Art and Design Commons^™

Private Conversation, Gahee Park

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper "Private Conversation" discusses the themes, contexts, and influences relevant to paintings and drawings I made during my MFA studies.

Desire And Fantasy Between Commercialism And Personal Room, Yukimi Otagiri

Theses and Dissertations

I apply two aspects of my life history to my art; my childhood experiences and my advanced studies in sociology. My work therefore combines a highly personal reading of my experiences of social interactions and my ongoing analysis of the nature of capitalism and socialism, commodification and media, especially in regard to the experiences of women in particular and consumers in general.

Nasty People: An Illustrated Guide To Understanding Sex, Sophia Weaver

Senior Honors Projects

Sex made me and it probably made you too, but for many of us sex remains a mystery for our entire lives. I see sexual images every day, but I rarely hear it discussed openly or factually. This is problematic. If most people are having sex and most people have a lot of misinformation about it, STDs, unwanted pregnancies and even sexual assaults are much more likely. Research suggests that increased (and well developed) sex ed. can reduce all of the possible negative outcomes of sexual misinformation. My observations of everyday life and my research in academia have given me …

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 …

Feminist Theory And Technical Communication, Olivia Duffus

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

This essay explores feminism, socially-constructed norms, and the relationship between feminism and technical communication. It argues that undergraduate technical communication programs should include courses that study feminist history and theories as related to the field, claiming that studying feminist theory will improve user-centered design and broaden students' spheres of influence as professionals.

Creating Narratives Through Art As Self-Definition For Black Women, Shannon Snelgrove, Laura Gardner Ph.D.

The Winthrop McNair Research Bulletin

The purpose of this study was to examine ways in which Black female artists have created narratives through art as self-definition. These artists have responded to stereotypical stories and images of Black women by creating self-defined stories and images. This study specifically focused on Faith Ringgold because she has combined narrative and visual art in story quilts that present Black women as empowered, multidimensional people. Her story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima reclaims the narrative of the stereotypical Black mammy character, Jemima. Ringgold depicts Jemima as a liberated, dynamic entrepreneur and family woman. In creating positive characterizations of Black …

Una Mueca Irónica: !El Travestismo Como Recurso Artístico De Las Yeguas Del Apocalipsis / An Ironic Grin: ! Cross-Dressing As An Artistic Resource Of The Apocalypseof The Yeguas, Sophia Cantizano

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Yeguas del Apocalipsis (Mares of the Apocalypse), were an art collective consisting of two men, Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas, who revolutionized the way transvestism was used in performance art. Active between 1988 and 1997, the Yeguas lit the way out of the dictatorship and into the post-regime transition period. For this reason, the context in which Lemebel and Casas made their art was more conducive to their own open criticism and explicit commentary of the political and social landscape, than that of the performance artists who functioned during the authoritarian dictatorship itself. This gave the Yeguas’ performances a …

Silhouettes Of A Silent Female’S Authority: A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Perspective On The Art Of Kara Walker, Angelica E. Perez

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998.

In a …

Performing Ourselves At The Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This interview sits alongside an extended version edited for Amanda Curreri’s solo exhibition, The Calmest of Us Would be lunatics, which took place from January 21–May 8, 2016, at Rochester Art Center, in Rochester, Minnesota. Curreri dug through the archival collection of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the country, and their journal, The ladder, at the Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition is titled after a line in Emily Dickinson’s 1877 letter to Elizabeth Holland which reads, “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of …

Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We live in an age of fast fashion. Clothing is produced in greater volumes than ever before and the lifecycle of each garment keeps getting shorter and shorter. Many items are manufactured to be worn only one time and then thrown away—as disposable as a cup of coffee. There is much to be learned about our current fashion ecosystem by looking into the past. Beyond the garments themselves we must understand the larger historical and sociological context in which these articles of clothing were produced. How does the shopping environment shape the buying habits and fashion trends of an era? …

Dress And Womanhood Of Ancient Rome, Eliza Burbano

Honors Theses

Fashion transcends its own role of imagery, as it becomes the medium through which individuals express their place in society. Fashion history would not consider the ancient world as part of the history of the discipline. Nevertheless, the function of dress in ancient cultures like that of Rome has definitely helped shape social hierarchies that are still present today. Clothing structured Roman society deeply, just as class, race, and sexuality did. Scholar Kelly Olson (2002) defines the function of clothing as part of a sign system. This study argues that dress in ancient Rome goes beyond this idea, in that …

Voices Trapped Within The Portrait: Annetje Kool Pieter Vanderlyn And The Expectations Regarding Gender In Public And Private Spheres In A Burgeoning Nation, Abigail Hollander

Honors Theses

The main subjects of this study, Pieter Vanderlyn, the attributed artist of “A Portrait of Annetje Kool” (c.1740), and Annetje Kool, the sitter, both had subversive identities relative to the sociocultural expectations of New Netherland, a Hudson River Valley based settlement. The oil portrait on canvas depicts a young woman in an elaborate dress with lace and gilt embellishments. To understand this portrait’s historical context, this thesis examines how male and female voices functioned on the margins of the moral boundaries that shaped expectations of gender appropriate thought and action during the colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary eras in New York …

Ise Annual Report 2015-2016, Intercultural Student Engagement Office, Anthony Johnson

Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) Annual Reports

The ISE Annual Report 2015-2016 is a year in review containing a message from the director, staff updates, community programs, statistics and general report of the work of this office. Our Mission: The office of Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) fosters multicultural understanding and personalized support at RISD by engaging its community through programming, advocacy, and specialized services. ISE believes in the power of art and design to unleash our inherent curiosity, constantly broadening and reshaping our understanding of the human experience. ISE envisions an artistic community where the breadth of the human dignity is creatively realized, inspiring everyone to collectively …

Animal Studies Journal 2016 5 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Notes On Contributors And Editorial, Melissa J. Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Cover page, table of contents, contributor biographies and editorial for Animal Studies Journal Vol. 5 No.1, 2016.

Toothsome Termites And Grilled Grasshoppers: A Cultural History Of Invertebrate Gastronomy, Deirdre P. Coleman

Animal Studies Journal

This article examines the recent turn to entomophagy (insect eating) as a new source of nutrition in a world confronted by increasing population, degraded soils, and food insecurity. Although many regard entomophagy with disgust, there is a case to be made that many insects are much more nutritious, as well as greener and cleaner¹, than many of the foods we regularly eat without thinking. Also, there is nothing new about insect eating or the belief in entomophagy as a sustainable and sensible practice. There is a long cultural history in countries such as Africa and Australia, for instance.

Mimicry And Mimesis: Matrix Insect, Madeleine Kelly

Animal Studies Journal

Paintings and insects might seem like odd companions. In this paper I describe how a series of paintings I made depicting insects creates associations between mimesis and mimicry in order to flag a sort of protective self-referentiality – one where painting resists its proverbial ‘end’ and insects are presented as vital new orders. Drawing upon art historical references, such as Surrealism and the modernist grid, I argue that playing on these references and the compositional effects of camouflage enlivens our regard for the sensuous worlds of both insects and painting. I conclude by exploring how paintings of insects are powerful …

Through The Eyes Of A Bee: Seeing The World As A Whole, Adrian G. Dyer, Scarlett R. Howard, Jair E. Garcia

Animal Studies Journal

Honeybees are an important model species for understanding animal vision as free-flying individuals can be easily trained by researchers to collect nutrition from novel visual stimuli and thus learn visual tasks. A leading question in animal vision is whether it is possible to perceive all information within a scene, or if only elemental cues are perceived driven by the visual system and supporting neural mechanisms. In human vision we often process the global content of a scene, and prefer such information to local elemental features. Here we discuss recent evidence from studies on honeybees which demonstrate a preference for global …

A Sustainable Campus: The Sydney Declaration On Interspecies Sustainability, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Sue Donaldson, George Ioannides, Tess Lea, Kate Marsh, Astrida Neimanis, Annie Potts, Nik Taylor, Richard Twine, Dinesh Wadiwel, Stuart White

Animal Studies Journal

Under the remit of an expanded definition of sustainability – one that acknowledges animal agriculture as a key carbon intensive industry, and one that includes interspecies ethics as an integral part of social justice – institutions such as Universities can and should play a role in supporting a wider agenda for sustainable food practices on campus. By drawing out clear connections between sustainability objectives on campus and the shift away from animal based products, the objective of this article is to advocate for a more consistent understanding and implementation of sustainability measures as championed by university campuses at large. We …

The Intersectional Influences Of Prince: A Human-Animal Tribute, Annie K. Potts

Animal Studies Journal

Prince Rogers Nelson (1958-2016) was best known for his joyful funk music and electrifying stage performances that transgressed normative representations of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, identity and taste. He was also a compassionate person who held deep convictions about freedom and the right of all species to enjoy lives without fear and suffering. This essay discusses Prince’s intersectional influences – the various ways his virtuosity over the past 38 years disrupted binaries, challenged assumptions and stereotypes, advocated for social justice, and combatted speciesism in its many forms. Embedded within the essay are seven personal tributes written by fans of Prince …

[Review] David Wilson, The Welfare Of Performing Animals: A Historical Perspective. Berlin: Springer, 2015, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

This book makes a valuable contribution to animal studies. It investigates the social and political processes concerned with the welfare of performing animals in Britain from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Although this area requires specialised inquiry, as David Wilson points out, animal performance is usually generalised about within pro-animal scholarship. Drawing on highly detailed research, this book provides a comprehensive account of the individuals and organisations that campaigned against animal performance and its cruelties and, in turn, those who campaigned for its continuation. It presents the human stories behind the movement against animal performance; descriptions of the …

Thirteen Figurings: Reflections On Termites, From Below, Perdita Phillips

Animal Studies Journal

This image essay is a creative reflection back upon The Encyclopaedia Isoptera: An encyclopaedia of the arts, sciences, literature and general information about termites, which was mostly written by the artist between 1997 and 1998, and forward to what termite art might undo today. Without access to living termites and, predating multispecies ethnographies, the Encyclopaedia Isoptera was an investigation into the limits of knowledge around termites. Looking back, it can be seen that certain strategies in the Encyclopaedia, such as looking at superseded or alternative knowledge, was a way of interrogating the boundaries of the sensible/insensible, and parallels more recent …

[Review] Ann C. Colley, Wild Animal Skins In Victorian Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, John Simons

Animal Studies Journal

You should never judge a book by its cover but, of course, that’s exactly what the Victorians did when they looked at animals—or so Professor Ann Colley claims, and with some justification. This book is a contribution to the growing list of valuable and entertaining studies of the collection and exhibition of wild animals in Victorian Britain and beyond, and it is highly recommended to anyone researching the field. I was looking forward to reading this as although there has been a fair bit of work on zoos and menageries and, especially recently, on taxidermy, the habit of collecting skins …

Humans, Insects And Their Interaction: A Multi-Faceted Analysis, Raynald H. Lemelin, Rick W. Harper, Jason Dampier, Robert Bowles, Debbie Balika

Animal Studies Journal

By administering Personal Meaning of Insects Maps (PMIM) to participants from eastern Canada and northeastern United States, we examine how people’s perceptions of insects are often determined by childhood encounters, corporeal cues, and influenced by environmental preference during recreational activities, often resulting in inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and bias. While the purpose of this study was to acquire a greater understanding of these entanglements through visual maps, the goal of this paper is to disentangle these morasses by highlighting the various positive, negative, dialectic, and ambivalent aspects of how insects are perceived.

Do Insects Feel Pain?, Helen Tiffin

Animal Studies Journal

This paper briefly considers the broad social and scientific background to research into the possibility of insects experiencing pain sensations analogous to our own. There has been increasing use of insects in pain experiments generally, as ethical constraints on the use of other animals increased through the last century. The ways in which scientists have tackled the question of insect pain, particularly in trying to distinguish between nociception and pain are then selectively summarised. These include opioid, hormonal, evolutionary, neurophysiological and behavioural approaches, as well as experiments designed to elucidate the difficult area of insect consciousness, from the 1980s to …

[Review] Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert And Helen Tiffen, Wild Man From Borneo: A Cultural History Of The Orangutan. Honolulu: University Of Hawai’I Press, 2014, Matthew Chrulew

Animal Studies Journal

Wild Man from Borneo is a studious and wide-ranging cultural history of the orangutan and an indispensable resource for anyone working on this species or great apes in general. Orangutan stories and encounters have always captivated, from the tales of the Dayak and Batak peoples from Borneo and Indonesia, to the first rumours of early European travellers, and later observations and dissections. The orangutan’s uncanny similarity to humans, both in form and behaviour, made it central to a nineteenth-century debate about the uniqueness of humanity, in a time when few had been seen and Europeans were unsure just what sort …

Provocations From The Field : The Place Of Bees, Michael R. Griffiths

Animal Studies Journal

What would it mean to permit lack to become a productive place? What, indeed, would it mean to think place – so often feminized in the carnophallogocentric order – as active? Lack, in these terms, could be constitutive rather than a mere marker of absence. I propose that the place of bees in the symbolics of species could yield answers to these and related questions. Insects are often understood and conceived as communicators – through pheromones for instance. But in the very gesture that recognizes their communication, one finds the refusal of consciousness behind this communicative apparatus. If bees are …

Context Clues, Brynn Trusewicz

Masters Theses

Context Clues explores the tensions between identity and appearance, especially as it relates to queer identities and the bodies that carry them.

It assumes that identity and appearance aren’t always straight forward or line up in expected ways.

It aims to expose our discomfort about this uncertainty.

It explores how we look at and evaluate others; what we observe and what we fill in.

It compares how we look at others and how we look to others.

It critiques the absurdity of how people perceive and interact with each other, by putting them in uncomfortable scenarios and exaggerating awkward situations. …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

Mr. Jonathan P. Berger: Gentle Conflations, Jonathan Patrick Berger, Mr. Jonathan P. Berger

Graduate School of Art Theses

Sentimentality is a critical aspect of human existence because it is human-natural, agendered, and provides ground for gentle conflation of the domestic sphere and the roles within it. As an artist, I am able to utilize sentimentality to open possibilities and welcome, instead of molest, viewers into contemplation with the assumed norms of domesticity.

With its origins founded in the Age of Enlightenment, sentimentality was a praiseworthy endeavor, one based on intelligence and contemplation. I define sentimentality as the emotional intellect’s way of encoding or decoding the soft emotions surrounding and within objects, people, times or ideas. Soft emotions are …

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 …