Art and Design Commons^™

Fragmented Bodies, Lauren Careese Alexander

Art Theses and Dissertations

Through Memory Webs and fragmented ceramic vessels, I express what it feels like to grow up living in a biracial body. I utilize mixed media to emulate a mixed-race experience. My Memory Webs are fashioned by painting on scraps of canvas and attaching them with crocheted wire and ribbon to speak to how my memory has impacted my identity. My fragmented ceramic vessels are cut up and stitched back together to represent disjointedness and un-belonging. All of my work is contextualized through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and what the Monster may represent for people of color. I also …

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

A Renaissance: The Absurd Retelling Of Mostly True Events, Erica R. Hitzman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Throughout the following you will be taken on a fantastical retelling of the exhibition A Renaissance, and some of what lead up to it. Through the eyes of various shifting perspectives you will explore the relationships between the artist, her art, and the viewer in the hopes of unveiling how the work plays into feminist theory, its place in the Zeitgeist, and the motivations behind it. Each perspective is formatted differently, to visually mirror the shift in perspective. Presented in the first person and aligned to the right, the account of the artist discusses the process, emotion, and inspiration behind …

Contemporary Handicraft, Textile Art, And Feminist Social Critique, Kaitlynn Blow

Honors Theses

My thesis looks at the work of female contemporary artists who use what has historically been considered “women’s craft” such as embroidery, knitting, stitching and other various textile arts. Since the Women’s Art Movement of the 1970s, women have used these creative outlets to express discontent and injustice in their lives revolving around gender and identity. In my research, three main themes emerged as addressed in each chapter. The first theme addresses the topic of domesticity and memory including unseen female labor, such as domestic chores and motherhood, and how fabric holds memories. Chapter two covers gender politics- specifically the …

When Valerie Solanas Shot Andy Warhol: A Feminist Tale Of Madness And Revolution, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In 1967 Valerie Solanas published the Society for Cutting Up Men (the SCUM) Manifesto. She shot artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Her Manifesto raises issues about whether a revolution can be fought or won without using violence. “Nice” girls were of no use to her Radical feminists, especially Ti-Grace Atkinson and Flo Kennedy, saw Solanas as a symbol of a feminist fighting back and rushed to her side. They found a smart, very paranoid woman who was a decided loner. Ultimately, Solanas would not work with Atkinson and Kennedy; she refused to allow them to help her or explain …

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

Say Luv: Reimagining The Black Female Body, Jer'lisa Devezin

Art Theses and Dissertations

From hottentot venus to Cardi B, the influence of the white representation and the treatment of the black female body has shaped a culture of oppression amongst Black women, having surpassed the white community and trickled into the black community. In hip hop culture, reality television, and social media, black women are portrayed as angry and are stereotyped as ghetto and ignorant. On the music scene woman are always sexualized under the male gaze, however now that we are in the twerk era Cardi B is giving a new perspective to the representation of women in hip hop. By using …

Thesis/Thesis Document 2, Jessamyn Plotts

Art Theses and Dissertations

Thesis/thesis document 2 explores the subversive power of the painted image, made by a physical performative act. Such acts are not confined to the production of the art object, but expand across the landscape, involving the minds, bodies, and things of culture adjacent to the making process. Following the thinking of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Thesis/thesis document 2 understands painting not as the container of a finite, legible message, but as a physical platform for the conveyance of perceptual, personal, and experiential ambiguity. Made in this way, painted images offer a powerful alternative to the proliferation of propaganda and advertisement …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

A Woman's Gaze, Emily Fiore

Honors Theses

My work merges my passion of thinking politically and artistically. This series, A Woman’s Gaze, is an extension of my Political Science thesis, where I focused on artists who combat the male gaze by representing women’s lives realistically, from a woman’s perspective. These paintings focus on intimate scenarios from women’s lives where the male gaze is absent. The large scale imagery brings visibility to these otherwise private moments.

Prevail: In The Moment..., Nicole Stahl

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This body of work is composed of sculptural mixed media objects and scenes that heavily utilize cast glass. These pieces are physical representations of my quest to seek mental balance by focusing on what brings me happiness and comfort while still honoring mortality.

Moldmaking and repetition of process innate within casting and other aspects of this work makes me focus and revisit an idea, repetitively, like a meditation or a prayer. The intense focus required helps combat my anxiety and translates anxious energy into more positive, productive, balanced way of living.

Part of this balance requires the acknowledgment of the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

The Ceramic Body: Concepts Of Violence, Nature, And Gender, Chrysanna R. Daley

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the connection between women and nature, specifically the violence that has been inflicted upon them both and how it is interrelated. I positioned my research within the field of Ecofeminism, which critiques the language we (as a Western culture) use to associate women with nature and vice-versa. Traditionally, women are more often associated with nature than men are, and the environment is personified as “Mother Nature”. I argue that uncritically gendering nature as “female” is problematic because of the associations we typically make between the two, and the expectations and values we assign to …

Women And Video Games: Pigeonholing The Past, Allison Perry

Scripps Senior Theses

Academic work dealing with the overlap between video games and female representation is limited in both volume and proper research. Most texts agree on three supposed flaws with video games: they alienate female participants, there are no games for female players, and female players cannot relate to female characters. This thesis sheds light on these points, not only citing specific counter-examples, but also showing how many of these issues reflect on a larger societal problems.

Addressing Gender Equity Through Artistic Process, Jane P. Rando

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

On our society, girls and women face unique physical and psychic dangers. There is insufficient support for respectful surfacing and articulation of voice, neither are there sufficient tools with which to combat the socio-environmental phenomena of “hitting the wall” and “going underground.” (Gilligan 1983). While the creative process is full of risk taking and challenge for all, it presents additional problems for girls and women. This thesis identifies and explores the ideas and factors that influence female voicing, with a focus on artistic process as a voicing too. The reader is offered a selective review of the literature on gender …

When There Will Be Great Women Artists, Anne M. Stanton

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

Linda Nochim has posed the question why there are no great women artists? (Nochim 1988) While this question can be challenged as a issue of perspective, I attempt to address it as an actual phenomenon. What is it that limits the productivity of women in art? Historically, women in the modem industrialized world have been objectified and stereotyped, and I will present a brief overview that discusses the definition of woman in this context (Bohan 1993, West and Zimmerman 1987, Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1990), and also demonstrate this view has saturated society. As a first step to change, women must …

Shirley Moskowitz At Seventy-Five, Samuel D. Gruber Dr.

Samuel D. Gruber Dr.

Essay about the life and art of Shirley Moskowitz for catalog of retrospective exhibit.

Paintings And Drawings In Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné, Polly P. Duryea

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Paintings and Drawings in Willa Cather's Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné considers the specific artists and their visual art that greatly influenced Willa Cather's textual compositions. The Catalogue draws upon the author's research of Cather-related art from both American and European libraries and art museums. This art includes painting, drawing, illustration, and tapestry. A detailed and alphabetized list of selected artists and paintings that Cather preferred is provided. The artists are cross-referenced with Cather's own statements about their work or style. Included is biographical data for each artist, the named work of art, and often the date executed, the location then …

[Introduction To] Writing The Woman Artist: Essays On Poetics, Politics, And Portraiture, Suzanne W. Jones

Bookshelf

The essays in this collection explore the many ways in which women writers have seen and dreamed the woman artist as a character in their works. In describing this character, her struggles and her visions, we as feminist critics run the risk of prescribing her, and yet failing to name her means failing to know her. We confront this difficulty not by defining the woman artist figure but by identifying many. Recognizing as Teresa De Lauretis has suggested that the social construction of gender is "a common denominator" among women, we examine the different representations of the woman artist figure …

Warm Journal: Special Issue On Competition Volume 1 Issue 3, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

WARM’s focus in this issue is on competition and its impacts on personal and professional life. Within this issue is a conversation between the women on the WARM Journal Committee entitled “Dividing the Pie” which discusses women and societal images. There were compositions on competition, artwork, and poems followed by a calendar of events. Also found is information on WARM Exhibitions and a piece about Jaci Schacht’s work authored by Fran Addington. This issue concludes with reviews of local displays, an open letter to Sam Sachs, and details about WARM members and membership.

Warm Journal Volume 1 Issue 2, 1972-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

This issue contains two interviews, one with Pat Olson about her graphic design work and life as an artist, and one with B.J. Shigaki about her life and being the director of the Rochester Art Center. There is a collection of poetry by Jill Breckenridge-Haldeman, and a review of Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer, a book on women’s “fine art” from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century. Also included in the issue were submissions of artistry with descriptions from members of WARM.

Warm Journal Volume 1 Issue 1, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

The main articles of this issue concern Julia Barkley’s trip to China, Taiwan, and Japan, an interview with Sally Brown, an art instructor in the Twin Cities, and a review of the Women’s Art Weekend by Roseanne Sullivan. Barkley’s travelogue, although it contains language dated by modern standards, is an insightful exposé of what life was like for female artists in East Asia at the start of the 1980s. Brown’s interview provides a window into the development of women’s artistry in the 1960s. The Women’s Art Weekend documented women speaking about their struggles against racism and sexism at MCAD, and …

Warm Newsletter 1978 January-March, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

WARM provides a newsletter for January-March of 1978. Its contents include meetings, announcements, openings, and membership information. The coordinator provides congratulations to grant winners, grants given for Women Invite Women and Visiting Artist Program, and thanks for work on grant proposals. Readers are given information about membership fees, the annual meeting, and an invitation to the open discussion during the annual meeting. Article 1: Membership amendment (includes levels of membership) to the by-laws of WARM has been revised and clarified within this newsletter. The letter concludes with upcoming events of Joan Snyder and Marcia Tucker, a Wild Rice television date, …

Newspaper Clippings From January, 1935-1938, International Institute Of Rhode Island

Scrapbooks of the International Institute of Rhode Island (1930-1965)

In the scrapbook, there are various newspaper clippings that address Portuguese Handicrafts and an appreciation of other cultures. This cultural appreciation would be shown at the Rhode Island School of Design to provide audiences would an understanding of Portuguese designs. Alongside these artworks, there is a strong emphasis on Italo-American handicrafts also being displayed in the museum. These newspaper clippings also focus on other activities, organizations, and programs involving the foreign community of Rhode Island.