Art Practice Commons^™

Lines And Spirits: Tracing Georgia O’Keeffe’S Artistic Path Through Dow And Kandinsky, Surui Hu

Senior Projects Spring 2024

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

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, …

Balancing Modernist Structures With Destructuring: A Philosophical Exploration Of Art, Jiachen Liang

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Always In Motion, David Fujita

Senior Projects Spring 2024

Motion as a way of life embodies continuous movement, growth, and evolution of existence.The title of the show, Always.In.Motion, is a reference to this. Specifically in the motion of time and life from childhood to adulthood. My life has been filled with “motion” of different types. I was raised gallery hoping. I have spent years of my childhood traveling with my family from art gallery to art gallery. In college, I thought I wanted to be a Psychology major but switched to studio arts. While making this Senior Project show, I decided to change my idea halfway through, to what …

Create Space–Create Communal Change: An Exploration Of Tactics Used By Augusta Savage And Theaster Gates, Ardel'paschal P. Sampson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Here And Now, Samaira 2023, Samaira G. Wilson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Consider my work as a thread weaving through time. Illustrations of grappling with the present and its illusive constant nature. Questioning permanence. The temporary. This show, these walls, not forever, not for lease. Just a point in time. Can we hold time? Keep it? Is it ours? No. Time is something that is eaten, driven through, falling, perpetual, casual, necessary, fought against, spent, and healing.

Here and Now plays with what time feels like and is contrasted by an active voyage to another world.

This Side Of Silver, Bennett Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Dear Everything That Feels,, Oga Li (Oga L)

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Tryna Be A Mountain, Aru Apaza

Senior Projects Fall 2023

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

Resonance Of The Unseen, Dung Thi Thuy Nguyen

Senior Projects Fall 2023

in the moment

playful

in memory of

learning

altogether

Thuy-Dung (Julius) Nguyen's exhibition, 'Resonance of the Unseen,' confronts the sensory saturation of contemporary life by elevating the unobserved aspects of perception. Through sound, scent, and touch, this immersive installation encourages a rediscovery of the elemental experiences of life. The show illuminates the concept of absence, not only as something lacking but as an integral part of the sensory narrative, inviting a deeper resonance with the world.

Goodbye? Reflections And Stream Of Consciousness On, Underneath And Around The Creation Of “Hello?”, Leonard Shevel Gurevich

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Party Of Immortals, Hyazinth S. Baumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I am the cook of a queer kitchen for characters. Who wants to come out? Where’s the seasoning? So far I’ve had a nonbinary Hebrew angel, a trans Dionysus, a drag dragon, and an agender winter spirit inhabit my physical form. Each mythic persona is meant to serve a new dish on the table. Lailah externalizes her/my spiritual awakening. Dionysus realizes his/my ideals of re-normalizing nudity. Darastrix serves in reaction to the history of womanhood and investigates the strange and magical beginnings of her/my childhood. Perchta practices durational performance and processes its/my Austrian heritage.

Zines are self-produced, self-published bodies of …

Signs To Stop, Finn Tait

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Take this as a Sign-

At night it is so much easier to believe a story. There is a forgiveness at night, an expanding of what might be possible. I first learned how to tell stories in the dark, from listening to my dad's voice as I drifted off to sleep, from the whispered voices of my friends around a fire, from the car tape player on a long drive home. It is easy to imagine that something terrible stands just beyond the headlight's reach, looks back at you from your dark bathroom mirror, or lurks just behind your bedroom …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

The In-Between Times, Abraham C. Shenk

Senior Projects Fall 2022

I have grown up around cameras. My parents are documentary filmmakers. Early on, I understood how a photograph can capture reality. As a child, I also spent time in my grandfather’s darkroom, watching him as he went through the process of printing negatives. I watched as the images emerged in the chemicals. It seemed magical to me. A gnarled tree limb, a snow drift, a strange image emerging out of a series of torn papers on a wall. I remember him explaining the steps of making a picture. However, it was only when I arrived at Bard College that I …

Evocation, William Robert Gary

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Evocation

When I began my time at Bard College, I was already deeply interested in children’s Art. The ideas supporting my senior project reach all the way back towards the end of my Freshman year. The last few years have consisted of practicing, preparing and researching for what would become my thesis. Evocation encompasses a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures inspired in part by my own childhood artwork. After discovering a box of nearly five hundred drawings from my childhood during the summer of 2021, I have sought to infuse my interest in the expressive and symbolic tendencies …

She Is Clothed With Strength And Dignity; She Can Laugh At The Days To Come!, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda.

See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they're going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person?

Well, they're a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you.

You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you'll find that …

Silver Scabs, Cree Anthony Vitti

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The eyes stay closed for a long time. oils, my leftover scraps, drops of saliva and grit forming a shell, eyelashes sealing to my lids.

Fingertips, friction ridges vibrating, wanting. I am trying to touch everything, touch myself, I touch another. I lie, pressing hard and soft, things feel the same. they smell different. They spoil, fresh to rot and back again. They taste so different but are the same, different only in response.

I lick my lips and the spit dries on the corners of my mouth.

My cleft palate all sewed up. Precious little threads holding it together, …

I Thank You And All The Buildings That Make Me Feel So Small, Henry Holt Hull

Senior Projects Spring 2021

I use drawing and 3D animation to access memories of intimacy and distinctive spaces of privacy. Prior to this year I primarily worked with drawing and video, but always keeping them separate. However with my most recent project, I Thank You, and All the Buildings that Make me Feel so Small, I decided to combine my practice of drawing and 3D animation. I used adobe photoshop to convert my drawings from physical objects into 3D objects in the digital sphere.

The video you first encounter upon walking into my studio 400 Chambers and the video projected onto the ground Ivans …

Dead Weightless, Isaiah Schwartz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There is more than convenience embedded into my attraction to the unrefined materials that I work with. Shopping cart (baby size), palette, cheesecloth, bucket, and window. Each is rich with an individual history that expands beyond the use it was intended for. Suspending them in the air is my observance of the sanctity of their mundane uses. To create something new, also out of these unrefined materials, and to refuse to polish it. To have resolution in a thing that is also ambiguous. I can find intrigue in a million different things as soon as I pay attention to them. …

Self && Self, Shuang Cai

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Seldom before the COVID-19 pandemic have so many people simultaneously had their lifestyle drastically changed in the same way. The forced physical isolation is, ironically, a communal experience. The sickening quarantine left everyone nothing but time to confront and reconnect with themselves. Another inevitable result of corporal isolation is the predominant awakening awareness of digital existences and connections. Evoking the shared sensitivity and delicacy, studying the tectonic activity of the digital world, the project documents the endured contemplation in the upcoming resurgence.

Can You See It?: Providing Visual Arts Access To Audiences With Visual Impairment And Blindness, Rowan A. Puig Davis

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Open Sans, Access Incomplete, Lia J. Taus

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Why do some have access while others do not?

Think about your answer, don’t say it aloud.

To say it out loud is a privilege which we have and others do not.

Two ways to see it: what are you restricted from and others have access to?

Or: what do you have access to which others are restricted from?

Each of us are unique compilations of acquired knowledge.

Which is based on the availability and limitations of opportunities.

The unfortunate hierarchy of the world is decided by education and wealth.

Education is not freely available.

We are all told “you …

Installation: Untitled#0420, Thesis: Is The Artist’S Position Valid And Necessary To Her Completed Artworks ? —— An Investigation Of The Artist’S Position Through Martin Heidegger’S Poetry, Language, Thought And The Fisherman Analogy, Coco Ma

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Artist statement:

In my practice of mixed-media sculptures and installations, I use different kinds of materials in unexpected ways to provoke uncertainties, inquiries, and reflections. My works entice people to stop and pay close attention. In this process, they may be confused and amused. By being labor- intensive and repetitive with ordinary materials, my works inspire people to see familiar forms and materials in new and fresh ways. Underneath the familiarity of the materials is the “white noise,” a hum of dissonance between the familiar and the strange.

The installation Untitled#0420 uses fishing lines as its major component, which is …

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night, Josie Cotton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night

I have always worked by creating opportunities for mistakes and then fixing them. I’ve taken inspiration from the things I pick up every day: cups, necklaces, coat hangers, tables, chairs. I’ve taken inspiration from my dreams. They are always based in reality but twisted into a shape I’ve never seen before, and I wonder where these ideas come from. When I wake up, the people or the places I dreamt about are changed forever by a new perspective, out of my control. That is an idea I wanted to sift through …

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Embedded: The Bed As An Art Object, Maya Annika Teich

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

The Holistic Self: A Visual Analysis Of Carl Jung's The Red Book, Emma Lindsay Klement

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This senior project will look at Carl Jung’s The Red Book and how it’s creation was the process by which he healed from his psychotic break, or “deep-sea voyage.” Through the exploration of various other texts by Carl Jung this thesis will endeavor to understand Jung’s psyche during this time of deep turmoil by analyzing the images that he creates and the way in which he creates them. Jung was deeply molded by both Christian doctrine as well as Alchemy and the Occult, thus this project will take into account the specific Christian and alchemical meanings of particular motifs within …

The Zone, Jordon W. Soper

Senior Projects Spring 2019

There are places, soft spots, in our world where the membrane between realities and possibilities is thinner. Here the familiar constant fundamentals described by natural science to order our understanding of the world are inconsistent. Natural laws are stretched, warped, and refracted in chimeric distortions. To enter is to encounter the unreal and the unknowable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. The familiar and the unfamiliar intertwine and overlap. In the zone we see in circles, sensory experience expands, and minute details become revelations. At the fringes of consciousness and perception we meet with the shimmer of simultaneous wonder and terror.

Within …

I Become A Beam Of Light., Leor Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Who am I and what do I do about it? I come to a clearing in my mind. It is a landscape, constantly in flux: people running in and out, feelings swelling and crashing down, understanding moving in and out of focus. I am confused. I watch people and the ways they move, engage with each other, engage with the world, and wonder: how do I engage with myself, my surroundings, and the people who exist within them? Do I do it normally? Probably not. Maybe I should be asking if I do it well, or if the way I …