Art and Design Commons^™

Frewayni's Garden: Preserving Tigrayan Culture During A Period Of Ethnocide, Gabrielle F. Tesfaye

Theses and Dissertations

The recent and ongoing genocidal war in Tigray, Ethiopia, has witnessed the destruction and looting of countless historical religious sites, ancient manuscripts, and artifacts, leaving Tigray’s remaining cultural heritage extremely vulnerable. Such cultural loss erases a shared understanding across generations, robbing them of their history and identity. My work contributes to the safeguarding of Tigray’s cultural heritage and collective memory, informed by literature on cultural preservation efforts in post-war societies, and a series of interviews with Tigrayans in the diaspora and in Ethiopia.

The outcome of this thesis is embodied in a series of distinct jebenas, traditional Tigrayan clay coffee …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.

Memory Bread, Nisiqi

Art + Design Masters Theses

Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians …

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.

The Migrant Times, Jessenya Guerra

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This senior capstone newspaper shows how the Mexican diaspora has become integrated into American culture.

Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach …

Strange Fruit: Black Female Body Politics In Contemporary American Culture, Eleanor Kipping

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The African American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was an organized effort by and for Black American populations to receive equal treatment by law. Its legacy has much reason to be celebrated: not only for its accomplishments and successes in unifying the Black community but also in bringing issues of segregation, violence, and racial discrimination to the forefront of the public’s attention. The decade was a pivotal point in contemporary race relations, and served as an apex in attempts to bridge America’s past and what America is striving to become. Today however, the social and political climate …

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …

Stay Woke, Langston A. Williams

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the pages of my thesis, I comprehensively analyze the processes, intentions, and production of my thesis film Stay Woke. My examination will exhaustively probe every stage of the film from development to preproduction to production to postproduction and beyond. Individual aspects of this process including writing, casting, locations, production design, cinematography, directing, budgeting, scheduling, and postproduction workflows will be detailed. As I make elaborations in each section, I will explain my learning experiences from each day’s new tasks, challenges, and lessons. All of these things will be framed with regards to the overall goal and themes of the …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Creating A Multiracial Lesson Plan, Clayton Davis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this project is to teach students about multiracial identity issues. Multiracial populations in the U.S. continue to grow and it’s important for educators to address the needs of these students. A 5-E multiracial literature lesson plan was created for second grade that incorporates KWL and Text-to-World teaching strategies. A second grade class were read two children’s picture books, each featuring a biracial protagonist, and were asked to discuss and evaluate the content and commonalities of these stories. Students recorded what they learned in this lesson in their KWL’s. The results reveal that some students understood the problems …

Radical Dissonance And Haunted Gestures: Rupture And Reverence In The Artwork Of Aja Mujinga Sherrard, Aja M. Sherrard

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper serves to establish the studio practice of Aja Mujinga Sherrard within the framework of conceptual art, touching on the flexible use of media, the subversive or political nature of the work, and its relationship to movements and disciplines such as Feminism and Poststructuralism.

The section entitled “Race and Incoherence” addresses the practice of Radical Dissonance—or the creation of ruptures within commonly accepted concepts and social constructions—through the Costuming Kinship Series, 13≠12≠12.2 (Genetics Project), and Body Double. The section entitled ”Art, Loss, and the Unspeakable” traces an emotional shift in her work and speaks directly to the pieces …

Fragmentality, Elena Volkova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary art is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental; it becomes more and more trans-border, as life itself. Nowadays, people live in the world, where their beliefs, ideas, politics, and religion are constantly colliding. The more people expand boundaries and develop connections, the more complex and tangled our society becomes as a system.

FRAGmentality presents a set of mixed media pieces incorporating painting, weaving, embroidery and three-dimensional elements dedicated to these contradictions in the modern society. It deals with structures within Social relations and human nature.

Being a representative of a …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

Plaids And Broadswords Of The Altamaha, Robert K. Weber

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.