Art Practice Commons^™

Kazua Melissa Vang, Justin Beales

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American filmmaker, visual artist, photographer, teaching artists, production manager, and producer based in Minnesota. Melissa is currently a lead artist as well as a teaching artist for In Progress. Her most two most recent photography works were showcased at In Progress under the exhibit, “NEXUS: Honoring the Self-Taught Photographic Artist” (2016), and “Hmong Tattoo,”(2017). Her current photography project is taking portraits of Hmong refrigerators and freezers. From her collection “F R I D G E S,” was featured in the exhibit, “Foodway”(Summer 2018) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is currently …

Sky Cubacub Interview, Spencer Nieto

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Rebirth Garments are designed and made by hand by Sky Cubacub. Sky is a non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx human from Chicago, IL with life long anxiety and panic disorders. Sky first dreamed of this collection while in high school and couldn’t find a place where they could buy a chest binder as a person who was under 18, and who didn't have access to a credit card to buy one online. Sky is especially interested in Rebirth Garments being accessible to queer and disabled youth and is working on creating a program for making free/reduced priced garments …

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

Heather C. Lou Interview, Katie O’Reilly

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: heather c. lou, m.ed. (she/her/hers) is an angry gemini earth dragon, multiracial, asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, survivor/surviving, depressed, and anxious womxn of color artist based in st. paul, minnesota. her mixed media pieces include watercolor, acrylic, gold paint pen, oil pastel, radical love, & hope. each piece comments on the intersections of her racial, gender, ability, & sexual identities, as they continue to shift and develop in complexity each day. her art is a form of healing, transformation, and liberation, rooted in womxnism and gender equity through a racialized borderland lens. heather works in education as an administrator. …

Nicole Sumida And Alex Yu Interview, Laraib Malik

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Nicole Sumida is a co-founder and co-publisher of Riksha Magazine, an online magazine featuring creative work by and about Asian Americans. Alex Yu is a co-publisher of Riksha and both have been involved in community arts organizing since the 1990s in Chicago.

“Riksha provides a space for capturing the Asian American experience through compelling writing, commentary, and artistic expression. We curate an online magazine that presents poetry, fiction, non-fiction, fine arts, and video and audio pieces. We also comment on and curate the bric-a-brac and ephemera of Asian American life.”

Ada Cheng Interview, Zishuo Wang

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Ada Cheng is the host of the storytelling show Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series at Volumes Bookcafe. She is also the producer and host of the show Am I Man Enough? a storytelling/podcasting show, where people tell personal stories to critically examine the culture of toxic masculinity and the construction of masculinity and manhood. In addition, she is the co-producer and co-host of Talk Stories, an Asian American/Asian diaspora storytelling show, along with Randy Kim, a show where they showcase Asian/Asian American storytellers and performing artists.

Chamindika Wanduragala Interview, Vincent To

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American visual artist, cook, DJ ( DJ Chamun), puppeteer and stop motion animation filmmaker based in Minneapolis. Her work deals with personal experience through mythic stories. She is also the founder and Director of Monkeybear's Harmolodic Workshop, which supports Native/POC in developing creative and technical skills in contemporary puppetry.

Bio from: http://chamindika.com/index.html

Udita Upadhyaya Interview, Aneri Madhu

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Udita Upadhyaya is an interdisciplinary artist who uses the details of her medical, cultural, and social biography as her primary art material. Her work spans live art, devised theatre, performative photographs, sculpture, installation, video, writing, text, and fiber arts.

Upadhyaya delves into the privilege of being able to lose a language, to have a language to spare. She wonders which bodies have access to literacy? Which to expression? When? And Where? Upadhyaya writes in English, reconciling and reclaiming that her language of intellectual expression and subsequently of power is inherited from the colonizers of her ancestors. Simultaneously …

All The Small Things, Talia E. Levitt

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with the history of the still life as a marginalized and antiacademic genre. Rather than fool viewers into believing that there are real objects in front of them, as is the historical intention of trompe l’oeil, I use realistic rendering to emphasize the painting and painter.

Artist Statement, Halima Ladbon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Artist Statement

To The Peaches, Jazmine Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on erased histories and the ways these histories are preserved through cultural traditions. I explore histories across the African diaspora with specificity on African American culture and black female subjectivity.

Driving In Circles With Monsters, Melanie Klimjack

MFA Statements

Abstract

Using the novel Frankenstein as a visual mentor and metaphor, I explore methods of creating both paintings and video works through a piecemeal procedure like that of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. In this paper, I discuss the limitations and successes of my artistic practice and how the aesthetics of failure, montage, and the art historical movements of Post-minimalism and Casualism informed my work during my course of study. I seek to outline my journey from my early paintings that relied on image-making and my subsequent transformation to abstract sculptural paintings to achieve an aesthetic that is in line with that …

What Can A Studio Approach To Teaching Tell Us About The Academic And Social Learning Of Middle School Students? An Exploration Of Student Understanding Of How Making Art Supports Their Academic And Social Learning., Maureen Creegan- Quinquis, Maureen A. Creegan-Quinquis

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study explores the types of social and academic learning typically overlooked in public school education. Art-based approaches to academic learning have been labeled as“fluff.” Education policymakers hold a biased view of the arts. When asked to consider art as a viable epistemology, cognition theorists have dismissed art as irrational. These biased views have contributed to the marginalization of the field of art education. The purpose of this study was to question this bias through an art-based studio approach to research. The goal was to explore how middle school students understand the role of visual arts in their own academic …

Devyn Mañibo Interview, Daniel Bugliarello-Wondrich

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Devyn Lorelei Mañibo is a Brooklyn-based maker, feeder, organizer, and educator. Through poems, art objects, and gesture, she thinks intimately about the language and texture of death & desire, fullness & loss. Mañibo has had video, performance, installation, and academic work shown, published, and presented internationally in festivals, museums, and conferences including the MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival, the National Queer Arts Festival, the Berlin Porn Festival, the Queens Museum, and the Allied Media Conference. Mañibo is a 2013 Princess Grace Foundation Undergraduate Film Award Recipient, an alum of Cycle III of the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship with the …

Quiet Moments, Deitra Charles

CGU MFA Theses

I am a figurative artist who focuses on ordinary people and everyday objects. I paint moments. A moment of peace, a moment of tranquility, a moment of contemplation. It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of day-to-day life – that they give you the opportunity to experience life differently, stirring within you some sense of peace.

It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of …

The Psychos, Paula N. Stevenson

Graduate School of Art Theses

My current body of work is a series of drawings that juxtapose characters of fiction and reality in an attempt to explore the relationship between horror film and contemporary social issues. I strive to render an accurate portrayal of the face to draw the viewer into questioning the troubling narrative these characters illuminate. I focus on retelling stories of fear and horror, and crime and infamy. I want my work to convey ethical dilemmas as they are present within the relationship between horror movie antagonists and the audience (all of us). It is these concerns I attempt to visualize in, …

Dialogical Practice, Meenakshi Jha

Graduate School of Art Theses

Within an interdisciplinary and dialogical practice where process is as significant as final form/s, I delve in matters not to resolve but to explore them. Digging deep in my studio practice over my philosophical yearnings to talking loud and clear about my life in performances, I venture out in the geographical expanse to connect with self and others. In fact, the more I practice my craft, I feel a lesser and lesser gap between my ‘self’ and others. The walk outwards brings me closer to my internal realizations as a human being. In short, my practice is based on the …

Through The Looking Glass: Marie Antoinette, The Mafia And The Buddha, Craig G. Foisy

Theses and Dissertations

Through the Looking Glass: Marie Antoinette, the Mafia & the Buddhais a short documentary film that recounts six chapters from the autobiography of Marie Antoinette. No, not that last Queen of France who got her head chopped off. This Marie Antoinette lives in Woodstock, NY (“but I do like cake!” says Marie from inside her shop). And yes, Marie Antoinette is her real name. She is 78 years old and she sells what she calls “wearable art” out of a ramshackle and overstuffed boutique in town. Marie is facing the possible closure of her shop: her 100-year-old …

Say Luv: Reimagining The Black Female Body, Jer'lisa Devezin

Art Theses and Dissertations

From hottentot venus to Cardi B, the influence of the white representation and the treatment of the black female body has shaped a culture of oppression amongst Black women, having surpassed the white community and trickled into the black community. In hip hop culture, reality television, and social media, black women are portrayed as angry and are stereotyped as ghetto and ignorant. On the music scene woman are always sexualized under the male gaze, however now that we are in the twerk era Cardi B is giving a new perspective to the representation of women in hip hop. By using …

Books / Vessels / Hours, Lara Head

Graduate School of Art Theses

My thesis works two vessels, book : 300 hours and book : terrain explore and enact states of meditation, focusing on the process of making and the specificity of materials used. The meditative aspects of my process of making correlate to an anticipated meditation in the observer's time spent viewing. I hope to spark in the viewer the same response and state that I myself was in while making. In this text I explore my artistic process and what I hope for the viewer to experience while they are spending time with my works. I discuss how spending time making …

Over Certain Undecidedness These Heartstring Intimations, Martha Hemingway

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

over certain undecidedness these heartstring intimations is the culmination of a two-year-long abstracted cycle of textured conversation, internal eye contact, and endless playlist-making. Hemingway’s work is based in process-oriented reflections on habitual behavior, manifestation of sentiment, and sense of self. Her paintings draw inspiration from the ways in which we approach and avoid our internal and external routines – how degrees of our subconscious considerations affect how we extend ourselves to others. Individual auditory preferences of different colliding souls have carved a space for her in a language of empathetic abstraction – attempting to elaborate the curious beauty and pain …

Enmesh: The Art Of Trauma And Recovery, Joanna Pottle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Liminal Space is an artistic installation within the ongoing, interdisciplinary creative/research project "Enmesh: The Art of Trauma and Recovery.” Utilizing a combination of research methods, creative processes, and cultural inspirations, this project asks the following questions: how can the artistic process (this project serving as a preliminary case study) parallel various modes of recovery and healing? How can this objective be visually communicated through a mixed media approach of drawing, painting, and printmaking and how can this approach be an effective tool of communication? What can we conclude from both modes of work (solitarily or collectively)? How do they accomplish …

Deconstructing The Present || (Re)Constructing The Past, Hugh Hoagland

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Though we live only in the present, our every experience will eventually fade into the depths of memory. Deconstructing the Present || (Re)constructing the Past introduces my artist practice on a broad level, one that is preoccupied by the difference between present experience and its memory, as well as the ways we weave memory into the physical environments of architecture and material objects. This thesisestablishes a specific signal memory for the body of work, the memory of a structure that, for a brief time, was a sanctuary for myself and many others. The paper then follows the arc of …

Waiting Room., Helen Payne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Waiting Room is an installation of drawings and monotypes that re-envision everyday printed materials common in medical offices. The brochures, poster, bulletin board and children’s ABC book in this Waiting Room offer guidance suggest invasive and dysfunctional policy. A door opens onto a further room, where a hundred ultrasound images cascade onto the floor. This work, called Transducer Phosphene is the product of a fictional character’s encounter with a cruel (and not fictive) abortion policy. Waiting Room is the fruit of an inquiry that spanned my three years of study at the Hite Art Institute, a probing into the politics …

Time, Space, And Reality, Hugo Patao

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a mixed media artist working primarily within painting. I make layered, photo-based works that come from dreams and my own photographic archives. At the moment I am making oil paintings on board. What interests me the most is the nature of reality, including perception, memory, time, and dreams. I create environments that I like to call my own mindscapes; imagined places that have the potential to become real. I am engaged in creating worlds that are “in-between” reality and the imagined, dreams and waking life, conscious and unconscious.

My work engages and expands within the tradition of Western …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

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 …

The Impossible Tasks, Rachel Kalman

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis I unpack the still life genre and its relation to my painting practice, examining the ways in which banal objects project influence and disrupt the notion of a linear, narrative history. Through the contextual lenses of close observation, propagandistic agendas, and the transgressive history of pattern, I explore the inherent contradiction contained within still life painting; working to balance an empathic respect for objects, as such, with my deeply seated desire to metaphorically interpret and empower visual imagery. I am fascinated by the impossible tasks we ask of weak, inanimate, decorative objects and work to generate still …

Trace., Kcj Szwedzinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trace utilizes autoethnography to investigate aspects of Judaism to discover how one decides what to embrace, embody, or deny from inherited legacies. Autoethnography attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to systematically analyze and describe personal experience. The artist acting as Ba’alei Kushiah, or question bearer, uses Talmudic philosophy as a methodology and approach to art making. This research is self-referential; using Jewish thought to ask questions about Judaism. Judaism, often existing in an in between place with outward characteristics that reflect regional influences, facilitates a dialogue about whether there are relative or absolute delineations within and between …

Simply Mo., Marjolijn Jaliene Oskam

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

Small portfolio presentation of design work by Marjolijn Oskam, branded under simply mo. The poster includes school work as well as professional work.