Art and Design Commons^™

Never Real Historians, Emily Bluedorn

Masters Theses

Never Real Historians is a graphic inquiry into how surfacing hidden histories can lead to a liberatory and layered design practice. It is both a record of my process and a template for future making and future ancestors. Mining inheritance can be an ambiguously murky territory, full of contradictions, collisions, and tension between the past and present. My hope is that this thesis functions as a model of navigating that terrain, by interacting with storied objects and ephemera, in order to revive forgotten and marginalized histories. By re-examining my own shared and personal inheritances, as an American woman designer living …

You Are Cordially (Un)Invited: My Korean Femme Strategy And Aspiration For Survival And Queer Futures, Nahyun Kim

Masters Theses

You are cordially (un)invited: My Korean Femme Strategy and Aspiration for Survival and Queer Futures documents a series of ceremonies dedicated to the years I have survived. This book has branched from a project of the same name that consists of a durational installation, performance, and series of events. The project and book are an aspirational gesture to send off the part of myself–that had to compromise, comply, and negotiate with institutions–for a rebirth to live a life beyond survival.

As a book and project, You are cordially (un)invited is a culmination of my experiences as a Korean femme, using …

Introverse Arrangements: Rediscovering The Typewritings Of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Savannah M. Champion

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.”

Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers …

Sapping, Smudging, Staining: A Feminized Body, Breslin Shea Bell

Masters Theses

This book—of poetry, prose, and lists—muses on the effects of liquidity and leakiness of a feminized body. By bringing echo narrative, illegibility, de-telling, and that which is continuously wet to the viewer’s body and space, this book and accompanying multimedia installation provides a lens to consider reproductive rights, body autonomy, and gender-based aggression and violence. Work of matter and color investigates interiority, both bodily and spatial, as it relates to surface, access, and space-making.

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.