affects my placement in society. I use art as a tool forexpressing sexual freedom while questioning traditional sexual identity. I'm interested in exploring ideas of the oppressor and the oppressed, and how power becomes an inevitable force (in every society) that creates a hierarchy, consequently establishing control. But what is power? According to various definitions, power is an entity that possesses and or exercises authority or …

Cute As A Button, Marta R. Finkelstein

Theses and Dissertations

Cute As A Button explores powerlessness, vulnerability, illness and addiction all wrapped up in tender buttons and a cute, cuddly creature. Using animation, sculpture, sound and an intimate space, I surround the viewer in a saccharine nightmare, one that references the dark underbelly of the cute and the sweet. The visual and aural elements are representative of the psychological and emotional states of powerlessness, which are overcome by the act of making and exploring a medium over which I can have complete control.