Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

Introduction To Contemporary Art Across Political Divides, Alla Myzelev, Tijen Tunali

Art History

This book addresses the need for a more sustained knowledge and multidisciplinary understanding of what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. The book’s main inquiry is whether contemporary art can or cannot cultivate an “agonistic” way of togetherness and facilitate difficult conversations through a multitude of contradictions, diverging views and conflicting visions. With Marxist, feminist and ecologist perspectives, the contributors analyze contemporary art worlds across the globe in relation to memory, conflict, trauma, transitional justice, social engagement, social resistance and activism.

In this volume artists, activists, art …

Presenting And Curating Contemporary Installation Art; The Work Of Cornelia Parker And Céline Condorelli, Bridget Curtis

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The popular sentiment in curation among contemporary British art institutions has emphasized the attempt to reconcile with the divide between public art and art presented in institutions. The globalization of Britain in contemporary times has led to the wide dissemination of shows curated by British institutions. The location artwork is exhibited can change the reception and interaction with the work. Artists who use their work as a means of activism can benefit from the perception of a global audience. The question arises as to how impactful activism art can be when exhibited within the contemporary institution versus when it is …

21st Century Exhibition Rhetorics, Sabina Eastman

Pitzer Senior Theses

The desire to create a language through which reading artwork can be attainable to an inclusive audience is a relatively modern aspiration. Painting and sculpture have been longstanding ideals of elite aesthetic ambition, which are held in containers of cultural and social tradition, removed from the ebb and flow of mundane existence. These containers were initially created to encapsulate historic moments, providing insight into a creator and their ideas which were inaccessible to the audience of that era. Since the early 19th century, the conversation in art theory has turned toward the meaning, purpose, and justification for the design and …

An Epic (Fail): Humor, Play, And Politics In Chilean Contemporary Art From The Early 1980s, Paula Solimano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis foregrounds the methodology of humor and play employed by Chilean artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I argue that, through comic relief, collaborative practice, and melodrama, artists from different fields worked together in Santiago to reimagine the relationship between intellectuals and the public sphere and criticize the Pinochet regime.

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

The Ephemerality Of The Living And The Persistence Of The Inanimate, Erin Johnston

MFA in Visual Art

I create fragile, sculptural works with paper. Either cast from pre-existing objects or constructed forms, my three-dimensional works ultimately become pure paper objects. I use the visual language of absence, memory, ruin and ephemerality to present modern artifacts and address the now. I am interested in how the manufactured crumbs we leave behind as a species reveal our collective desires, and our relationship to the body and mortality. I am fascinated with, and even enchanted by, the proliferation of material objects and their tendency to surpass the lifespan of any single human. Perhaps this behavior of producing lasting creations is …

The Construction And Defense Of Artistic Authorship In Contemporary Copyright Disputes, Sophie Bell

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of three contemporary copyright infringement cases, this thesis examines topics in the field of art law, each grounded in the recent history of art and its controversies, in order to illuminate the unique set of legal conditions shaping contemporary artmaking, sale, and exhibition in the United States.

The Printmaking Boom And Its Effect On The Future For The Market For Prints And Multiples, Helen H. Condo

MA Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the history of the market for prints and multiples beginning with the print renaissance of the 1960s to discover the underlying drivers of a successful editions market and make predictions for the future. Before the print boom of the 1960s, driven by the departure of printmakers from Europe during World War II, who reinvigorated a passion for the artistic process, printmaking was considered that of a craft. Once it was elevated from its secondary status, due to excitement from Contemporary artists and institutional accreditation, a market structure was solidified. By examining the …

Neoliberalism, Institutionalism, And Art, Declan Hoy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As contemporary art has expanded to encompass further disparate activities under its umbrella, the various institutions of art can be looked to as the only constant and defining characteristic of art. These institutions are often seen in sharp contrast to spontaneous collectivism, the real, and radical creativity—attributes deeply valued within contemporary art. This creates a troubling situation in which institutions are seen as limiting the possibility of what art could be, and artworks are perceived as needing to escape the very institutions which define them in order to be deemed worthy. In this structure, contemporary art follows and validates the …

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

A Tale Of Two Biennales: How Contemporary Art In Italy Reflects Current European Politics, Hannah Rosabel Capucilli-Shatan

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

Made Of Water, Covered In Mud, Nicole Norman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My fixation on water as metaphor is a product of my cosmic design; Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I am made of water, begging to be held. Anything liquid has this same desire. I use my art practice to examine the fluidity of physical and digital spaces; how they transform almost constantly. This is only possible through the use of containers that give form to abstract ideas and make them easier to drink (read: digest). Containers can vary in size and shape, but their purpose remains the same. A drinking glass, a swimming pool, a creek bed. These are …

Double Documents: Imaging And Installation In Sturtevant’S “Duchamps”, Chris Murtha

Theses and Dissertations

The artist Sturtevant produced exacting but inherently distinct recreations of artworks only recently completed by her contemporaries. This thesis examines the body of work she created after Marcel Duchamp between 1966 and 1973, and how that work reveals the central and entwined roles of photography and installation in her practice.

Distorted Icons In Contemporary Art: An Examination Into How We Know What We Know And Why, Alessandra Ruggiero

MA Projects

The purpose of this exhibition, Distorted Icons in Contemporary Art: An Examination into How We Know What We Know and Why, is to explore the nature of icons, specifically contemporary renditions of modern or traditional icons. Colloquially, icons are a symbol of something well-known or an image that is easily recognizable. Traditionally, icons refer to religious figures, most commonly devotional paintings in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Greek churches and are used as a means of prayer to represent peace, piety and faith. However, what constitutes an icon in Western contemporary culture has changed significantly. Devotional images have been replaced by …

Erotic Fever In The Arquives: Imagining A Queer Porn Paradise In Cait Mckinney And Hazel Meyer’S Exhibition Tape Condition: Degraded, Genevieve Flavelle

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Focusing on Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s site-specific exhibition Tape Condition: degraded (2016) at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives, this paper explores reparative and desire-driven approaches for working with partial and missing histories within archives. Focusing specifically on artists working as archivists, I consider how the limitations of evidence-based histories can be addressed through creative practice. The essay unfolds in two parts. The first examines a selection of objects from the exhibition to draw out the historical context of The ArQuives, grounding my analysis of the conditions that have created and perpetuated specific archival gaps; in this case, pornography made …

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

Site, Power, And Experience: Three Contemporary Installation Works On Global Mobility, Xiyin Sabrina Lin

Honors Projects

This Honors Project investigates the themes of immigration, space, and mobility through the lens of contemporary installation art. It addresses a brief history of global contemporary art, arguing that art of the past two decades has been shaped by preoccupations with and tensions surrounding space. Using the works of Yanagi Yukinori, Alfredo Jaar, and Doris Salcedo as case studies, the essay analyzes how artists use the medium of installation to address institutional history, contemporary geopolitics, as well as individual and collective experience. It interrogates the different aspects of installation art, including temporality, site-specificity, and the use of language, to demonstrate …

Contemporary Textiles: Unraveling White Feminist Discourse, Meredith Friedman

MA Theses

In recent decades, attention to textile art has flourished. The growth of contemporary studies committed to revising fiber’s hierarchical categorization represents a discursive turn heavily weighted within feminist inquiry. The interrelation between textile techniques and constructs of femininity and domesticity was at the base of a robust interdisciplinary field of feminist theory developing around the 1970s in the US. Often referred to as the second wave of feminism, this era experienced scholars and artists proposing the medium’s capacity to counter the elusive genre’s marginalization and, by extension, presenting textile’s ability to subvert notions of gender difference. This analysis aims to …

Appealingly Unpeeled: The Layered Lemons In Dutch Golden Age And Contemporary Art, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the lemon holds a prominent visual, economical, socio-cultural, and moral position. This trend would then be repeated in contemporary art, beginning in roughly the 1970s. This thesis, in two parts, will explore the significance of the prevalence of the lemon and their recurrent presence in both Dutch Golden Age art and modern and contemporary artwork. This multivalent approach will look at lemons as not only a visual representation of fruit, but a symbol of larger concepts such as globalization, commercialism, colonialism, sexuality, religion, linguistics, mythology, and pop culture.

More Than Just Middlemen: The Legacy And Influence Of Art Dealers Joseph Duveen, Peggy Guggenheim And Leo Castelli On Shaping Art Collections, Valencia Tong

MA Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine whether art gallerists are replaceable in the current climate in which the plea for removing the middlemen has been growing. The speed and ease of art transactions through digital platforms provide an alternative to the relationship-based in-person elements of the art world. Before the pandemic, the art market was seen as notoriously opaque, and gallerists have been stereotyped as middlemen who take high commission from art sales. However, art gallerists have played an important role throughout art history, not only buying and selling works of art like traders, but also shaping the …

The Post-1990s Chinese Artists And Their Art: Xin Liu, Wa Liu, And Zipiao Zhang, Yifan Ye

Senior Projects Spring 2021

During the major social-economic transformation, many contemporary Chinese artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guoqiang, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing, cautiously articulate the concept of a utopian socialist society in their specific visions. Some may take a more provocative position; while others sometimes create harmony as an approach to the concept. It is likely that the artistic intentions of these artists who experienced the 1989 Tiananmen incident create art with political ambitions. However, in the new decade of the 1990s, China’s economic reforms have already led to the formation of globalization. Artists who were born in the 90s live in …

Femagogical Strategies In The Art School: Navigating The Institution, Barbara Knezevic, Amy Walsh

Articles

This writing aims to define and examine ‘femagogy’ and the transformative potential for an inclusive intersectional feminist teaching practice in Fine Art education in the context of the contemporary Irish art school. This writing will trace the influence of linguistic power structures and the influence of broader institutional patriarchy in an educational setting and outline the inspirations and genealogies of femagogy. This writing provides situated embodied examples of femagogy in practice. It proposes the femagogical model of teaching as one that situates itself outside prevailing patriarchal models and proposes strategies to reimagine knowledge production and navigate the prevailing structural patriarchy …

Contemporary Art And Food: An Examination Of Three Case Studies Using Anthropology And Diaspora As Key., Viridiana S. Mayagoitia

Dissertations and Theses

Food-related artworks are as crucial to understanding culture as other mediums in art like painting, installation, sculpture, and drawings. From Greek and Roman mosaics, Egyptian banquet scenes, to Renaissance frescoes and Flemish still-life paintings, the depiction of food and meals has had multiple meanings. Food as a medium in Western contemporary art was introduced in the 1930s by the Italian Futurists’ banquets, which celebrated modernity and technology underlying social and political commentary. It continued throughout the 1960s with performance art, conceptual art, and happenings, and in the 1970s with the Fluxus movement’s exploration of the boundaries between art and life. …

How Contemporary Curatorial Practice Co-Opts Participatory Art, Caroline S. Eastburn

CMC Senior Theses

Instagram users post photos in art exhibitions all of the time. Contemporary art curators and museums have a role to play in this new phenomenon. Programming and curating participatory art exhibitions allows for the perfect art selfie which draws in visitors from around the world. But, how do curators and museums affect the significance of these artworks by placing them within the Instagram age? This thesis uses the three exhibitions as case studies: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, Take Me (I'm Yours) at the Jewish Museum in New York, and "Hélio Oiticica: To Organize …

“Other Modernities”: Art, Visual Culture And Patrimony Outside The West. An Introduction, Silvia Naef, Irene Maffi, Wendy Shaw

Artl@s Bulletin

The notion of modernity as a tabula rasa phenomenon that destroys the present in order to build the future is particularly complicated in the case of non-Western settings, where modernization was often understood as erasing local culture in favor of a template borrowed from the West. Historiographies of non-Western arts have mostly followed such a model, viewing fine arts, associated with modernity, as opposed to “traditional” arts, often commodified in the production of nostalgia or marketed for tourists. This article discusses the complexity of art production in non-Western contexts, beyond such reductive classifications.

Mining Maps, Making Meaning: An Interview With Kasia Ozga, Nikoo Paydar

Artl@s Bulletin

In the following interview with Kasia Ozga, the Polish-French-American contemporary artist focuses on her Mapping Aluminum series from 2013-2014, metal relief sculptures that throw light on environmental issues arising from bauxite mining and aluminum processing and smelting. Ozga illuminates how she came to focus on the material aluminum, the context in which she developed the project and selected the mapped sites (the Saint Lawrence River in Massena, NY, the Simandou Mountain Range in Guinea, and Ajka Vezprém County, Hungary), and how borders, cartography and maps figure in her larger body of work.

Good Dyke Art, Sam M. Mack

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work in good dyke art visually expands upon conversations about institutional critique and its contradictions, specifically questioning who dictates the boundaries between institutions and bodies: how divisions are made between them and who enacts or receives force. One’s participation in this critique, however, indicates a participation in the problematics of the institution and by extension, a desire to critique may also be considered a desire to participate in that system.

Ceramic, glaze, and found objects manifest an allegorical formalism that utilizes coded languages of institutional spaces, traditions of queer-coding, and charged word-play. The ceramic vessel forms reference the Ancient …

Subversive Stitch, Kimberly Reinagel

MA Projects

WhiteBox Harlem is thrilled to present Subversive Stitch, a group exhibition featuring female contemporary artists that work in textiles, curated by Kimberly Reinagel. Presented at this show will be works by Eozen Agopian, Alexandria Deters, Zhen Guo, Lisa Kellner, Mariana Garibay Raeke, Kimberly Reinagel, Leila Seyedzadeh, Victoria Udondian and Christina Whitney Wong. This exhibition will look at the societal reassignment of the textile in the art market. Textiles throughout history have been primarily considered a "feminine" medium. Fabrics, fashion, embroidery and tapestry all connote a feminine background, and have thus notoriously not been received with much gravity. This exhibition is …

North American Indigenous Collection And Curation And Its Impact On Market Arts., Adelaide Mccomb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the history of two North American Indigenous groups, those belonging to the Great Plains and the Arctic, and observes how settler-colonial influence determined the collection and curation of arts and artifacts in these areas. This art includes a mention of pre-Colombian works, but focuses predominantly on works being made after “first-contact” through the contemporary ear. The paper addresses the effect imperialist history has had on the development of Indigenous art markets, and how institutions such as museums may address them through ethical practices, and efforts to decolonize museum spaces.