Art Practice Commons^™

Fragmented Bodies, Lauren Careese Alexander

Art Theses and Dissertations

Through Memory Webs and fragmented ceramic vessels, I express what it feels like to grow up living in a biracial body. I utilize mixed media to emulate a mixed-race experience. My Memory Webs are fashioned by painting on scraps of canvas and attaching them with crocheted wire and ribbon to speak to how my memory has impacted my identity. My fragmented ceramic vessels are cut up and stitched back together to represent disjointedness and un-belonging. All of my work is contextualized through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and what the Monster may represent for people of color. I also …

Cliffhanger, Micah Mickles

MFA in Visual Art

I am Micah Mickles, a mixed-media visual artist in St. Louis, Missouri. My artwork is deeply rooted in my personal experiences and serves as a memorial and monument to counteract the enduring effects of grief and loss. What sets my work apart is the transformative impact of my everyday encounters, inspired by my 14 years of experience working at Trader Joe's. These encounters have led me to reflect on my profound connections with diverse communities. By delving into the hidden narratives of mundane materials encountered in the workplace, I prompt a reexamination of convenience and supply chain origins. Inspired by …

Innovation, Liberation, And Agency In The Outsider Visionary Art Of James Hampton And Purvis Young, Griffin J. Joerger

Senior Projects Spring 2024

This project argues for the urgency of scholarship, inherent artistic sensibility, and legitimacy of modern, religious, spiritual, visionary, untrained, and self-taught art from the American South which challenges conventions of materials and exhibition. The research focuses on two specific African-American visionary outsider artists named James Hampton (1909-1964) from South Carolina and Washington, D.C., and Purvis Young (1943-2010) from Miami, Florida, both of whom defied white and classical standards of beauty and value. The subject of education will shape my argument, comparing how the differences in artistic opportunities, training, and support systems in the South versus the North impact Southern, self-taught, …

Notes Toward A Personal Afrofuturism, Jalen T. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is penned by a young adult who is generally confused about a lot of things regarding life, but has one singular focus that is perhaps larger than life—trying to find the bridge between a future already lived, and a past yet to happen. These are his findings so far.

"Where Did Your Christ Come From?", Kamara V. Townes

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This written document is the accompanying thesis for my Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, “WHERE DID YOUR CHRIST COME FROM?”, shown at Gallery 937 in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (displayed April 5th-June 9th, 2024). Through painting, sculpture, and installation, I rely on an intuitive artmaking practice to create work that makes commentary on race, gender and identity. This thesis documents my research on contemporary influences, experimentation with materials and my point of view in conversation with intersectional feminism while navigating institutional racism.

Conceptually the work of my thesis is deeply influenced by womanism and Black culture, which informs my exploration …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

Roots And Webs And Nets And Branches And Bulletin Boards And Banners And Newsletters And Mutual Aid Text Threads And Kin And Caretakers And Porches And Poems Of Today And Spaces Of Survival, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

Theses and Dissertations

As I welcome Richmond, VA into my family, I find myself needing to make roots and webs and nets and branches that ground me, that place myself as a Black, queer, mixed race, artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and cultural worker in this city. I am called to the streets before I am called to my studio. I question what it means to be a part of an institution that is slowly eating this city up. I become a story collector. I need to know where I am and whose land I now call home.

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.

Rui(N)Ation: Narratives Of Art And Urban Revitalization In Detroit, Jessica Ks Cappuccitti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation considers the City of Detroit as a case study for analyzing the complex role that artists and art institutions are playing in the potential re-growth and revitalization of the city. I specifically look at artists and arts organizations who are working against the popular narrative of Detroit as “ruin city.” Their efforts create counter narratives that emphasize stories of survival and showcase vibrant communities. By focussing on artist-led and institutional initiatives, I emphasize the importance of art in both community and narrative-building.

This research has taken the form of a written dissertation and two adapted projects, and positions …

"I Need To Fight The Power, But I Need That New Ferrari": Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-Hop And "The New Rock & Roll", Emmett H. Robinson Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial …

The Rupture Repeats, Jennifer Everett

Graduate School of Art Theses

Rupture repeats without regard. Occurring on macro and micro scales, these historical, financial, and social upheavals continue throughout our lives, remaking our worlds and leaving us to respond as best we can. Rupture is a condition of human existence. For marginalized communities and Black Americans specifically, rupture is familiar and precarious. Historically, Black people respond to the space that rupture makes through a rigorous, interdisciplinary, creative tradition which serves as a strategy for survival and a way to produce and transmit knowledge. These methods of knowledge production exist in excess of formal training and are evident of quiet and expansive …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

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 …

My Neighborhood Is Changing: Positive Youth Development In The Historic Near East Side, Fevean N. Keflom

Capstone Collection

In this paper, I consider the impact of positive youth development in the lives of Black youth, in the Historic Near East Side of Columbus, OH. More specifically, I examine initiatives centered in cultural arts, holistic support, and African centered education in order to identify positive trends impacting urban Black youth. My research is guided by the question: How are Black youth impacted by urban development in a historic African-American neighborhood?

The Near East Side(NES) is a distinguished neighborhood, and in the past laid the foundation for some of the most prominent and successful African American owned businesses in Columbus, …

Pawns: Value Perception, Need Diversity, Soraya Jo-Anna Cain

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

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 …