History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Constantino Escalante's Lithographs In La Orquesta And The National Legacy Of The Mexican Constitution Of 1857, Steven V. Cary

Art & Art History ETDs

ABSTRACT

An examination of the lithographic prints of Constantino Escalante in the Mexican publication, La Orquesta, was undertaken for the years 1861 through 1868. Foremost among La Orquesta’s concerns and repeatedly appearing in Escalante’s work, is the importance of the Constitution of 1857 as the Liberal instrument for Mexico’s journey to become a sovereign, modern state. During a tumultuous period of 19^th century Mexican history, Escalante and La Orquesta dealt with sustained threats and censorship, causing frequent and intermittent shutdowns. An early supporter of Benito Juárez, La Orquesta radically amended its positive view of Juárez following the unsuccessful …

Graphic Scotland: Visuality And Empire, 1810 – 1913, Laura Michelle Golobish

Art & Art History ETDs

Graphic Scotland: Visuality and Empire, 1810–1913 interrogates the aesthetic, technological, and literary conventions used to represent Scotland’s character in nineteenth-century publications. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, publishers, authors, and readers began to correlate the material format of prints, books, illustration, and bookbinding with individual and national character. Periodicals and literature drew the correlations between the aesthetic conventions of picturesque Scottish landscape, physiognomy of Scottish authors, and bookbinding to frame ideas about Scottish character as a didactic model for middle class British and American readers. Thus, Graphic Scotland offers an intertextual reading of three illustrated publications about Scotland–J.R. Osgood’s 1882 …

“By Order Of The Commandant General”: Eighteenth-Century Bourbon Reforms And The Architecture Of Mission San Francisco De La Espada, San Antonio, Texas, James E. Ivey

Art & Art History ETDs

The effects of Bourbon reforms on mission architecture of the northern frontier of New Spain have not been examined in the surprisingly limited historiography of the San Antonio, Texas missions. The few existing architectural studies overlook major structural and developmental changes at the missions. Using the construction history of Mission San Francisco de la Espada, I argue that most of these changes are the result of the application of the Bourbon-revised mission administrative method, the método nuevo, made possible by the Patronato Real Universal of 1753 that gave the King of Spain temporal control over the Catholic Church within …

Living Between The Lines: How Japanese Crafts Taught Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, And Eileen Gray To See Modern Domestic Space, Regina Nabil Emmer

Art & Art History ETDs

Histories of European and U.S. modernism conventionally accept that Enlightenment rational thought set modern architecture’s terms and criteria in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Rationalism privileges visual and material properties; distinguishes between art, architecture, and craft; and identifies space with the structure that frames it. It normalized the view that buildings stand fixed, independent of our interaction with them, and perpetuates assumptions about what physically defines domestic space. Consequently, Japan’s significance for modern domestic space in Europe and the U.S. has been interpreted as structurally evident. Simultaneously, the architecture of European and U.S. modernists who did not think like rationalists …

From Stasis To Ecstasy: Tracing Bernard Of Clairvaux's "Queer" Influence On French Gothic Art, Jackson O. Larson

Art & Art History ETDs

I trace the progression of figural sculpture in the Latin West from the static statues of the late-tenth century to the ecstatic statues of the mid-thirteenth century. I explore the various reasons for the return of freestanding figural sculpture and suggest that the return is indicative of an eroticization of the Christian holy figures. I suggest that Bernard of Clairvaux’s erotic theology in the twelfth century resulted in a synthesis of eros and Christian devotion that allowed latent classicism to find purchase in Christian art. I submit that Bernard’s influence on European art is a form of “queering”—a process by …

Stripped And Exploited Blackness: Black Nude Men In The Art Of F. Holland Day And John Singer Sargent, David P. Saiz

Art & Art History ETDs

Black representation in late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century U.S. art and visual culture is primarily dominated by racist depictions produced by white elite (usually male) artists. Exploiting Black male nude subjects in their art production, F. Holland Day and John Singer Sargent are inextricably tied to this complicated legacy. For Day, his African series featuring U.S.-born model, J.R. Carter, extracts the subject from his time and place to present him as an exotic African subject/object. On the other hand, Sargent encounters Black Bahamian laborers at Miami’s Villa Vizcaya where he then documents his subjects in watercolor as bathers in the surrounding subtropical …

William Blake's Satan As A Hermaphrodite, Genevieve E. Hartsock

Art & Art History ETDs

Depictions of Satan had started off with a grotesque and monstrous figure, but depictions of and attitudes towards the character shifted with the publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, although the aesthetics of the figure shifted, I argue that William Blake’s renderings of Satan continue the tradition of rendering them as monstrous and grotesque in a new way, in that Blake renders Satan as a hermaphrodite. Attitudes towards hermaphrodites has shifted over time, but the attitude of regarding them as unnatural or monstrous harkens back to ancient Greece, and these attitudes were only furthered with time and the advent …

The Origins And Development Of Textile Writing In Peru, William M. Cheek

Art & Art History ETDs

Scholars once considered Inka khipus (14^th-16^th CE) to be a technological development unique to the Inka Empire. We now know that the earlier central Andean Wari (6^th-11^th CE) also made use of khipus, calling into question the Inka primacy of the technology. Understanding the origins and transformation of khipu notation in the Andes sheds light on the ways that information technologies figured into Andean state formation and administration, and impacts larger understandings of how tactile notational systems develop into writing and information storage. This study articulates how, just as the Inka inherited khipu technology …

"Maa-Multh-Nii" People Who Came Floating In: Analogues Between Nuu-Chah-Nulth And Tlingit With Spanish Colonial Expeditions In The Eighteenth Century, Suzanne R. Mcleod

Art & Art History ETDs

Spanish explorers first navigated the 2,400-kilometer stretch of the Pacific Northwest Coast in the latter part of the eighteenth-century, largely in response to rumors that Russian traders had established a presence in lands north of Alta California (then considered Spanish territory). Spain launched a series of expeditions to the region, the first in 1774 under Juan Josef Pérez Hernández, and the final, in 1792, under Alejandro Malaspina. The Spanish remained in the area until 1794 when political and territorial tensions with the incoming British forced a negotiation known historically as the Nootka Convention. By 1795, the empire abandoned its aspirations …

Pilgrimage To The Virgin Of Juquila: The Negotiation Of Catholic Institutional Power In Colonial Oaxaca, Paloma Barraza

Art & Art History ETDs

Despite the contemporary popularity of the pilgrimage site of the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina of Juquila, the statuette of Oaxaca’s Virgin of Juquila is often eclipsed by the more well-known tilma image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The limited art historical scholarship has failed to address the statuette of the Virgin of Juquila as an icon that signifies both Indigenous and Catholic power dating back to the seventeenth century. Dominican missionaries used the statuette as a mediator for religious conversion practices in the local Chatino community. Furthermore, the moment the Virgin of Juquila gained significant Indigenous popularity …

Contemporary Alaska Native Identities: Creation And Curation By Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tess Mccoy

Art & Art History ETDs

I focus on contemporary Alaska Native artist, Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq, Athbaskan, Irish, German), her works of art, exhibitions, and her curatorial practices to explain the presentation history of Native American people and how this affects present-day exhibitions. Through her work, I explore the importance of agency of Native people through identity, depictions of themselves, and their people in museum spaces. I examine the history of museum culture as the way in which indigenous agency is removed and reconstructed to fit the needs of interest groups. In contrast, Kelliher-Combs and other advocates attempt to intervene and interrogate the persistence of archaic …

Shawn Hunt's Transformation Mask: The Intersection Of Contemporary And Traditional Heiltsuk Art, Terese R. Lukey

Art & Art History ETDs

Shawn Hunt is an artist of Heiltsuk (Bella Bella), French, and Scottish Canadian ancestry who is at the forefront of contemporary Northwest Coast art in the Vancouver area. Historic artworks of his community have been often overlooked in scholarly literature due to the seeming willingness of the people to adapt to colonization. Viewed as a “tainted” culture, the Heiltsuk have been noticeably ignored in the art historical realm. However, their masks are some of the best examples of traditional regalia that are found in museums across Canada and the United States. Contemporary native artists of the Northwest Coast continue to …

Arts Of Resistance: Ecologic History And Contemporary Interventions In The Valley Of Mexico, Chloë L. Courtney

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis analyzes two contemporary artworks concerning Mexico City’s complex socio-ecologic history: the installation The Return of a Lake (2012), by Maria Thereza Alves, and the performance Plan Acalote (2015) by the collective Plan Acalli (Carlos Huitzil and Ehecatl Morales). Mexico City faces land subsidence, flooding, and water shortages. Systemic power imbalances and ongoing efforts to transform a wetland landscape to a city conforming to Eurocentric ideals concentrate these problems in marginal communities. Using strategies of eco-criticism, decolonial thought, and performance studies, I argue that The Return of a Lake and Plan Acalote link broad social and ecologic problems with …

Compositional Analysis And Cross-Cultural Examination Of Blue And Blue-Green Post-Fire Colorants On Tolita-Tumaco Ceramics, Breanna F. Reiss

Art & Art History ETDs

Blue and blue-green ceramic colorants are an uncommon occurrence in the ancient Americas. This paper explores blue and blue-green post-fire colorants used by the coastal Tolita-Tumaco culture of ancient coastal Ecuador and Colombia through compositional testing and cross-cultural comparison. Using X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy, one sample each of blue and blue-green colorants were tested to identify the mineral composition present. Though the colorants were thought to likely originate from copper carbonates like azurite or malachite, or perhaps even similar to other Mesoamerican pigments like Maya Blue, the blue-green pigment, collected at La Tolita, …

The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality And Performance., Michelle S. Mcgeough, Michelle Susan Mcgeough

Art & Art History ETDs

Gender variance and artist production are not topics that are often discussed within the discipline of art history. In fact gender variance and in particular its relationship to sexual orientation was not a topic studied, much less discussed outside of the medical community until the mid-twentieth century. It was generally thought that sexuality and gender were “biologically determined” and deviation from the heterosexual norm was considered pathological. In contrast, Indigenous nations in Canada and the United States had a very different understanding regarding the relationship between gender, biology, and sexual object of choice. One area that provides us with a …

Porous Time And Space In Contemporary Photography: How Social Constructions Of Space And Reenactment Produce Alternative Histories, Emma Brooke Lehrer Stein

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines how the photograph can exceed the long-rooted debate around medium specific notions of photographic truth, since all realisms are historical and constantly changing. Applying theories of socially constructed space and porous time to analysis of these case studies presents alternative photographic histories that show past and present together. Boris Mikhailov, as a dissident artist and post-Soviet documentarian of new Russian capitalism, presents histories of visual culture that compete and overlap during the Soviet era and afterward. Mikhailov refers to the multiplicity of voices found in his photographic practice as a state of “coexistence.” Looking at photographs of …

Cultural Imprint: A History Of Northwest Coast Native And First Nations Prints, India Rael Young

Art & Art History ETDs

Cultural imPRINT provides the first substantive art historical investigation into Northwest Coast Indigenous prints. Since the 1960s, Northwest Coast artists have employed the print medium to share their histories, heritage, and culture amongst each other and with the larger world. Because print artists number in the hundreds, and print editions in the thousands, this dissertation takes a socio-cultural approach to understanding the purposes for the medium’s production and circulation. First, it analyzes the deep histories of reproduction in the North American art world and in Northwest Coast Indigenous communities, asserting that reproduction within coastal communities serves to perpetuate history from …

Testimonies Of Violence: Images Of Franciscan Martyrs In The Provinces Of New Spain, Emmanuel Ortega

Art & Art History ETDs

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Franciscan martyr portraits became popular in monastic spaces of the Spanish viceroyalties of central Mexico. To visually construct the meritorious life of these martyrs, artists drew inspiration from hagiographic chronicles that described various Native rebellions, which featured the graphic depiction of the gruesome deaths of friars. The prospect of martyrdom enticed novices to follow in their footsteps in service to God, but also to the Crown, whose presence in the northern territories of New Spain intensified during the period of the Bourbon reforms. In my dissertation I explore this propagandistic approach to martyr …

Folk, The Naïve And Indigeneity: Defining Strategies In Violeta Parra's Visual Art, Serda Yalkin

Art & Art History ETDs

Since the decades following Violeta Parra’s death in 1967, the life and legacy of the folklorist, singer, poet, and visual artist has been mythologized in Chilean popular consciousness. Throughout her career, which spanned the 1940s to the 1960s, Parra launched a widespread folkloric project for the purpose of the recovery, compilation, transcription, performance, and study of the music, poetry, rituals, proverbs, folktales, and material objects of the diverse regions of Chile. She recorded and performed original music utilizing traditional rural instruments with socially critical lyrics that denounced the injustices suffered by the oppressed sectors of Chilean society, a demographic with …

Yinka Shonibare Mbe's Critiques Of Empire And His Reception In Four Transnational Case Studies, Johanna Wild

Art & Art History ETDs

In the wake of art history’s “global turn”, the installation art of Yinka Shonibare MBE has obtained vast visibility in the established centers of contemporary cultural practice in Europe and beyond. Shonibare is best known for his installations of mannequins that reenact canonized paintings and historical events culled from European modernity. Dressed in deceptively “African” Dutch Wax fabrics, Shonibare’s phenotypically ambiguous and headless mannequins ensnare audiences with a semblance of “exotic” difference, but ultimately resist the fixity of national, cultural, racial and, in some cases, gendered categorization through an incessant semiotic slippage. In his book, The Culture Game (2001), Olu …

Narratives Of Violence And Tales Of Power: The Work Of Jorge González Camarena, The History Of The Castillo De Chapultepec, And The Establishment Of The National Museums In The Project Of Mexican Nationalism, Rebekah Bellum

Art & Art History ETDs

In the project of nationalism in Mexico, the governing bodies acted out a deliberate process of reclamation of the histories and mythologies of Mexico for the purpose of state programming, and for the development of an official narrative of nationality. In my thesis, I trace the effects of nationalism by first looking into a history of power in Mexico as articulated through the adaptive reuse, over centuries, of the Castillo de Chapultepec building. This building has housed the National Museum of History (Museo Nacional de Historia) since the early 1940s, and has played a prominent role in the construction and …

Touching Nether-Regionalisms: Paul Cadmus As Exemplary Foil To A Homegrown American Art, Maxine Marks

Art & Art History ETDs

The struggle over who writes our histories and who is included in those histories resonates within the broader scope of my project where I examine such productions and deliberations of American identity through U.S. visual language and artistic production. I challenge exclusive ideas of Americanness' and counter such exclusions within Regionalism via the artistic production of Paul Cadmus. I specifically explore issues of gender, race and class in the artworks of U.S. artist Paul Cadmus, his resulting impact on the Regionalist movement and the heteronormative masculine identity that emerges from within Regionalism. I illuminate Cadmus's contributions to Regionalism, rebuild connections …

Chronicles Of Revolution And Nation: El Taller De Gráfica Populars 'Estampas De La Revolución Mexicana' (1947), Mary Theresa Avila

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation concentrates on the key 1947 portfolio Las Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana' ('Prints of the Mexican Revolution') produced by El Taller de Gráfica Popular (The Popular Graphics Workshop) or TGP, a graphic art collective founded in Mexico City in 1937. The album's eighty-five prints recount Mexican history from the l870s to the 1940s, as well as address the human condition and denounce social and civil injustices. These images are anchored in the diverse narratives and legacies of the Mexican Revolution (1910 and 1920). My analysis of the visual, textual, and historical components in the TGP's 1947 portfolio, a …

The Open Veins Of Guayasamí­N'S Paintings, Maria Otero

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis will focus on several of the smaller series that make up Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín's La Edad de la Ira series, using them as examples of the main themes of this body of work. These themes include representations of oppressors and the oppressed, which is a regularly occurring opposition created throughout La Edad de la Ira. The first chapter will explore images of series consisting only of oppressors in the context of Latin America's actual history by relating it to Eduardo Galeano's famous book Open Veins of Latin America. I do so in order to explore how Guayasamín's …

Conquest, Consequences, Restoration: The Art Of Rebecca Belmore, Kathleen Deblassie

Art & Art History ETDs

Rebecca Belmore (Ojibwa/Anishinabe, b. 1960 in Upsala, Ontario), embraces three themes in her oeuvre: conquest, consequences and restoration.Through the mediums of performance art, installation, video and photography, Belmore confronts Indigenous issues regarding land theft, identity, gender, racism, stereotypes,memory, contested histories, and the recovery and reclamation of a decolonized self. All of these themes are sub-categories that fall under the larger theme of the consequences of conquest. The most significant component of Belmores work, however, is restoration, which embraces themes of healing, self-determination and sovereignty. Traditional art-historical methodologies can and have been used to analyze Indigenous art. This thesis proposes that …

Three Case Studies Of National Narratives In Central American Art, Gustavo Larach

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis explores the ways in which two Central American artists of the 20th century conceived of their own emerging nations through works of art that present national narratives. The first artist discussed is the Nicaraguan Armando Morales (b. 1927). This discussion centers on Moraless lithographic portfolio of seven images titled La saga de Sandino, which recounts the rebellion led by Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934) between 1926 and 1933. The second artist discussed is the Honduran Arturo López Rodezno (1908-75), who set out to produce, between the 1940's and 1960's, murals that focused on the figures of ancient Maya rulers …

The Reception Of Autos-De-Fe In 18th Century New Spain: Image, Text And Practice, Emmanuel Ortega

Art & Art History ETDs

In 18th century New Spain, autos-de-fé were publicly performed as a way to openly confront the sins of heretics and to announce their penance. Paintings of these events are among the rarest scenes ever depicted on both sides of the Atlantic. Paintings, such as Un auto de f\xe8 en el pueblo de San Bartolomé Otzolotepec ca.1716, emphasize the impressive display of power enacted by the inquisition through autos-de-fé. However, they downplay the presence of the indigenous spectator-participant in lieu of the organizers and elite invitees. In terms of content, however, this painting represents a unique example of auto images since …

The Interrelationship Of Identities: How Artistic Practice Informs Teaching In The Visual Arts, Karen G. Adams Edwards

Art & Art History ETDs

This research is an investigation into the relationship between artistic practice and art teaching in secondary art teachers. After an examination of various perspectives on this relationship that have appeared in scholarly journals over the last several decades, some of which argue that artistic practice is essential to the quality of an art teacher's teaching, and some of which regard the two practices as separate, I interviewed five secondary art teachers to find out more about this relationship. I conducted the interviews in a semi open-ended fashion, asking questions that invited participants to discuss teaching preferences and priorities as well …

The Once And Future King: A New Approach To Ancient Maya Mortuary Monuments From Palenque, Tikal, And Copan, Elizabeth Olton

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines the Temple of the Inscriptions, Temple I, and Temple 26 and explores what could have motivated the Maya to construct these large monuments and how they might have been meaningful. Traditional art historical methods of comparative and formal analyses are employed as tools for discussing patterns of meaning among these temples. The structural and decorative programs shared by all three temples signal that they are part of a separate genre of architecture that is specifically mortuary and interactive. Furthermore, these features are also a mode of communication. Messages depicted in the offerings, sculpture, and spaces of the …

Imagining The Noble And Loyal City: An Introduction To The Biombo Franz Mayer, Madalena Consuelo Salazar

Art & Art History ETDs

The decorative arts of New Spain had, until recently, been peripheral in art historical discourse. Current scholars have begun to widen the lens of interpretation to include new spheres of influence and objects that defy traditional disciplinary classifications. One such object is the Biombo Franz Mayer, a viceregal biombo, or folding screen. Although useful for elucidating larger themes, recent studies have de-contextualized the Biombo by regarding the object in terms of group identity or as a representation of colonized spaces. Building on previous scholarship, this thesis will reintroduce the object's context, and through formal and iconographic analyses, study the screen …