American Art and Architecture Commons^™

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 …

Echoed Sites And The Unknowable Object, Joseph Canizales

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis will discuss the expanded field of sculpture, simulacra, digital technology, and two terms I’ve devised: the unknowable object, and echoed sites. Within these two terms, I’m concerned with the complicated relationship between humans and geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. In echoed sites I create sculptures with and without a geologic site or object, by way of digital technology. These forms display two states paradoxically in balance, where what’s presented leaves more questions than answers. Thus, as part of echoed sites, exists the unknowable object. …

The Making Of Cleveland’S Artist: The Aesthetic And Cultural Politics Of Boundary Crossing In The Industrial Landscape Paintings Of Carl Gaertner, 1923 - 1952, April N. Johnston

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The Making of Cleveland’s Artist: The Aesthetic and Cultural Politics of Boundary Crossing in the Industrial Landscape Paintings of Carl Gaertner, 1923 – 1952

by

April Johnston

Master of Arts in American Culture Studies

Washington University in St. Louis, 2019

Dr. Iver Bernstein, adviser

In 1923 Carl Gaertner captivated jurors at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual competitive May Show with a painting of a local bolt factory titled Up the River at Upson’s. What made the painting so arresting was its rendering of the elements of factory, nature, and the human spaces that mediated between them, as …

American Encounters: Art, History, And Cultural Identity, Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, Jennifer L. Roberts

Books and Monographs

American Encounters provides a narrative of the history of American art that focuses on historical encounters among diverse cultures, upon broad structural transformations such as the rise of the middle classes and the emergence of consumer and mass culture, and on the fluid conversations between "high" art and vernacular expressions. The text emphasizes the intersections among cultures and populations, as well as the exchanges, borrowings, and appropriations that have enriched and vitalized our collective cultural heritage.

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

A Network Of Experience: Community Building And Social Restructuring In Fluxus, Margaret Sherer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis argues that the group dynamic of Fluxus and the artwork produced by the group functioned as agents in the cultivation and maintenance of a Fluxus community that developed an experimental, object-based approach to societal formation. I argue that a primary goal of Fluxus was to use their artistic production and their association to establish alternative modes of social interaction that were simultaneously plagiarizing and criticizing conventional social and political institutions.

Landmarks For Sleepwalkers, Isaac S. Howell

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Abstract:

In my recent work I have been interested in thinking about notions of instability. In order explore these notions, in this paper I will like to explore the relevance of postmodern literary theory and the color black in my work, as well as think about the importance of the grid as a tool for organization and ontological delineation.

I will be examining writing by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as art work by Mark Manders, Giorgio de Chirico, Kay Sage, and Ad Reinhardt.

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …