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The Cult Of The Nymphs: Identity, Ritual, And Womanhood In Ancient Greece, Ivana Genov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Examining archeological and epigraphic evidence in its historical context, in this thesis I explore the Cult of the Nymphs venerated across ancient Greek poleis. I analyze the nymph’s profound cultural and historical impact that is often overlooked in the study of ancient Greece. Nymphs were female deities thought to embody ecological sites, such as fountains and springs, and became fundamental to polis identity. Their locations were often central to city plans, and their faces, depicted on coinage, became representative of the city itself. In the community, nymphs were integral to rituals for major life events, most often in the lives …

From The Studio To The Field: André Breton’S ‘Hopi Notebook’, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

André Breton’s visit to the Hopi villages of Arizona in 1945 had an impact on his view of the world and of the objects he collected. His response to what he witnessed in the month when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was reflected in the notebook he kept on his trip, known as the “Hopi Notebook,” and in the poem he began writing that summer, “Ode to Charles Fourier.” His belief in the liveliness of repurposed things, haunted by their former lives, was particularly pertinent to the Hopi katsina figures he collected on his trip …

Manufacturing The Freak: Animality And The Western Sideshow, Sebastian Cannito

Undergraduate Research Awards

Excerpt from paper: "Come one, come all to the fascinating world of the carnival: a wonderland at first glance, something from a dream or a nightmare. Spirited jingles from a cheap speaker are playing overhead and everything is painted to look like a circus clown. Step right up! The carnival talker beckons you inside. “Freaks! Live! Dead! Other! SEE THEM NOW!”

Little captured the spirit of this place better than the sideshow banner. For a long time, these painted tarps were valued only for their ability to lure in an audience; once obsolete, they were reused as scraps. Since then, …

The Architecture Of Clothing: Notions Of Public And Private Space, Savannah Orsak

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Space, as defined as a three dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction, is conversely bound through clothing, architecture, and other margins that organize humanhood for everyday purpose. Continually, clothing imposes and extends itself into everyday experiences and dictates notions of interaction between both people and objects. In this written body of work, my intention is to explore public and private spatial influences within clothing and the ways in which these influences can be curated to reflect and evoke notions of interaction and identity. Following three related studies on space, form, and curation, a survey …

The Line Of Dichotomy: Standpoints And Meaning In Anne Truitt's Art, Charles J. Parsons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Some of Anne Truitt’s formal strategies—such as using the separate faces of the work to force the viewer to engage in it sequentially—build or depend on real or literal facts of the “situation” of the artwork. If this is the case, how do such works escape being reducible to their objecthood, their literal properties of size and shape? And how do they produce effects that are not mere experience or mere affective response? The answer I offer is that they depend on conventions and interpretation.

Much of my analysis focuses on the ways Truitt makes her intentions visible through form, …

Historical Art, Ecology, And Implication, Alan C. Braddock

Arts & Sciences Articles

"For fifteen years, I have researched, published, lectured, and taught about art and ecology, focusing on contemporary contexts as well as historical work produced long before Ernst Haeckel coined “ecology” (Oecologie) in 1866, and prior to the emergence of modern environmentalism..."

Collecting Ghostly Things: André Breton And Joseph Cornell, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from the article: "The collection André Breton left behind at his death in 1966 was unified by ghostliness, surrealism’s hauntedness, which grew out of the early experiments with automatic trances in Breton’s apartment in 1922–23 and was later embodied in the surrealist propensity to see qualities of life in things, that, having been used and handled, were believed to have led former lives (fig. 1).1 Breton identified intimately with the ghostliness he found in things because he believed the objects he loved housed hidden impulses, memories akin to the dream traces human beings carry in their unconscious minds. Breton’s …

Action And Standing A Round, Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Articles

Some philosophers, like Roger Scruton, famously deny that a photograph can be a work of art. On their views, whatever is truly photographic is sheerly mechanical: it is dependent on the objects of the world, not on the ideas, beliefs or intentions of the photographer. Photography cannot make art, because there is no way to intend something photographically. To help us grasp what is essentially photographic, Scruton suggests we consider what he calls an “ideal photograph,” which is (as he explains) a “logical fiction.” The “ideal photograph” is the product of photography stripped of all manipulation and reduced to what …

Photographic Automatism: Surrealism And Feminist (Post?) Modernism In Susan Hiller's Sisters Of Menon, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Excerpt from book chapter: "Susan Hiller stated in a 2005 interview that what drew her ‘to look again at surrealism’ and ‘the repressed history of automatism within modernism’ was the experience she had drawing Sisters of Menon (1972) as part of a group project she initiated involving automatic practice. One reason for this reconsideration must surely have been the surrealists’ engagement in the countercultural ideals of her own generation as evidenced by their commitment to the May 1968 student protests in Paris..."

The Surrealist Collection: Ghosts In The Laboratory, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Excerpt from book chapter: "Surrealism was forged by poets and artists who intentionally surrounded themselves with objects of philosophical significance to them, objects whose arrangement refracted back to them elements of their own beliefs. André Breton, author of the manifestoes of Surrealism, was the movement’s exemplary collector and his practice of collection yielded the movement’s mystery‐laden backdrop to the development of the principles of Surrealism just as his apartment on the rue Fontaine in Paris provided the setting for gatherings of the group’s meetings..."

"Introduction" & "Modernisms And Authority", Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusiñol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compelling—something …

Value And Hidden Cost In André Breton’S Surrealist Collection, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

André Breton’s collection provides a unique perspective on the environment within which the principles of surrealism were crystallized. In addition to his collection of European paintings, Breton’s Oceanic object collection grew during World War Two in New York. In essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Breton ascribed a “poetic view” and “prestige” to these things with no reference to their monetary value. And yet his history of acquisition and de-acquisition of such things and paintings show that he also understood collecting as a form of investment, despite his avowed objection to the forces of French colonialism that made it accessible …

Questions For Adams, Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Articles

Thomas J. Adams’ review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century begs what I consider to be a vital question. In what follows, I want to pose that question. In that sense, I am criticizing Adams. I should say, further, that that is the only sense in which I understand myself to be criticizing Adams. I don’t aim to find fault with his general thesis, that by “eliding history, the terms of [Piketty’s] discussion imagine solutions without politics,” which is to say, without a good account of the history of inequality, you cannot have an effective, mobilized political engagement.

"Her Correspondence Is Dangerous": Women In The Fashion Trades Negotiating The Opportunities And Challenges Of Doing Business In The Chesapeake, 1766-75, Kaylan Michelle Stevenson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Miró’S Politics, Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Articles

Filippo Brunelleschi built a perspective device that combined a rendering of the Florence baptistery with a mirror. Its story is one of the origin myths of the art and science of perspectival projection—of what the Florentine renaissance called costruzzione leggitima. Brunelleschi painted a small picture of the Florentine baptistery, which is located directly opposite the entrance of the Florentine cathedral. This picture and the accompanying apparatus were to provide a demonstration of a new technique, which we now call perspective. But Brunelleschi wanted his picture not just to show this technique, but also to demonstrate its accuracy, its special …

Carrington's Kitchen, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

This essay argues that the objects in Leonora Carrington’s kitchen, as represented in her writing and painting, are comparable to the objects in Breton’s study, as he writes about them and has them photographed. Her most emblematic object - the cauldron - epitomizes the way she mixes the ingredients of her art, creating new substances through a literal process of embodiment. In comparison, Breton predominantly matches the ingredients of his art, through his strategy of juxtaposition, following the combinatory principle of the surrealist image, the spark that stimulates automatism’s flow. Both sets of objects reflect the spaces that house them …

The Making Of A Boxer, Ronald Schechter, Liz Clarke

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Inspired by the resounding success of Abina and the Important Men (OUP, 2011), Mendoza the Jew combines a graphic history with primary documentation and contextual information to explore issues of nationalism, identity, culture, and historical methodology through the life story of Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza was a poor Sephardic Jew from East London who became the boxing champion of Britain in 1789. As a Jew with limited means and a foreign-sounding name, Mendoza was an unlikely symbol of what many Britons considered to be their very own "national" sport. Whereas their adversaries across the Channel reputedly settled private quarrels by dueling …

What Makes A Collection Surrealist: Twentieth-Century Cabinets Of Curiosities In Paris And Houston, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Articles

Breton’s surrealist collection constitutes a twentieth-century cabinet of curiosity that like its baroque predecessors, sought to encompass the world within a contained and concentrated space. This essay argues what makes it a surrealist collection, lies in its ghostliness, its cultivation of a global aesthetic informed by a curiosity about psychological depth. This surrealist collecting sensibility persists in New World collections like the Menil Collection in Houston, which is similarly characterized by ghostliness. Surrealist collections have the potential to help contemporary museum viewers understand better the history of the current aesthetic produced by globalization.

Responses To Davis, “Neurovisuality”, Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Articles

Things remain visible to people outside the visuality within which they were intentionally produced, though what is visible in an artifact in this context (or what is visible about it) may differ from what is visible in the context of visuality. By the same token, people can succeed to many visualities, though both Wölfflin and Panofsky were somewhat uncertain (on different grounds) about just how far it is possible to do so when we are dealing with visualities constituted in the past and accessible to us only in things made to be visible within them that happen to have survived …

False Gods: Authority And Picasso’S Early Work, Charles J. Palermo

Arts & Sciences Articles

In his Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism, Steven Knapp discusses some revisionist biblical criticism. This materialist criticism uses social history to recover contexts for biblical history, and does so specifically for the purpose of casting doubt on canonical biblical texts. The substance of the accounts is not my interest here, nor are the aims of their revisions. What I am concerned to trace is a problem Knapp finds in them generally. The problem is: if you question the sacred texts in light of historical circumstances, why do they still matter to you? “The answer,” as Knapp puts it...

"By Measures Taken Of Men": Clothing The Classes In William Carlin's Alexandria, Katherine Eileen Egner

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Pamunkey Pottery And Cultural Persistence, Ashley Atkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Jeffersons At Shadwell: The Social And Material World Of A Virginia Family, Susan A. Kern

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

From the 1730s through the 1770s Shadwell was home to Jane and Peter Jefferson, their eight children, over sixty slaves owned by them, and numerous hired workers. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals much about Thomas Jefferson's boyhood home. Shadwell was a well-appointed gentry house at the center of a highly structured plantation landscape during a period of Piedmont settlement that scholars have traditionally classified as frontier. Yet the Jeffersons accommodated in their house, landscape, material goods, and behaviors the most up-to-date expectations of Virginia's elite tidewater culture. The material remnants of Shadwell raise questions about the character of this frontier …

Fashion's Foes: Dress Reform From 1850-1900, Elizabeth A. Komski

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Mysterious Messages: Masonic Imagery In Baltimore Album Quilts, Anne Bayne Battaile

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Plaids And Broadswords Of The Altamaha, Robert K. Weber

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Sugar Chests In Middle Tennessee, 1800-1835, Anne Shelton Mcpherson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

All Sorts Of China Ware Large, Noble And Rich Chinese Bowls: Eighteenth-Century Chinese Export Porcelain In Virginia, David Andrew Madsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

African-American Influence On The Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe: Evidence From Nineteenth Century Probate Inventories And Population Census Records Of York County, Virginia And Worcester County, Maryland, Albert James M. Mamary

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Tobacco And Cloth: A Century Of Virginia Clothing Acquisition 1607-1707, Barbara Anne Curran

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.