Art Practice Commons^™

Renluka Maharaj Interview, Steven Zych

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Renluka Maharaj grew up in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and moved to New York as a child where spent most of her life. Her Eastern and Western background wrapped with modern sensibilities is evident in her bodies of work. Her interests are centered on gender roles, sexuality, colonialism, mythology, iconography and fetishism. Some of the artists that have influenced her work are Yinka Shonibare and Yasumasa Morimura.

Ms. Maharaj completed her BFA at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the …

Sarah Nishiura Interview, Larry Villanueva

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Sarah Nishiura grew up in Detroit and now lives in Chicago, where she makes paintings, drawings, prints and quilts. She learned to sew from her mother and learned to love geometry from her father. From her grandparents, who were great builders, painters, stitchers, weavers and gardeners, she learned that making things is one of the greatest imperatives, privileges and pleasures in life.

Spreading Seeds: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds And His Performative Personality Received In The West, Wei Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

In 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds made its debut in Tate Modern, which promoted Ai to be one of the most famous and respected contemporary Chinese artists. This Conceptual art work has multiple layers of meanings, which all corresponds to the Western expectations for a successful contemporary Chinese artist. In fact, the Western art world has long held bias and stereotypes towards international artists. Ai chose to perform his personality to conform to the expectations and Western ideologies, which brought him international fame. On the other hand, other Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhou Chunya, don't totally agree with …

Pineapple, 022, Conversation – Behind The Cover Art, Jesse W. Standlea

The STEAM Journal

Many sources date the pit-firing process as a 30,000 plus years-old ceramic firing technique. Every year I take my AP 3D Design class to the beach to fire ceramic pieces using this method. Being a contemporary sculptor who shows in Los Angeles I have always appreciated pit-fired pieces but never used one in my own art practice until now. A connection between the first method of firing ceramics and my art practice seemed unrelated. The title for my piece might add to the disconnect; and yet these seemingly unrelated elements force the work into a place where the artistic process …

Let's Keep In Touch : Conversations About Access And Tactility., Whitney E. B. Mashburn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Let’s Keep in Touch: Conversations about Tactility, a project collaboratively organized by social practice artist Carmen Papalia and curator Whitney Mashburn, presents conversations between Papalia and artists selected by Mashburn, in regard to tactile access of the chosen artists’ works. The project aims to challenge visual biases in museum engagement, through dialogue with living artists.

Carmen Papalia takes social practice in a new direction as he applies it to the topic of accessibility. Using the tool of conversation, he creates strategic infrastructural activism and prompts exploration of non-visual perception.

In this thesis, Papalia’s work will be examined and discussed …

On Coming And Going, Quintin Teszeri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and the accompanying exhibition On Coming and Going (presented at the Artlab Gallery in January 2017) constitute my MFA in Visual Arts thesis. The first chapter of this dossier is a Comprehensive Artist Statement in which I reflect on how my art, thinking, and life engage different meanings of coming and going in different ways. The statement approaches a deeply subjective and aggregate philosophy, or perhaps an attitude, or perhaps most appropriately if also most cliché, a way of being, in the face of relentless transience. The second chapter is a review of Michel de Broin’s 2016 Castles …

Viewer-, Author-, And Ownership In The Work Of Andrea Zittel, Amanda M. York

Theses and Dissertations

Andrea Zittel invites others to collapse the distinctions between artist, viewer, and collaborator by interacting with her usable works. This thesis explores the process of interacting with Zittel's works, and how it affects viewer-, author- and ownership.

New Genres In The Art Classroom: Shifting Ideas And Identities, Alyssa Grant Ridge

Theses and Dissertations

Secondary art education programs primarily offer courses in traditional mediums like drawing, painting, sculpture, and ceramics. In addition to valuing these traditional art forms, art education research supports integrating new technologies and media in the classroom. However, the possibilities of creating an exclusively contemporary, new genres curriculum have yet to be explored. This study examines the affordances and limitations of a high school-level new genre curriculum and describes how students reacted to these new genres and how their perceptions of art, student-peer relationships, and artist identities changed over time. By introducing students to new genres, the author found students expanded …

Tailoring Student Learning: Inquiry-Based Learning In The Elementary Art Classroom, Jeffrey Melvin Cornwall

Theses and Dissertations

This research study explored the role of the elementary art educator in facilitating individualized learning experiences for students in contrast to a standardized culture of education. The methodology of a/r/tography was used to investigate the role of the teacher, as well as artist and researcher, within an inquiry-based art curriculum for a fifth grade class. Inspired by contemporary art practices, students used inquiry to investigate, research and experiment with their ideas around an integrated topic of compare and contrast as found within the fifth grade science and language arts standards. Students created a work of art as a means to …

New Genres In The Art Classroom: Shifting Ideas And Identities, Alyssa Grant Ridge

Theses and Dissertations

Secondary art education programs primarily offer courses in traditional mediums like drawing, painting, sculpture, and ceramics. In addition to valuing these traditional art forms, art education research supports integrating new technologies and media in the classroom. However, the possibilities of creating an exclusively contemporary, new genres curriculum have yet to be explored. This study examines the affordances and limitations of a high school-level new genre curriculum and describes how students reacted to these new genres and how their perceptions of art, student-peer relationships, and artist identities changed over time. By introducing students to new genres, the author found students expanded …

Digital Space Art (History?), France Languérand

Artl@s Bulletin

Invited by ARTL@S Bulletin as visual artist, France Languérand opted for a first-person text introducing her artworks—which develop into the digital sphere, questionning their own sustainability— and recounting the evolution of her relationship the digital space. This walkthrough is guided by her current thoughts about numbers and coding system as creative tools. Languérand’s pieces are only partially visible in the physical world but exist entirely in the digital space.

From 'Means To Ends': Labour As Art Practice, Gabriella Solti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis discusses labour from three different historical and theoretical viewpoints, namely Karl Marx’s perspectives on labour, Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action and Jacques Rancière's radical view of workers as an aspirational class, including how their respective philosophies influenced discourse on labour in contemporary art. To examine the aesthetic consequences of these labour theories, my discussion of each writer is accompanied by a case study of a contemporary artist whose work operates in dialogue with the philosophical ideas presented. In conclusion, I bring these theories together by focusing on how they implicate art making as labour, and I point to …

Somaesthetics And Aesthetic Transactions: Art And Phenomenology Today, Monique Boutin

Honors College

This thesis inquires into the application of Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics with respect to contemporary art, through an analysis of the work of Yann Toma and Tatiana Trouvé included in the exhibition Aesthetic Transactions, 2012. In exploring somaesthetics in relation to art, this thesis addresses John Dewey’s aesthetics and idea of the consummatory experience, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with respect to art and experience as parts of the foundation of Shusterman’s ideas of somaesthetics. In today’s decentralized, global art world, can somaesthetics offer a means of understanding and maintaining art’s vitality for viewers and/or artists? In this thesis, I argue for …

Making Rich Use Of "Leisure", Augusto Sandroni

CGU MFA Theses

I make paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures using oils, acrylics and everyday materials such as burlap, reclaimed wood, cardboard and duct tape. More than any other, Matisse’s work was always a point of reference. Everything I do is partially informed, even if not directly by the work of my predecessors, with Matisse toping the list: the element of joy, play and expression of visual beauty is something I’m not ashamed to strive for. I also embrace risk taking, not conforming with establish norms or methodology; I’m always hoping for novel ideas and methods to infiltrate my workflow.

Mana & Ea, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

The STEAM Journal

This work, Mana and Ea, expresses Polynesian indigenous sovereignty struggles with colonialism and globalism in the Pacific Islands.

"A Painter's Brush That Also Makes Poems": Contemporary Painting After Northern Song Calligraphy, Andy J. Patton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There is no Western equivalent to the practice of calligraphy in pre-modern China, an aesthetic form which does not resolve itself into a literary object or a visual one. Calligraphy was sustained by a rich and complex body of thought that can fully rival art criticism and theory in the West. To undertake this project, I immersed myself in the study of both key works of calligraphy and the aesthetic that sustained it during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) in China—not in order to practice calligraphy but to transform my own understanding of art and make contemporary Western paintings out …

Paradise Maintenance Department, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

CGU MFA Theses

Based on personal and artistic research in Samoa, Polynesia, Oceania, and the South Pacific Islands, "Paradise Maintenance Department" investigates the contemporary colonial relationship between the U.S. Territory of American Samoa and the United States, while engaging in a poetic expression of f'a'afafine queer Samoan life.

Elke Krystufek And The Obessive Production Of Person, Melanie E. Emerson

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Elke Krystufek’s artistic practice has centered almost wholly on duplicate and substitute images of herself, specifically emphasizing the female body and its position within the discourses of art history and gendered identity. While an earlier generation of feminist artists used their bodies as subject and object of their work in order to critique stereotypes and forcefully dismantle barriers that excluded women from the public sphere or labeled them objects of desire, Krystufek uses similar tactics to point to the fact there is no longer a private space. Identity is not solely the property of an individual, but rather an open …

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …

Gabriel Bizen Akigawa Interview, Joe Ondrey

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Gabriel Bizen Akagawa is the Assistant Director of Academic Advising and recently former Academic Advisor in the Office of Student Affairs and Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He exhibits regularly as a Chicago-based artist. He has been awarded Artist-in-Residencies at the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, British Columbia, at Crabtree Farm in Lake Bluff, Illinois, and at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan. His curatorial projects include an ongoing and changing series he initiated in 2005 called “Faketure” (fake nature), which lead to founding the Faketure Consortium …

The Evolving Role Of The Exhibition And Its Impact On Art And Culture, Anna C. Cline

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Regarding India, Conversations With Artists. Video Interview Website, Kathryn Myers

Kathryn Myers

Regarding India is series of video interviews with contemporary artists living and working in India. Reflective of a dynamic and diverse contemporary art scene the interviews engage aspects of Indian history, society, culture and current events through the creative work, experiences, and insights of artists. The series is ongoing and will eventually include over sixty interviews.

Regalia And Repetition, Deborah I. Karpman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My thesis investigates some of the conceptual ideas related to my studio work, both in terms of theory and contemporary practice. This thesis focuses how the visual images formally operate, as well as the larger framework of discourse that surrounds my practice. In my work, the habitual, incessant process of cutting and extraction and the subsequent meticulous reconfiguring use the strategies of repetition and labor. These sustained, ongoing acts have the possibility to be generative or transformative rather than simply repetitive. This thesis also explores the found object, complicating the classification and knowledge systems of the source image with odd …

Representaciones De Figuras Feministas En La Muestra Despierta!, Kathryn Lane

Pitzer Senior Theses

Elizabeth Waltenburg es una artista contemporánea argentina. En su muestra, despierta!, las obras en óleo sobre tela representan a mujeres, niños y animales en fondos extraños y deprimidos. Ella utilize simbolismo de animales y figuras femeninas para discutir el feminismo actual. Ella trabaja en un tiempo complicado por el feminismo, el postfeminismo, la critica de ambos, y un sistema de comunicación global. Su trabajo marca una tendencia hecho por la confusión de todos estos movimientos. Esta tesis discute su trabajo en el contexto de la historia de representaciones de mujeres, de niños y de animales para llegar a una mejor …