Art and Design Commons^™

Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson

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

Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other space”.

This work addresses aspects of that citizenship. I used my experiences as a person living with a disability and as a parent to a son with Autism to explore the dichotomy of this dual citizenship. The …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

The Alchemical Vessel, River Soma

MFA Statements

My work comes from a place of deep feeling on a bodily level. Amidst the decorative play, there is a sense of the primitive and primordial, and also a certain humanity and clumsiness through struggle. Through the hermetic tradition I relate the alchemical vessel and its symbolic process of interior development to my artistic practice. Focusing in mixed media sculpture, I discovered a concentrated accumulation of symbolism specific to my practice, but also the full recognition of my practice as a ritualized psychological undertaking.

High + Low: A Forty-Five Year Retrospective Of D. Dominick Lombardi, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This catalog contains information about the exhibition High + Low, a 45-year retrospective curated by T. Michael Martin, featuring 20 distinct chapters of the art career of D. Dominick Lombardi. The common thread throughout his work is his interest in blending together qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, and experimentation with various media. His life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica(1939) at the age of 3 or 4, and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zapcomix in 1968.

The exhibition begins with the …

Soheila Azadi Interview, Jillian Bridgeman

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Soheila Azadi is an interdisciplinary visual artist and lecturer based in Chicago and Iran. Born in the capital of Islamic cities, Esfahan, Azadi absorbed story-telling skills through Persian miniature drawings since she was nine. Azadi’s inspirations come from her experiences of being a woman while living under Theocracy. Now residing in the U.S. Azadi is dedicated to transnational feminism with a passionate devotion to the ways in which race, religion, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity intersect. Azadi uses performance art and performative installations as methods to both materialize and narrate stories about women’s everyday struggle in the world. Her …

Ode To The Sea: Art From Guantanamo, Erin L. Thompson, Charles Shields, Paige Laino

Publications and Research

Exhibition catalogue for “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” (October 16, 2017-January 26, 2018, President's Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York). Detainees at the United States military prison camp known as Guantánamo Bay have made art from the time they arrived. The exhibit displays some of these evocative works, made by eight men: four who have since been cleared and released from Guantánamo, and four who remain there. They paint the sea again and again although they cannot reach it. The catalog includes contributions by Trevor Paglen, Solmaz Sharif, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, and current and …

Whitetail, Michael Steven Villarreal

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

When I was growing up, both my parents worked at a U-Haul from which they brought home discarded objects to the house my dad built with his own hands. This home, interior and exterior, was not designed to fit an explicit aesthetic, but all aspects of the house were in harmony and completed by the objects brought into each space. The house became a repository for abandoned domestic American culture— beds, window blinds, couches, appliances, and other products made it into the home in irregular but frequent intervals. For me, each item was an opportunity to have something new to …

Maybe The Gate Could Be A Fan, Erin L. Schoenbeck

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

I notice with quiet thrill an individual object or shape such as a railing, an odd pattern in the cement, a handle that does not match the rest, or a surprisingly decorative form intended only for a useful purpose. Choosing a form for its potential function, strange shape or particular color, I filter it through my aesthetic. My mental repetition of the day’s stresses is changed into lighthearted wondering. Maybe that gate I passed could become a beautiful fanned shape, its silhouette in gold and pale green. It could be so tiny its functional life outdoors is transformed into delicate …