Art Practice Commons^™

The Transnational Semiotics Of “Policing Murals”: How Representations Of Police Power In Murals Conceal And Reveal State Violence, Vivian A. Swayne

Doctoral Dissertations

Murals tell visual stories that legitimize/delegitimize formations of state power, conceal/reveal state violence, and attract collective interface from diverse parties. Scholars, artists, and organizers have studied murals as an aesthetic medium, tools for social movements, affective memorials, and episodes of conflict in the public space, but patterns and distinctions in the local, global, and digital duration of policing murals requires critical analysis. Policing murals refers to (1) murals made by police (and/or their advocates) to reproduce its preferred representations and (2) the censorship and control of unauthorized murals. Murals painted on police departments share semiotics globally, all of which conceal …

Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional And Decolonial Approach To Exploring The Sexualization Of Female Recording Artists And The Empowerment Of Women In The United States, H.B. Rebeka

Dissertations

This dissertation, titled Shake Ya Ass, But Watch Yourself: An Intersectional and Decolonial Approach to Exploring the Sexualization of Female Recording Artists and the Empowerment of Women in the United States, critically examines the phenomenon of sexualization of women in the music industry and its impact on female empowerment. Through an intersectional and decolonial feminist lens, the study delves into the historical and socio-cultural contexts that shape the portrayal and perception of female recording artists in the United States.

The research traces the roots of feminism and the commodification of racial stereotypes through music, exploring how female empowerment has been …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Beyond The Exit: Moma Design Store & The Extended Museum Experience, Anna C. Wershbale

Undergraduate Honors Theses

American art museum attendance soared following World War II as museums became popular education and entertainment destinations for the growing middle class. Shaped by the influence of 1980s Reaganomics and the effects of neoliberal funding policies, museum shops developed from small information desk ventures into a vital source of public relevance and financial sustainability. When given creative liberty and economic attention, the now standardized amenity presented the opportunity to sell institutional ethos. In light of neoliberal capitalism’s tendency to construe value primarily in economic terms, shops reveal how the art museum strategically assigns new meaning to its collection, mission, and …

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, …