Art and Design Commons^™

Destabilize (Achtung) Baby: Performance Text, Phenomenon, And Writing As A Condition For Radicalizing An Historically Bourgeois Artform, Jeremy Kadetsky

Theatre Thesis - Written Thesis

The author seeks to define the preconditions for creating performance text that has the possibility to not only create exciting compelling performance; but also has the affordance to radically change the way in which dramatic theatre is produced. In creating their own dramaturgy, Jeremy Kadetsky draws inspiration from the post-structural linguistic writings of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva; the queer theory espoused by Jack Halberstam and Sarah Ahmed; and the written and realized work of contemporary American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Sibyl Kempson, and Agnes Borinsky. Ultimately, they find a working criteria for writing in a way that promotes fecundity, jouissance, …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

The Artist's Arsenal: Hiv+ Women Artists, The ‘War On Aids’, And Reclaiming Illness Narratives, Mekha Varghese

Art and Art History Honors Papers

This work uses the methodologies of both art history and medical sociology through the ‘syndemic’ framework to engage in close readings of two selected artworks, Exit (1997) by Nancer LeMoins and Violation of Africa (1984) by Affrekka Jefferson. An interdisciplinary approach to these works enables consideration of how multiple marginalized identities—i.e., living with a stigmatized illness, being a woman, being LGBTQIA+, being a person of color—appear in visual art and shape illness experience; these ideas are investigated through a formal and iconographic reading of the selected artworks. Placing art as the foundation of this analysis reveals its astounding impact and …

The Project Of Hope: Middle Eastern Feminism In Controversy, Alla Myzelev

Art History

No abstract provided.

Create Space–Create Communal Change: An Exploration Of Tactics Used By Augusta Savage And Theaster Gates, Ardel'paschal P. Sampson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Artistic Representation And Self Esteem, Brianna Davis

Honors College Theses

Dependent upon the constructs of the perception of self and the viewpoint of others, humans base the value of their self esteem on outer perspectives rather than internal ones. For this thesis in particular, the outer perspective to be examined is representation in the field of the arts. This thesis project explores the process of self esteem, artistic representation in the arts, how one affects the other, a history of the correlation between the two, and ways to inform and educate the masses with the tools necessary to advance representation in the arts thus raising the self esteem of its …

Critical Exhibition Methods In Museums, Jaimie Davis Ms

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Art and anthropology are intimately intertwined as art is an extension of culture which falls under the purview of anthropology. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates both anthropology's considerations for culture and art's consideration of aesthetic creates the best possible methodology for exhibition in museums. Art museums have enough aesthetic and could benefit from the considerations an anthropology's school of thought.

Harmony Of Difference: Theorizing Rashid Johnson's New Universalism In The Grids Of Antoine's Organ, Mark Fredricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My reading of Antoine’s Organ, a sculptural installation created by the artist Rashid Johnson in 2016, explores the artwork as a richly textured response to the limited universalism of modernism. I argue that Antoine’s Organ is a multimodal expression which crafts a harmony of difference using the aesthetic language and forms of both visual art and music. The term “harmony of difference” is taken from and inspired by a composition of the same name by jazz musician Kamasi Washington, and is used within to describe Rashid Johnson’s counterpoint strategy to work differences with and against each other, mobilizing the grid’s …

Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay analyzes the pictorial representation of Frida Khalo’s “The Dream,” to unfold the nature and reflect upon the notions of joy and innocence as forms of a subtle contestation. How are they represented? By examining the visible and the non-visible as conditions of critical possibility for joy, innocence and contestation, we can reevaluate the interrelation between the notions of life and death in the Mexican culture, and Frida’s personal history. I argue that innocent joy is a quality that articulates a subtle contestation or clandestine activity of freedom

Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise …

The Unpresentable And The Aesthetics Of The Sublime In The Art Of Alfredo Jaar, Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

I argue that in Postmodernism, as per Lyotard’s writings, art “…caters to the impossibility for an attainable wholeness or sense of presence” (1131). And yet, this state of ‘unattainable wholeness’, does not deny to postmodern art the role of the experience that can carry emancipatory power. Yet, it may not be a ‘unity of experience’ as per Habermas, but still constitute a space of experience and presentations of the unpresentable that is predicated by difference. I propose that Lyotard’s theory of the presentation of the unpresentable, which sees presentation of artworks oriented towards formless art language games and communication, are …

In-Between Spaces: Atmospheres, Movement And New Narratives For The City, Paul Alexander Stoicheff

Masters Theses

We often think of architecture as distinct buildings, yet as we move through the city we continuously pass through a built environment that is a collage of buildings. These spaces between buildings are underestimated as influences on our experience of everyday life in the city. Considering architecture as linked existential experiences through spaces rather than confined to individual buildings is more in line with our experience of the city as a series of interconnected spaces and places. Rather than describing a single, static architecture through words, how can we express this linked experience of spaces dynamically through narratives? Can writing …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

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. …

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …

Striking Chords Ii: Music In Ukiyo-E Prints (2022), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"The theme of music in ukiyo-e prints has been explored by the RISD art history students for two semesters (fall 2021 and spring 2022) in a hands-on curatorial format. The resulting exhibition Striking Chords: Music in Ukiyo-e Prints, is on view at the RISD Museum from February through July 2022.

The spring semester project is virtual. However, the approach is similar – to comprehensively study music-related prints in the collection of the RISD Museum and to share the findings with interested audiences, albeit in digital format.

Nineteen prints have been selected. In the exhibition’s virtual space, they are displayed according …

Políticas Visuales Y Acción Colectiva: Un Investigación Sobre Las Articulaciones Estético-Políticas En Manifestaciones De Arte Público En Ushuaia Y El Bolsón / Visual Politics And Collective Action: An Investigation Of Aesthetic-Political Articulations In Manifestations Of Public Art In Ushuaia And El Bolsón, Laura Woodhouse

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Art in the public sphere is an integral tool of communication that transcends the vertical hierarchies of social organization by infiltrating the popular consciousness with disruptive mediums and reclamations of visual space. Because of the specific accessibility of a variety of forms of public art, for both creators and observers, manifestations of public art have become a popular method through which counter-hegemonic social narratives can be constructed and mediated; in Argentina, a profound history of disruptive art has has been intricately intertwined with an equally rich history of popular activism. With a focus in El Bolsón and Ushuaia, two localities …

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 …

Cherokee Abstract Artist Leon Polk Smith: A Convergence Of Traditions, Danielle Montanino

Dissertations and Theses

This paper analyzes how Leon Polk Smith's Indigenous roots and upbringing in Indian Country had a significant impact on his artistic practice in a time of discrimination and segregation in the United States. Through examination contextualizing his work within the history and political events of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations it is revealed how Polk Smith developed a formal language that could navigate both worlds and be viewed through a pure abstraction lens or a lens embodying his Indigenous traditions. In addition to his Indigenous philosophies, Mesoamerican Inca Nation’s cultural motifs further ground Polk Smith’s Indigenous aesthetic, and avant-garde …

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

Towards A Revised Approach To Designing From The Outside In: Contextualizing The Preliminary Proposal For The Fourth Addition To Bard College Library, Aidan Galloway

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Before creating the new, architects are faced with the existing. An enormous oak tree might be within the bounds of the site you’ve been hired to build a house on. Do you cut it down, or leave it? A tall brick building might be next door. Do you imitate its scale, its materiality, its style, or do you create something that looks entirely different?

These kinds of questions, while perhaps always fundamental to architecture, were especially pertinent in mid-to-late-twentieth century debates surrounding “context” as architects like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown challenged the conventions of “orthodox” Modern architecture. “Frank …

The Disappearance Of The Anti-Aesthetic; The Death Of Fashion, Scrap Evans

Capstone Showcase

In this essay, Scrap explores the connection between famous nihilist and postmodernist theorists, Dadaism, the concept of the anti-aesthetic, and today's high fashion. They provide a history of nihilism and follow its influence through time upon other social, political, and artistic movements. They then make direct connections between famous theorists' prose and famous fashion designers' collections. Finally, they analyze the current state of the fashion world and discuss their plan of action.

Striking Chords: Music In Ukiyo-E Prints (2021), Theory & History Of Art & Design Department, Elena Varshavskaya (H791 Instructor)

Ukiyo-e Prints Course | Exhibition Catalogs

"The book “Striking Chords: music in ukiyo-e prints” is a student version of a scholarly catalog that accompanies the RISD Museum’s ukiyo-e prints exhibition of the same title. ... This exhibition is a culmination of an ukiyo-e art history course taught at RISD in the fall of 2021. The project was generously accommodated by the RISD Museum. With the help of Wai Yee Chiong, Associate Curator of Asian Art, fifteen prints were selected from the collection of the RISD Museum. For the exhibition’s online component, which is still under construction, additional prints were chosen – two more from the RISD …

The Role Of The Reader Is To Fallow: Responding To The Negative Reception Of Paul Verhoeven’S Film Adaptation Of Starship Troopers, Julian Meyerstrom

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Robert A. Keinlein’s science fiction novel Starship Troopers (1959), and its film adaption of the same title directed by Paul Verhoeven (1997), received mixed critical reactions. Both pieces came across as supporting fascistic ideals to most critics upon release, despite the two creators opposing political and moral beliefs. Using Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory as a framework for analyzing both the novel and film adaptation, this paper postulates the film adaptation fails to deliver an accurate critique of the novel by placing the burden of moral knowledge on the audience. Keinlein’s novel guides the reader into his moral sensibilities, whereas …

James Mahony (C.1816-1859): The Illustrated London News, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience Of Vulnerable Immigrants, Eric Andre

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience of Vulnerable Immigrants" focuses on the impact of systems of state control such as immigration laws, policies, and practices that have been institutionalized and that have marginalized immigrants. In my thesis, I pay specific attention to inhuman acts of exclusion and discrimination resulting from the systemic barriers perpetuated by xenophobic and nationalist ideologies.

From this standpoint, my thesis exhibition employs interactive space, which includes visual art (drawing, sculpture ceramics), projection, video, and sound, as a means to explore the effects of the exclusive and discriminatory immigration policies and practices. Furthermore, it is designed to explore …