Art and Design Commons^™

From Margins To Museums: Tracing The Evolution Of Representation For Contemporary African Artists In The United States, Victoria Mouraux Durand-Ruel

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the art community in the United States and the evolution of representation for Contemporary African artists. By analyzing the careers and artistic contributions of Omar Ba, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, the study explores the concept of artistic agency according to which African artists have more control over the production and distribution of their works.

The research begins with a comprehensive literature review, investigating the historical contexts that have shaped the art landscape, including the impact of colonization, decolonization, and globalization. The study reveals how these …

Resitance Art And Urban Space: A Strategic Comparison Of Artistic Urban Space Usage In Buenos Aires And San Francisco, Adeline Rose Schmitz

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the early Twentieth century the Mexican Muralism movement reached two important port cities: San Francisco and Buenos Aires. The artists in these cities quickly adopted the usage of public art as means to insert political dialogue into the everyday life of their citizens. Throughout the years the resistance art in these cities has evolved in parallel, shaped by their dynamic histories of social and political change. This paper critically compares the evolutions of resistance art in Buenos Aires and San Francisco over the past twenty years. It does so by analyzing the public art archives of local collectives in …

The Role Of Aesthetics In Classroom Design: Implications For Engagement And Equity, Giuliana Barraza

Master's Theses

The desire for achieving greater equity in education has been a prevalent topic of research, with many studies indicating that the current education system in this country is designed in a way that exacerbates initial inequities and has a negative impact on student motivation and engagement (EOCD, 2012). While existing scholarship mostly discusses equity and engagement through the lens of curriculum and instruction, the power of physical classroom environments and aesthetic elements present in those environments is less explored. With student populations becoming more diverse, there is a greater need for new tools for teachers to utilize in pursuit of …

Volcanoes & Other Yards, Rebeca Flores

Master's Theses

Volcanoes & Other Yards is a collection of short stories set in the yards of California, Mexico, and El Salvador. Characters see the manifestations of their labor through imagination and purposeful acts of play. Working class characters are pushed to eruptions that make them question what it means to witness racism, capitalism, and noble acts of good. They undergo solitude, loss of home, and welfare lines, and they witness their country gas children, government intrusions, and grief. To reconcile with their generational trauma, they must encounter land and labor. The collection explores the idea of an imaginary volcano to bring …

Community, Preservation, And Street Art: A Proposal For San Francisco’S Mission District, Marissa Nadeau

Master's Projects and Capstones

The Latinx community is an integral part of San Francisco’s rich history. From Mexican missions in the late 1700s to an influx of immigrants from various Latin countries starting in the early 1900s, the Mission District (‘the Mission’) of San Francisco has served as a hub for this mix of residents, fondly called “Raza,” emphasizing the people of a community rather than the country they have come from. Wars and issues dealt in their homelands were close to the hearts of the entirety of the Latinx population of the Mission, and their voices and opinions were heard through a type …

Curating Contemporary Japanese Art: Exhibition Catalogue Production For Hidden Landscapes: Yasuaki Onishi And Invisible Space, Emily Lawhead

Master's Projects and Capstones

In the last decade, there has been a telling increase of attention given to contemporary Asian artists exhibited in the United States and Europe. Since 2008, artists from China, Japan, South Korea, and Central Asia have been featured in exhibitions from the Venice Biennale to the Whitney Biennale, and are becoming ever more present on the Western art stage. Meanwhile, curatorial practice, once focused on the care of objects, is shifting to encompass a wider range of creative activity. Curators are taking time to engage with living artists in a collaborative setting, rather than as impartial facilitators. This capstone seeks …

Curating Adjacent Shores: A Contemporary Art Exhibition At Usf's Thacher Gallery, Nell C. Herbert

Master's Projects and Capstones

This capstone is a project management plan for the curation of a real-world contemporary art exhibition at the University of San Francisco’s Mary and Carter Thacher Gallery. Adjacent Shores: Hughen Starkweather was on view from March 7 through April 24 of 2016, and featured an eighteenth century Japanese map and the work of the collaborative team of San Francisco based artists Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather. The exhibition was part of a larger program of events that occurred concurrently on the USF campus and at the Asian Art Museum, all centered on the theme of cartography. During and immediately following …

Translating Transformative Human Rights Education Through Visual Languages & Informal Spaces, Jazzmin Chizu Gota

Master's Projects and Capstones

This project examines methods, theories, and practices of translating human rights education through multiple vernaculars. Developed as a workshop in sociocultural syntax deconstruction and an educational human rights education website focused on the domestic population of the US, the project focuses on localizing human rights concepts to the public vernacular of the country. Human rights education (HRE) and media and information literacy (MIL) are expanded and redefined as social literacy, or the ability to navigate and decode the present, complex realities that both HRE and MIL were developed to address. Reframing media and visual arts as an archive of past …

Systems At Play: The Construction Of International Systems In Social Impact Games, Jorge Albor

Master's Theses

This thesis explores how game makers conceive of and navigate the intersection between digital systems and real world systems by asking, how can social impact game designers shape procedural rhetoric to effectively address complex real world systems with digital systems? By examining three game case studies, I reach four significant findings regarding player agency, subversive play, design approaches to scale, and game difficulty in regards to systems fluency.