American Art and Architecture Commons^™

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …

Forbidden Fruit: Mary Cassatt’S Mural Of “Modern Woman” At The World’S Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893, Tricia Cusack

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper considers a large mural of “The Modern Woman” painted in France by the American artist Mary Cassatt for the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It focuses in particular on the large central panel of the mural titled Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science that depicts women and girls apple-picking. Cassatt’s mural drew on various traditions and myths. Apple harvesting was a common sight in America. Cassatt’s title though points to the story of Eve and forbidden fruit, in which Eve seeks knowledge, but is severely punished for it. Cassatt …

The Course Of Empire: An Analysis, Devyn Woodard

Emerging Writers

This essay delves into the themes of and motivations for Thomas Cole’s series of paintings, The Course of Empire. Through an analysis of the different rhetorical appeals and fallacies employed by Cole in the series of paintings, the deeper meaning behind the works comes to light. This analysis serves as a bridge between the environment the paintings were created in almost two hundred years ago, and the contemporary global landscape, which is still in need of its lessons, even so many years later.

Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Collection, 1894-2008, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar

Finding Aids

Finding aid for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans collection prepared by Bronx Community College Archives.

Programa De La Conferencia Segundo Congreso Internacional De Iconografía Precolombina

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Barcelona, 2023.

Victòria Solanilla, organizador

17 al 20 de octubre de 2023.

En el Museu de Cultures del Món de Barcelona. Calle Montcada, nº12-14, 08003, Barcelona.

Y en el Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Calle del Carme, nº 47, 08001, Barcelona.

Organizado por el GRUP d'ESTUDIS PRECOLOMBINS· con el apoyo del MUSEU ETNOLÒGIC I DE CULTURES DEL MÓN· INSTITUT D'ESTUDIS CATALANS· SOCIETAT CATALANA D'ESTUDIS HISTÒRICS

On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon

Criticism

What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …

Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the rise of the consumer market toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the production of decorated fine ceramics that became powerful modes of popularizing new ideas in the United States regarding independence, national symbols, and abolitionism.

Póster De La Conferencia Segundo Congreso Internacional De Iconografía Precolombina

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Victòria Solanilla, organizadora

17 al 20 de octubre de 2023.

En el Museu de Cultures del Món de Barcelona. Calle Montcada, nº12-14, 08003, Barcelona.

Y en el Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Calle del Carme, nº 47, 08001, Barcelona.

Los Bordados Mayas Que Protegen De Enfermedades En El Estado De Yucatán, México, Roberto Campos-Navarro, Leydi Dorantes, Danielle Dupiech Cavaleri

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Conocemos el rol de los textiles en los rituales y el significado de numerosos símbolos que bordan las artesanas mayas de la Península de Yucatán, no obstante, existen varios motivos de plantas medicinales bordados en los textiles que no fueron analizados. En el mes de septiembre de 2022 dio comienzo una investigación en cooperación con la joven curandera x-meno’ob de Yaxcabá, Leydi Dorantes, que cultiva más de doscientas plantas medicinales mayas en el jardín botánico que creó su abuelo, mismas que usa en rituales y también para curar. Ella nos da a conocer la relación existente entre los elementos de …

Identificación De La División Del Trabajo Entre Los Géneros A Través Del Análisis Iconográfico, Sarah Kauffmann

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

El presente trabajo se enfoca en la metodología para identificar los roles y actividades realizadas por determinado género en la sociedad maya prehispánica. Códigos especiales en la iconografía son utilizados para representar y diferenciar los dos géneros. Varios medios se explorarán como las estelas, dinteles, cerámicas y figurillas. A través de la iconografía se identificará las actividades, vestimenta y postura para interpretar la división del trabajo.

This present study focuses on the methodology for identifying the roles and activities realized by both genders in the pre-Hispanic Mayan society. Special iconographical codes are used to represent and differentiate men and women. …

El Refugio De La Imagen Chamánica En El Mundo Malagana, Sonia Blanco, Catalina Simmonds Caldas

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

La voluntad de elaborar una pieza antropomorfa, es incidir sobre el objeto, haciéndolo actuante. Tratándose del mundo Malagana – sociedad prehispánica colombiana –, que consideró el papel primordial de la mujer, esta imagen femenina y robusta, en cerámica, de pie, portadora de una máscara, como pieza – soporte simbólica contendría en su epidermis y gesto, una narrativa ritual. Desarrollada en un espacio funerario, como ajuar, personificaría los atributos del mono aullador y convocante de los “espíritus (auxiliares) alter-ego”, de los monos ardilla, intervendría de forma ritualista sobre los humedales del pueblo Malagana, aportándoles el equilibrio para la inflorescencia de la …

Proyectar El Diseño Precolombino: Experiencias Didácticas, Luz Helena Ballestas Rincón

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Se presenta el resultado de un Modelo Pedagógico basado en el Diseño Precolombino, el cual ha sido aplicado en diversos escenarios y ambientes de aprendizaje. Mediante la sistematización de la teoría con la práctica del diseño se muestran ejemplos de los métodos de diseño que han resultado eficaces, ya sea en el ámbito universitario o en grupos interesados en el conocimiento de estos bienes patrimoniales, entre los que se encuentran estudiantes y profesores del área artística así como personas convocadas por algunos museos que poseen colecciones precolombinas.

Al experimentar y proponer activando los mecanismos que liberan la creatividad y, a …

El Sobredimensionamiento Y Otros Recursos Plásticos Como Representación De La Capacidad Extática–Visionaria En El Arte Chamánico Americano, Ana María Llamazares

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Este artículo explora uno de los principales rasgos del arte chamánico visionario: el sobredimensionamiento de las figuras o de algunas de sus partes significativas. A través de diversos registros arqueológicos y contemporáneos, se brindan elementos valiosos para interpretar como representaciones explícitas de la capacidad extática o visionaria, ciertas imágenes de arte prehispánico o etnográfico ligadas a tradiciones de prácticas chamánicas americanas, en las que se ha expresado la percepción de la magnificación energética a través de rayos, aureolas o apéndices diversos que expanden el tamaño de las cabezas, manos, pies u otras partes del cuerpo en forma desproporcionada respecto del …

Sconce Upon A Time: Evaluating Multimodal Methods Of Researching Period Lighting Technology, A Case Study Of Drayton Hall, Neale Elizabeth Grisham

All Theses

This thesis reviews several methods of researching light sources and lighting schemes from the “long eighteenth century,”[1] on a historical site. Despite the period’s cultural reliance on lighting as well as technological advancement in this era, there has yet to be published documentation on how to engage with evidence of lighting technology on historic sites for better understanding of the site’s relationship with lighting.

Using Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina as a case study, this thesis outlines and demonstrates the process of five methods of investigating period lighting technology. These methods are: wall investigation, anchorage points comparison and …

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Preservation And Public History In Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Walker Bray

Honors Theses

This paper is an exploration of the history of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an all Black community in the Mississippi Delta formed by freedmen in the wake of Reconstruction. This paper also discusses the ways in which Mound Bayou citizens are working to preserve their history and make it known to a wider audience. In particular, this work discusses the recently opened Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History and related efforts to restore and preserve historic structures in Mound Bayou. In addition, this work also seeks to explore ways in which the University of Mississippi can effectively supplement …

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

“A Certain Brauch:” German-Georgian Palatine And Rhenish Immigrant Houses In Columbia County, New York And Their Vernacular Architectural Roots, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this archaeological and architectural survey of 18th Century Palatine and Rhenish immigrant houses in New York's Hudson Valley, specifically in Columbia County, I track the development of three houses from their earliest vernacular forms to those touched by the Georgian influence. The Georgian worldview, stemming from European Enlightenment ideals, began permeating colonial American society in the 18th Century. It's influence first began to touch the wealthy and elite most connected with mother Europe, and then trickled into more common society. I chronicle and analyze Germantown, NY's Reformed Sanctity Church Parsonage, Germantown, NY's Simeon Rockefeller House, and Clermont, NY's "Stone …

America’S Forgotten Laborers: The World Of Enslaved Craftsmen, Zack Dow

Emerging Writers

This article examines the underrepresented world of enslaved artisans in the American south. In the minds of many, enslaved Americans were confined to unskilled plantation labor. While such labor constituted a large part of the work of the enslaved, master craftspeople go unrecognized, perpetuating an imagine of unskilled, nominal workers that undermines the accomplishments of the millions of black artisans working at the time.

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation advances studies of Black childhood, particularly Black girlhood, by examining how African American women writers depict the troubled journey to adulthood in stories of segregation, immigration, and incarceration. I argue that authors of four representative literary works emphasize architectural structures as well as ancestral hauntings among which Black children grow up. Without examining the material structures, we cannot understand the strategies these haunted Black youth deploy to reach adulthood. Examining the architectural structures that the protagonists of Maud Martha (1953), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Zami (1982), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) grow up in and around, I demonstrate …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

The U.S.–Mexican War: Visualizing Contested Spaces From Parlor To Battlefield, Erika Pazian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The U.S.-Mexican War[1] (1846-1848) was a watershed event that transformed the North American continent politically, socially, and ideologically. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexico lost approximately half of its national territory in the north, and the United States acquired the modern states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and Wyoming. Both nations were plagued by internal conflicts after the war, and each was plunged into civil war within fifteen years of its conclusion.

During this time of turmoil, Mexican and U.S. artists created and recreated myriad images …

Mammy And Aunt Jemima: Keeping The Old South Alive In Popular Visual Culture, Angela G. Athnasios

Honors College Theses

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, American popular visual culture produced racist portrayals of Black Americans. Literature, illustrations, minstrelsy, film, and television are notorious for promoting such unflattering images. Each of these media typified African Americans as exaggerated caricatures with dark skin, bulging eyes, bright-red lips, and goofy smiles. The creators of these stereotypes project their racist beliefs into popular culture. This in turn heavily influences the way other races view people of African descent, as well as how Black people view themselves. From mammies, to Jezebels, to pickaninnies, and everything in between, the message ultimately conveyed in these …

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …

"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …

Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow

Honors Theses

“Art & AIDS: Viral Strategies for Visibility” examines the complex relationships between social stigma, healthcare, homophobia, and mortality, and how these impacted the lives of Western artists and manifested in their works. Most of the art discussed in this thesis was produced during the height of the AIDS crisis (late-1980s to mid-1990s). During this period, gay artists and their allies employed new strategies in their work to inspire activism, and convey intense emotions –– predominantly frustration, grief, and anxiety –– associated with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., the inaction of the Reagan administration was largely due to widespread homophobia kindled by …