Art and Design Commons^™

Christ Child Bearing The Instruments Of The Passion Technical Study And Treatment Of A Painting On Copper From The Viceroyalty Of Peru, Daniela González-Pruitt

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Christ Child Bearing the Instruments of the Passion (acc.# 228017) is a 17^th century Peruvian Viceregal painting on copper belonging to the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. The painting depicts the Christ Child on a flower laid path as he carries the instruments of the passion also known as the Arma Christi Paintings executed on copper convey new and challenging preservation issues based on their materials and techniques.. The work had been heavily restored and exhibited several condition issues, including significant overpaint and broad losses. The painting was photographed using multimodal imaging techniques as well as reflectance …

Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina

Masters Theses

Located at the western edge of Texas where the Río Bravo ~ Rio Grande, becomes the border between México and the United States. Resides a spectacle of misconceptions that, along with an expansive corten steel border wall embedded into the earth, live to suppress the histories, culture, and environment entangled together like patchwork along this border space. The built environment influences our daily experiences, and our daily experiences can often influence our built environment. This project seeks to leverage, murals as a medium, creative writing, and architectural representations, to rework the mapping between Mexico and the US. Honing in on …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Flores, Rigoberto Flores

Masters Theses

My name is Rigoberto Flores and I was born in Guerrero, Mexico. The work I make involves politics, immigration, cartel violence and religious themes. I’m interested in presenting these challenging and difficult concepts, to have them remain in the public consciousness. The work I produce involve charcoal drawings, textiles, print, and painting. The work I create is intended to address inconstancies in established ideas, usually involving government violence. Throughout history art has been used to promote institutional propaganda. I am searching to do the same, but to oppose those structures.

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Ni De Aqui Ni De Alla..., Jc Santistevan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Ni de aqui ni de alla navigates the complexities of belonging to two cultures-Mexican

and American-while not fully identifying with either. By visualizing liminal spaces,

migratory patterns, and quotidian subject matter the work serves as a metaphor for

the Latinx experience in the United States-an experience defined by conflicts between

conformity and resistance, individuality and community, spirituality and secularism,

alienation and belonging. "Black and white are the colors of photography…..they

symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair," Robert Frank once said, and it is

through a nonlinear installation of black and white imagery that I seek to describe the

push …

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

Questions Of Canon In Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics, Martin Dolan

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.”

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized …

La Cultura Que No Cambia, Karina Arreola-Gutierrez

MFA in Visual Art

In the text of La Cultura Que No Cambia, I mention how my work has been influenced by becoming more aware of generations of altar making that occur in my family. By collecting stories and photographs of altars, I can observe and create work based on how the legacies can change through generations or stay the same. The memory of my ancestors and family traditions is strengthened. Growing up seeing discrimination towards others has influenced me to highlight my Mexican heritage of traditions, culture, and language through several different methods. Using these elements, I can create work informing audiences about …

Un Guisado: Allí, Allá And The Space In Between, Quinn A. Briceño

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Guisado: a savory stew. A blend of two worlds: one of Nicaragua, and the other of the United States. I am both Nicaragaüense y Estadounidense. As an artist, I work with painting and collage as a form of image making that carefully takes inspiration from those traditions to create a new narrative. In my work, I examine both my struggle with identity and how I came to be the person I am today. As I am both Nicaragüense and Estadounidense it is important that my paintings reflect those two worlds.

The ingredients making up my …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Bibliography For "Chicano Art: A Display In Celebration Of Hispanic Heritage", Margaret Puentes

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about Chicano Art for National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15-October 15, 2021, at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

Painting Outside Of The Lines: How Race Assignment Can Be Rethought Through Art, Giovanni Mella-Velazquez

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

For centuries art has been used to make us think about our own human experiences. Unfortunately, works usually reflect the era which they were painted in; this has led to various artists showing, maintaining, and therefore reinforcing racist thoughts in our cultures. Art can be used to create a new narrative for our race assignments and their meanings. The idea of loving one's roots has been prevalent in many cultures, but in art form a disconnect between history and the everyday experience can arise which could miss the mark in helping us redefine our own race. Therefore, artwork which empowers …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

The Art Of Heritage And Mortality, Barbara Johanna Mileto

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through my art I explore the formation of cultural and personal identity addressing the importance of heritage, ancestors, and religion in Latin-American culture, while I develop my unique deities and spiritual space, creating my own iconography. The pieces are strongly autobiographical, using my family members, and frequently lived experience as a subject. Furthermore, I am drawn to the circle of life and productive failures - beginnings, deaths, and transitions. - My work integrates two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, ranging from photography and printmaking to assemblage and textiles, video and digital.

Pero...Maybe, Adrian Gonzalez

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through collage, assemblage, and object making, I fit unlikely fragments that I call manchitas—stains—together. In my paintings and mixed media assemblages I incorporate references to Spanglish as un acto of making. To me, it’s like the visual work that I make: thinking in one language and speaking another, words start with English but end in Spanish. They sound like English but are Spanish or vice versa. The words look misspelled but are used in everyday conversation. Spanglish is idiosyncratic and is what I build my practice on. I collect materials around me, some I find and some I make. …

The Adobe Frontier, Christopher J. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

The Adobe Frontier is a documentary film about Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello—together known as “Studio Rael San Fratello” —and their work connecting contemporary technology with the legacy of pottery making and adobe architecture in the Southwest United States.

Architectural + Language: Breaking Barriers And Creating Cultural Dialogue, Maria De Los Angeles Delgado Bailon

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

When I was 11 years old, I moved back to the United States, after having spent my whole childhood in Ecuador, my parents native land. I was moving back to the land of opportunity in the search for the so called ‘American Dream’. It was difficult to leave and move to a new place where we did not know anyone or have anything, but just the idea of a going back to my hometown piqued my curiosity and excitement. I remember very vividly, the day I left Ecuador. I remember telling myself to be happy, because this was a moment …

Aztlán Del Sol, Marcus Zúñiga

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest

An artistic writing developed from the themes and concepts of an of art installation made by a visual artist of Mexican-American descent from New Mexico. The work references the relationship of Aztec mythology to the American Southwest, art theoretical discourse in object oriented ontology and aesthetics, and key ideas in astronomy. Additionally interwoven is an expanded sense for interpreting ancestry and history under the constructs of multicultural conceptions of time, specifically cultures with notable spiritual rituals of Sun worship and observation.

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Popping (Post)Modernism: Joaquín Torres-Garcia & Latin America's Pop Art Movement, Alexandra Branscom

Scripps Senior Theses

Even though the canon of Western Art History has attributed the Pop movement to the US and the UK, artists from around the world have made significant contributions to pop art and formed their own Pop movements. This includes the Latin American pop artists Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexican), Antonio Henrique Amaral (Brazilian), and Juan Dávila (Chilean), who, between the years 1968 and 1974, fled right-wing political unrest of their respective home countries and gained artistic education in dominant, imperialistic countries. These artists subvert the capitalistic, adverting language of pop art to promote the localized political sensibilities of their home countries and …

Pase Perdido Missing Pass, Larissa M. Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contains the following terms: colonialism, ghost populations, natural occurrences, global positioning, poetic relation, confrontation/vengeance, mapping, graphs, models, warfare, bio warfare, magic, mystery, migration, memory, mutation, ghosts, and esoteric systems

Mexico And The People: Revolutionary Printmaking And The Taller De Gráfica Popular, Carolyn Hauk, Joy Zanghi

Schmucker Art Catalogs

During its most turbulent and formative years of the twentieth century, Mexico witnessed decades of political frustration, a major revolution, and two World Wars. By the late 1900s, it emerged as a modernized nation, thrust into an ever-growing global sphere. The revolutionary voices of Mexico’s people that echoed through time took root in the arts and emerged as a collective force to bring about a new self-awareness and change for their nation. Mexico’s most distinguished artists set out to challenge an overpowered government, propagate social-political advancement, and reimagine a stronger, unified national identity. Following in the footsteps of political printmaker …

Heritage Sites, Leah Burke

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Heritage Sites, in which vignettes of the artist’s personal and familial narratives become a backdrop for examining themes such as global tourism, the notion of universal heritage, and questioning Puerto Rico as a postcolonial place. A two channel short video layers archival imagery with original material to examine the ways Puerto Rico has been represented and misrepresented personally and globally.

Mes-Ti-Zo, Aeleen Jacinto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that …

The Migrant Times, Jessenya Guerra

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This senior capstone newspaper shows how the Mexican diaspora has become integrated into American culture.