Art Practice Commons^™

Ciencia De Las Mujeres: Experiencias En La Cadena Textil Desde Los Ayllus De Challapata, Denise Y. Arnold, Elvira Espejo

Textile Research Works

En el contexto de la crisis económica que atravesó Bolivia en los años ochenta, una comunidad de puna de pastores andinos, Livichuco, que forma parte integral del ayllu mayor de Qaqachaka, emprendió por iniciativa propia un proceso de mejoramiento de su producción textil, con un programa de rescate de los tintes naturales de la región. Con recursos mínimos, los comunarios compraron ollas y bateas metálicas, y comenzaron a preguntar a las personas mayores sobre sus conocimientos prácticos tradicionales en el ámbito de la tinción de textiles. Durante un período de diez años, y en coordinación con varias instituciones —incluida la …

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 …

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 …

Bryan Thao Worra, Pauline De Leon

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: An award-winning Laotian American writer, I work actively to support Laotian, Hmong and Southeast Asian American artists. I am recognized by the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. I also served as a consulting contractor with the Minnesota History Center, the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans and the Minnesota Humanities Commission. I am an active professional member of the Horror Writer Association and president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Heritage Sites, Leah Burke

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Heritage Sites, in which vignettes of the artist’s personal and familial narratives become a backdrop for examining themes such as global tourism, the notion of universal heritage, and questioning Puerto Rico as a postcolonial place. A two channel short video layers archival imagery with original material to examine the ways Puerto Rico has been represented and misrepresented personally and globally.

Kathy Liao, Lei Chen

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Biography: Kathy Liao currently resides in Kansas City, MO, and teaches at Missouri Western State University as the Director of the Painting and Printmaking Studio Art Program. Drawing inspirations from her diverse cultural background and personal history, Kathy Liao mixed media work is about the intimate yet universal concept of relationships. Liao received her MFA in Painting from Boston University and BFA in Painting and Drawing from University of Washington, Seattle. Liao is a recipient of various awards including the StudiosINC Studio Residency Program, Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency, Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Grant, Artist Grants from Anderson Ranch Arts …

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 …

"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 …

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

Youngsun Choi Interview, Adam Martinez

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: YoungSun Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea and is currently living in Chicago, IL. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2018 and her Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University majoring in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography in 2015 where she was awarded the Strauss Scholarship for Photography as well as the Sher-Right Art Scholarship.

Tori Hong Interview, Eliza Lemus

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Tori Hong is a self-taught visual artist exploring homelands and homecomings. In order to create meaning out of the often ambiguous, disruptive, and generative spaces they occupy, Hong creates narrative-driven illustrations, portraits, and zines. The people Hong centers in their work are LGBTQ Asian Americans and people with marginalized identities. Hong is based in Minneapolis, MN.

Jennifer Tshab Her, Allison Bautista

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: My work demonstrates and complicates the politics of displacement through my experience as a second-generation Hmong-American woman. As a nation-less ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, I fear cultural extinction. I create work that reveals the diaspora of the Hmong, questioning the roles of site and place, and instead looking in-between. My work engages political and cultural space through multidisciplinary practices such as embroidery, installation, and social practice. I use color as a dialogue–a tool for bringing attention to space, claiming space and recognizing how spaces are claimed. I interpret the question of ownership, whether land or body, through …

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 …

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 …

Socio-Political Criticism In Contemporary Indonesian Art, Isabel Betsill

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The objective of this paper is to understand the connections between contemporary art and politics in Indonesia both in terms of how politics has shaped art practices, and in terms of how art influences politics. Questions I was interested in exploring include how contemporary art practices have changed considering the political changes over the past 30 years; if and how contemporary art is being used to facilitate political dialogues in the country; if and how contemporary art is being used to criticize and invoke change regarding social issues; and what the role of art spaces, collectives and foundations is in …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Dinesh Sabu Interview, Mitch Buangsuwon

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Dinesh Sabu made his first feature documentary Unbroken Glass with Kartemquin Film. It played at numerous film festivals and was broadcast on America ReFramed’s 5th Season in May 2017. Dinesh was awarded “Best Director” at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in 2017 for his debut feature. Before Unbroken Glass, Dinesh shot parts of American Arab and The Homestretch with Kartemquin filmmakers. He also shot and is co-producing the forthcoming How to Build a School in Haiti with director Jack C. Newell. He is currently attending Stanford University’s Documentary Film and Video MFA program.

Giau Minh Truong Interview, Gin To

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Giau Minh Truong is a company member of A-Squared Theatre Workshop and an at- large artist for various performing arts companies in the Chicago area. For A-Squared, he directed Ching Chong Chinaman, The Other Shore, and short plays for My Asian Mom, acted in Trial By Water, and designed lights for The Wind Cries Mary. Giau’s other directorial credits include Downward Facing, Lights Out, Everybody, and Theatre of Women for Dream Theatre Company. He directed Sister Outlaw, Mr. and Mrs. LaQuesta Go Dancing, My Name is Flor Contemplacion, and I Dream Electric for CIRCA-Pintig, Chicago’s …

Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

Space on Par is a short performance text that uses gentle humour to communicate an alternative perspective on how open space is used by humans and nonhuman animals, in this instance a golf course. If playing golf for enjoyment is puzzling behaviour for a nonhuman observer, it can emphasise human refusal to recognise the physical and spatial rights of other species and their needs for survival. The effort to educate about the treatment of animals can include theatrical characters who blur the species identities to make a point, and Space on Par inverts the invisibility of the gaze of the …

If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores how concern about animal welfare and animal rights relates to ecological citizenship by discussing student assignments written about the Dutch Party for Animals or PvdD. ‘Animal welfare’, ‘animal rights’, and ‘ecological citizenship’ perspectives offer insights into strategic choices of eco-representatives and animal rights/welfare advocates as well as educators. The assignments balance animal issues with socio-economic ones, explore the relationship between sustainability and ethics, and attribute responsibility for unsustainable or unethical practices. Analysis of student assignments reveals nuanced positions on the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism continuum, showing students’ ability to critically rethink their place within larger environmental systems. Some students demonstrated …

‘Animals Are Their Best Advocates’: Interspecies Relations, Embodied Actions, And Entangled Activism, Gonzalo Villanueva

Animal Studies Journal

Since 1986, the Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) has sought to ban the practice of recreational duck hunting across Australia. Campaigners have developed techniques to disrupt shooters, rescue injured water birds, and gain media coverage. The campaign is underpinned by embodied processes that engage empathy, emotion, affect, and cognition. Seeking to understand human-animal interrelations, I conducted multispecies autoethnographic research, during which I participated as an activist-scholar in the anti-duck shooting campaign for nearly three months. Drawing on feminist philosopher Lori Gruen and others, this article conceptualises ‘entangled activism’ and argues that embodied actions arise from interspecies interrelations. This article demonstrates …

[Review] Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg And Cecilia Åsberg, Editors, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies Of Human-Animal Relations. Routledge, 2018. 276pp, Zoei Sutton

Animal Studies Journal

It’s 2016 and rats are ‘taking over’ in Malmö, Sweden. Forced out of the sewers by flooding, the sight of usually-hidden rats now visible on streets and playgrounds (not to mention their dead bodies in the river) has humans calling for sanitation through eradication to ‘restore’ social order. In daring to exist ‘out of place’ in their search for food the rats ‘turn from tolerated, illegitimate, but invisible waste-workers, to ‘trash animals’ (1). This dramatic scene which opens Animal Places ‘shows how space, place and human-animal relations intersect, thereby producing diversity of effect, boundary work and political action’ (1). Building …

[Review] James Hevia, Animal Labor And Colonial Warfare. Chicago University Press, 2018. 328pp, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

James Hevia’s very accomplished history, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare, actually contains more than one history. A history of the military’s reliance on nonhuman animal (animal) labour emerges from a history of the administrative procedures of a British colonial regime. Some years ago, I went searching for this type of animal history to contextualize colonial war re-enactments with circus and menagerie animals. Hevia provides statistical information about the animals involved in colonial military ventures, breaking down the figures by species and compiling total numbers and percentages. He develops an in-depth analysis of the monumental scale of animal deployment – the …

Animal Liberation: Pathways To Politics, Paola Cavalieri

Animal Studies Journal

After making its appearance in analytic moral philosophy at the beginning the 1970s, the animal cause in its modern form – that is, as a challenge to human supremacism and as a defense of interspecies egalitarianism – is recently undergoing a profound change thanks to the advent of new political approaches. Politics now dominates the intellectual scene in at least three main forms: as the devising of new social arrangements, as a critique of the prevailing order, and as an emancipatory project. It will lie with the contemporary animal liberation movement to explore these alternatives in order to definitely assert …

Animal Abuse And Advocating For The Carceral: Critiquing Animal Abuse Registries, Jessica Ison

Animal Studies Journal

Animal activism has an increasing focus on carceral based punishment that argues for animal abuse to be harshly prosecuted. One of the emerging trends is advocating for Animal Abuse Registries similar to the US-style of Sex Offender Registry. This paper challenges the effectiveness and suitability of these Animal Abuse Registries through a critical reflection on Sex Offender Registries. As a result of this, Animal Abuse Registries are extrapolated to be ineffective and perhaps damaging to animals and animal advocacy. The contention that arises from this paper is what constitutes animal cruelty in a society that has industrial slaughter? Further, the …

The Cow Project: Analytical And Representational Dilemmas Of Dairy Farmers’ Conceptions Of Cruelty And Kindness, Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser

Animal Studies Journal

This paper explores different conceptions of cruelty and kindness as they relate to the Australian dairy industry. Findings are drawn from the Dairy Farming Wellbeing Project: 2017- 18, which we affectionately call The Cow Project (also see thecowproject.com.au).1 Funded by Animals Australia, this study was designed to consider the many issues affecting the health and wellbeing of dairy farmers, their families, cows, calves, and to a more limited extent, bulls. The primary objective was to investigate whether farmers themselves identified (potential) links between their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their farmed animals. A total of 29 qualitative interviews were …