Modern Art and Architecture Commons^™

Body As Instrument: Crafting A Spatial Representational Language For The Dancer's Body, Avery Boland

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project explored the intersection of dance and architecture using choreography, photography, and architectural principles through the development and application of a graphic notation system. Focused on the works of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and photographer Barbara Morgan, the study tested the representation of the body in space through the use of Graham's choreography as captured by Morgan.

The results of the study demonstrated the effectiveness of the representational language in capturing the spatial dynamics of the human body in Martha Graham's choreography through the notation of “frame” and “plane”. Through a comparative analysis of the selected dances, the …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

“Everybody Loves A Conjurer:” The Fake Artworks Of Elmyr De Hory (1906-1976) And Their Consequences On The Art World, Caroline Grinstead

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Art institutions such as museums, galleries, and auction houses have for many years been characterized as reliable and trustworthy. The act of art forgery threatens this integrity and causes these institutions to rethink how they acquire artworks. My research focuses on a specific art forger, Elmyr de Hory, who became notorious for being able to reproduce works in the style of notable artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani. By successfully selling his forgeries to multiple museums and galleries, only to be discovered later, de Hory forced institutions to reconstruct their approaches in authenticating and acquiring works of art. As …

Re-Evaluating Egalitarian Design In Contemporary Danish Society, Alice Baughman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study examines the discourses and practices of egalitarian architecture in contemporary Denmark. Denmark’s long standing comprehensive welfare system promotes, for all citizens, equal access to education, healthcare, and public services, and other opportunities. Similarly, its own brand of socially progressive, egalitarian architecture encourages spatial designs intended for use by all people regardless of social disparities. Drawing on a range of sources from government documents to architectural magazines to design projects themselves, this study defines the historical development of this discourse going back to Modernist and Functionalist movements in the 1930s. By revealing the cultural and demographic assumptions on which …

At The Death Of Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright's Dreams Of America In Japan, Matthew L. Delgaudio

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

In 1832, French writer Victor Hugo declares the death of the edifice as a result of the totalizing popularity of Gutenberg’s printing press since the fifteenth century. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright would echo this sentiment to an intrigued Chicago audience almost 70 years later in his 1901 lecture, “The Art and Craft of the Machine.” The argument went that architecture, chief among the arts, would employ ornament, applied art, and symbolic meaning to capture and spread lasting imprints of human thought before the book usurped this position on account of its greater efficiency in accomplishing the same ends. While …

Stephen Antonakos: The Spiritual Tenets Of Neon, Seville Partida

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Working without paint or brushes, Stephen Antonakos (1926—2013) created murals of neon light. These sweeping gestures of buzzing color achieve a meditative and spiritual quality yet remain accessible in their communal and urban settings. Douglas Crimp's 1981 essay, “The End of Painting '' argues that the most promising art of the time mounts a thorough critique on the myths of humanism, and consequently the cherished tropes of expressive painting. Antonakos’s career spans this period of upheaval, fraught by fears over the looming death of modernist painting as well as critical and curatorial activity that interrogated art’s structures. Although Antonakos seems …

Lost Faith: The Culmination Of Common Thinking, Sierra Kallio

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

This article analyzes the painting Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Abelard and Heloise, Lost Faith (1913), by Henrietta Rae. Through visual analysis, and discussion of the artist, sitters, and subjects, the article looks to explore the dynamics between women in the arts, and their male counterparts.

Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.

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Scattered Fragments: Art, Architecture, And Archives In Revolutionary Urban Cairo, Mounira M. Makar

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how revolutions impact urban Cairo and its communities, specifically within artistic, architectural and archival practice while acknowledging the central role of public spaces in giving way to such revolutionary practices. Fundamentally, this paper highlights the foundational nature of such practices in developing urban communities.

"How Is Photography?": Robert Heinecken's Photographic Concept At The University Of California, Los Angeles, 1960–1991, Noa Wesley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the photography program Robert Heinecken established at UCLA, highlighting his interest in teaching photography as an idea rather than a technologically inflected medium. This pedagogical model provides a lens through which I trace the work of three of his students: Maria Nordman, John Divola, and Uta Barth.

The Coevolution Of The Six Ancient Kilns And Japanese Postwar Local Identity, Benjamin Lewis Rothstein

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

The arts have long been tools used to prop up political visions, and Japan’s traditional crafts are no exception to this trend. Japanese ceramics in particular have enjoyed, or perhaps endured, era after era of patronage by successive governments and movements over their more than a millennium of history. Appropriated by a wave of nationalism in the Meiji period, the rokkoyō (six ancient kilns), long famous for their rustic style and acclaimed tea wares, were converted along with many other traditional crafts into symbols of the Japanese national spirit. In the postwar period, however, without necessarily losing their national importance, …

“How Did Guernica Become The Important Painting And The Universal Symbol It Is Today?", Or Lebel

MA Theses

This thesis explores the intriguing journey that propelled "Guernica" from the initial obscurity of a commissioned artwork to its current status as a globally recognized symbol. The research unravels the multifaceted processes that have contributed to the transformation of a relatively overlooked artwork into an important painting and a universal emblem of protest, antiwar, and hope. The research addresses the fundamental question of how "Guernica" evolved into an important and universally recognized painting. Answering this question allows me to explore and explain how "Guernica," despite its lack of immediate recognition, grew to possess an enduring significance. The research also tackles …

Double Jointed: Gendered Flexibility And The Overextended Self, Grace A. Bromley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores compulsory domesticity and the impulse to overextend oneself, both pressures often associated with the construct of femininity. Through diving into my personal history, which includes growing up in a three-generational home of women, I explore mimesis as it functions in both the replication of identity and in terms of pictorial representation; specifically I address its relationship to gender, manifestation within the body, and the search for subjectivity through the process of making and thinking. In various forms of material explorations, I play with ideas of malleability, mimicry and “embedded” behaviors that are passed down and embodied in …

Cartographic Subjectivity In Fernand Deligny’S Lignes D’Erre, Anya Komar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) was a French thinker, writer, and social worker who dedicated his entire life to an abolitionist project of protecting “severely autistic” children from internment in mental asylums by allowing them to move freely through the mountains of Cévennes where he established a support network for neurodiverse children. He privileged children’s nonverbal state and let them “direct” the community.

This thesis aims to historicize the drawings made under the guidance of Fernand Deligny between the 1960s and 1980s. His drawing method of tracing children’s movement offered an unprecedented way of providing visibility to children with nonverbal autism, outside …

Music As A Tool For Ecstatic Space Design, Pranav Amin

Masters Theses

Music and architecture share a sacred bond across cultures. Their histories intertwine and together, they shape ritualistic, religious, and popular practices. As one of the few remaining avenues of universal transcendental experiences that have been so integral to humans, music’s ability to create ecstatic spaces is ever more necessary for the modern human. This thesis uses spatial, artificial intelligence, visual, and aural tools—while engaging in a dialogue between rationalist architecture and shamanic conceptions of spaces—to create an ecstatic space that seeks to reimagine the union of music and architecture. It reveals new ways in which this union can be experienced …

Death Becomes Her: Rejecting The Muse And Reclaiming The Female Body In Leonor Fini’S Skeleton Women, Janna Singer-Baefsky

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is organized through the varied ways Fini incorporated death imagery, like the skeleton, into her art. I trace how she changed her interpretations of death from being a symbol in earlier works to then rendering death as the subject itself and concluding with depicting herself as death.

Remedios Varo: Inspirations And Creative Strategies, Margaret Colbert

Theses and Dissertations

Remedios Varo is best known for the narrative, if enigmatic and symbol-laden, paintings she produced while living in Mexico from 1941 to 1963. This thesis argues that Varo’s key creative strategy was to mine and mimic the subject matter and motifs of other artists—Hieronymus Bosch and Leonora Carrington – as well as the visual culture related to the occult and other esoteric practices that she found in published sources, specifically by Carl Jung and Kurt Seligmann.

A.R. Futuristic Scenario In Seun, Yookyung Lee

Masters Theses

Due to social distancing policies during the coronavirus pandemic, people have increasingly turned to digital platforms to fulfill what they previously enjoyed in face-to-face interactions. The high demand for virtual world services, called “metaverses,” has sparked discussions about the possibility of completely replacing the real world, which has raised questions about the role of architects in dealing with physical spaces. However, it is widely believed that digital elements will merge into the real world instead of completely replacing it, which makes augmented reality (AR) a key technology to study in the context of architecture.

In “Learning from Las Vegas,” Robert …

Navigating Contextualism: An Architectural And Urban Design Study At The Intersection Of Climate, Culture, Urban Development, And Globalization Case Study Of Dire Dawa, Ruth Wondimu

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates architectural typologies that have dominated the world especially in the context of Ethiopia. It critiques the de-contextual nature of the modernist and related typologies through the lens of climate, socio-economic fabric, and urban design. It then focuses on Dire-Dawa University, located in the eastern part of Ethiopia, by investigating the authenticity, functionality, and contextuality of the architectural designs as well as their relationship with the people, urban landscape, and culture. Finally it provides design interventions that mitigate the climate related problems through local solutions.