To Dig A Hole And Fill It Back Up, Jackson Whetstone

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract:

The socioeconomical philosophy of the United States is still very much related to the Marxist Labor Theory of Value which states that “the economic value of a good or service is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it” (Das Kapital, Marx 1.) This philosophy has penetrated the way that we think about art and object, and in turn positions art as a means of transaction, thus limiting art to a form of glorified currency. This Essay will chronicle my art practice, that have led up to two thesis pieces, Trench and Dig …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Future Trash, Xinan Ran

Theses and Dissertations

Xinan Ran explores the politically different, yet similar cultural habits that China and the US share under the influence of late-stage capitalism. Through her handmade, speculative products inspired by novelty gadgets, or “Unitaskers,” she examines the heightened prevalence of the contemporary wellness market. The project “Future Trash” encompasses soft sculptures, printed materials, performance, and installation.

Bloody Show, Leonie Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Leonie Weber reflects on how reproductive, domestic, and emotional labor is addressed in her artwork, and her experience as an artist-parent in the art world. Moreover, she specifically discusses mothers who are navigating their own artistic paths. Her practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, performance, and installation.

Break Time, Quinlan Maggio

Theses and Dissertations

In this graduate thesis artist Quinlan Maggio describes their two-part art project in which they create site-specific private/public spaces and encounters within a larger public, specifically, that of the Hunter MFA community and its art-viewing audience.

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Five Days, David Beams

2022 MFA Visual Arts

No abstract provided.

Art/Work: Labor, Identity, And Society, Zirui Feng, Elinor G. Gass, Ran Li, Lauren C. Mcveigh, Matthew S. Montes, Lin Zhu, Yan Sun

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Artists, perhaps to emphasize their own dedication to the intellectual and manual skills required for making art, have long been drawn to the theme of labor, both in their depictions of workers and scenes of making. In the late seventeenth century, Dutch paintings frequently portrayed earnest and diligent artisans performing trades at shops or on the streets. Later, rapid economic, social and political changes throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century led to a more radical approach to realist representations of labor. This exhibition ART/WORK: Labor, Identity, and Society considers these art-historical precedents to explore the issues of labor in art. …

Navigating A Bipoc Identity Through Solidarity Design Labor, Dave Pabellon

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This short paper uses experiences as a design practitioner, an activist, and a 2nd generation immigrant as a means to understand and define “good work”, and how that work can assist in navigating one’s identity. The “good work” is self-defined by the author as labor produced in solidarity with communities in need of support. Through the obsession with work, albeit “good work”, one can ultimately lose sight of their own identity through assimilation. Or at the very least, be forced into a work-first lifestyle where constant code-switching is necessary, which forces the siloing off of each identity lens, never to …

Moving Without The Ball: Labor And Collectivity Beneath The Body Of The She-Wolf, Cristina Covucci

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I consider my personal experiences as an artist, art handler, and athlete through the motif of the Roman She-wolf, addressing how value systems are constructed according to binaries by showing how the sculptural process can break down these binaries, giving agency to both the mother mold and “completed” form.

Introduction To Volume Xiii, Laura Golobish, Andrea Quijada, Amy C. Hulshoff, Eleanor Kane, Breanna Reiss, Jeannette Martinez

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

I Hear You Now, I See You Then, Quinn Hunter

Art + Design Masters Theses

In the research driven project I Hear You Now, I See You Then, I refer to the contemporary and historical erasure of the labor of African American women using research gathered from the southern plantation economy to create an art installation. The objects in this installation are primarily made with artificial hair integrations and utilizing labor intensive methods that are similar to those used to install the hair on the Black body. The objects I make reference the luxury items in the domestic spaces of historic plantation sites that have been re-branded to be used in the wedding /tourism industry. …

Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb & Ash, 2013) is a place-based mobile augmented reality game and simulation that takes the form of a situated documentary. Players take on the role of time traveling reporters tracking down a story “lost to time” to bring back to their editor at the Jewish Time Jump Gazette. The game is played in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City. Players’ iPhones become their time traveling device and companion. Based on the player’s GPS location, players receive digital images from their location from over a hundred years in the past as well …

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, And Paradox In Subaltern Labor Photography, Mahnure Janis

Theses and Dissertations

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, and Paradox in Subaltern Labor Photography is an expanded cinema performance examining 'cheap' labor in the fast fashion industry through a self-reflexive diasporic lens. The images and narration explores the garment factories in Bangladesh and contains ‘a photographer’s cognitive meta-data’, including ethical dilemmas while taking the images.

Professional Risk, Russell A. Perkins

Theses and Dissertations

This essay suggests a reading of Harold Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” and John Cage’s “Experimental Music”, texts in which notions of chance and risk are mobilized to account for artistic production; I argue that this rhetoric mischaracterizes the relation between artist and material, confusing the labor involved in taking chances.

Taylor Biese Senior Art Exhibition Portfolio, Taylor Biese

Senior Art Portfolios

Taylor Biese Senior Art Exhibition Portfolio completed in Spring 2018.

[Insert Body Here], Katie Yun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The personal is political. Using humor and my individual narrative, I illustrate the main three factors that drive my work and relate them to corresponding theoretical frameworks: 1) My OCD tendencies and labor as art concept 2) Assimilation and the appeal of the White Cube 3) Reclamation of identity and Abject art. Through textual and visual research, I provide scholarly backing and precedents set by other artists to situate these personal narratives as part of a larger structural system of oppression, while being transparent of my culpability and participation in these structures. I posit that my work provides a nuanced …

Invisible Labor And The Preservation Of Dignity, Laken Bridges

All Theses

My art seeks to question the social value of labor. Throughout history, labor hierarchies influenced by social class and economic stigmas have informed how laborers are viewed in the United States. Physical jobs such as menial and domestic work are a common form of invisible labor that experience debasement and stereotyping. In my art, I use labor-based and ordinary objects as a metaphor for the worker, linking the value or disposability of the object to the societal value of labor. This critique of labor is enhanced by the manipulation of text, by the formal tools of scale and perspective, and …

Labor, Vera Bauluz

CGU MFA Theses

I make sacred objects from scratch, from ready mades, from industrial materials, and sometimes from trash or recycling. I treat those objects with love and reverence to embed them with essence and soul. I propose conversations with objects exquisitely executed, that question our social order and the machine, easily understood by everybody, although still challenging our understanding of contemporary art.

The placement of the work and the lighting, as fundamental part of the installation, attempts to generate strokes of conscience that enhance human understanding and capabilities beyond a specific discourse.

Humor and sacred coexist in my installation and in my …

Home Sweet Home: An Infinite Grid Of Memory And Repressed Abuse Trauma, Melissa Bush

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Incorporating traditional craft mediums of crochet and embroidery, I use digital technology to experiment with wording to graphically represent my abuse trauma. Due to the severity of the subject matter and the work ethic I employ in my art practice, using my hands and being completely involved is a form of masochistic pleasure. My process takes on a Sisyphean approach of penance for the sins of others in my work. During my studio practice, my process reaches a meditative state where my mind is clear and free of the burden. Once I've completed a panel of trauma, the burden is …

Ambient Void, Joy Phoenix M. Savage

Art and Design Theses

The constructed works of Phoenix Savage point to the negotiated world of African Americans. Savage explores her artistic process in relationship to racial tensions both personal and historical.

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 45, No. 1, Joan Saverino, Joseph Bentivegna, Nicholas V. De Leo, Catherine Cerrone, Janet Theophano

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• "Domani Ci Zappa": Italian Immigration and Ethnicity in Pennsylvania
• A Study of the San Cataldesi Who Emigrated to Dunmore, Pennsylvania
• A Look at the Early Years of Philadelphia's "Little Italy"
• "An Aura of Toughness, Too": Italian Immigration to Pittsburgh and Vicinity
• Expressions of Love, Acts of Labor: Women's Work in an Italian American Community

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 43, No. 3, Thomas E. Gallagher Jr., Elaine Mercer, Kenneth E. Kopecky, Eric O. Hoiberg, Gertrude E. Huntington, Marilyn E. Lehman, Samuel S. Stoltzfus, William B. Fetterman, Bernadette L. Hutchison, John W. Friesen

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• The Old Order Amish
• Amish Quilts: Creativity Supported by Rules and Traditions
• Conflict: A Mainspring of Amish Society
• Occupational Opportunities for Old Order Amish Women
• The Amish Taboo on Photography: Its Historical and Social Significance
• Our Changing Amish Church District
• Images of the Amish on Stage and Film
• Amish Gardens: A Symbol of Identity
• The Myth of the Ideal Folk Society Versus the Reality of Amish Life

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 28, No. 1, Martha B. Kriebel, William T. Parsons, Phyllis Vibbard Parsons, Antje Sommer, Judith E. Fryer

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Women, Servants and Family Life in Early America
• "Be it Remembered that these Indentured Servants and Apprentices"
• Gute Socha fer Hame tzu Nemma
• Taufscheine: A New Index for People Hunters
• Aldes / Neies

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 27, No. 2, James Moss, Holly Cutting Baker, Robert A. Barakat, Karl J. R. Arndt

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Gentlemen of the Road: Outlaw-Heroes of Early Pennsylvania in Life & Legend
• Patent Medicine in Pennsylvania Before 1906: A History Through Advertising
• Raising a Tobacco Shed
• Bicentennial Exhibitions and Publications in Germany
• Work and Work Attitudes: Folk-Cultural Questionnaire No. 50

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 21, No. 1, Earl F. Robacker, Eleanor Fein Reishtein, Ronald L. Michael, C. Frances Berman, Maurice A. Mook, Don Yoder

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• The Fraktur of Monroe County
• Minutes of the West Grove Housekeepers Association as Source Material for Folklife Studies
• The Searight Tavern on the National Road: An Archaeological Study
• The "Brown Sugar" Game in Western Pennsylvania
• Bread Baking in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania: Commentary for the Documentary Film in the "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica"
• Notes and Documents: Literature for the Allegheny Frontier: The Huntingdon Literary Museum and Monthly Miscellany (1810)
• Hunting and Food-Gathering: Folk-Cultural Questionnaire No. 21

Women And Work, Gertrude Rosenblum Williams, Isotype Institute, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

128 pages : illustrations (some color, including maps) ; 22 cm. Series: The new democracy "Designed and produced by Adprint Ltd London ; Copyright 1945 by Adprint Ltd London ..."--title page verso. "First published by Nicholson & Watson in association with Wells Gardner Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1945"--title page verso. Contents: The scope of women's work. The wartime revolution -- The rise of the "dependent" family -- The effect of marriage -- Law and custom -- The work women do. Changes in numbers and jobs -- The middle-class woman -- Woman's dual role. Differences in pay -- Do women …