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Contemporary Art Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Contemporary Art

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia Perkins Apr 2023

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia Perkins

Honors Theses

Contemporary environmental art can be inspired by personal experience and reflections between the artist and their surroundings. Black women have a unique interaction with and relation to their environment. I would like to unpack the relationships between Black women and the environment by exploring a few different artists’ work, and by dissecting the effects race and gender have on one’s view of the natural world. I have studied the work of four artists: Torkwase Dyson, Allison Jane Hamilton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Calida Garcia Rawles. Environmentally, I have a specific interest in bodies of water / Black waterways because of …


The Woman Behind The Whitney, Breanna Epp Mar 2022

The Woman Behind The Whitney, Breanna Epp

Honors Theses

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a prominent sculptor and patron to artists in the early 1900s. Her art collection was the largest of American art at the time, and she led the nation into an appreciation of its own native art. Native in this context specifically means any art that was made in America, not strictly art made by the indigenous people of the Americas. Tackling her entire life, from growing up in the Vanderbilt family to her death, I provide an overview of her interactions with the art …


Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow Apr 2021

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 …


My Exploration Of Treasures From The Mind Of David Park, Brittany Schwartz Jun 2020

My Exploration Of Treasures From The Mind Of David Park, Brittany Schwartz

Honors Theses

My honors thesis, “My Exploration of Treasures from the Mind of David Park” draws attention to communicate my sense of the female figure to the viewer, while taking particular gestures from the figures of the Bay Area painter David Park’s work. I seek to convey how the self or essence of being can appear on canvas. David Park resonated with me because of his eye for exceptional color combinations, physicality he builds with substance on canvas, use of bold mark-making and simplicity of forms. I am manipulating David Park’s representations of figures and making my own compositions, applying drybrush, oil …