Art Practice Commons^™

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

Or Read The Wikipedia Entry For The Parable Of The Tower Of Babel But Imagine It’S 2023 This Time And We’Re Getting So Close Just Give The Artist A Little More Of Your Money, David Thonis

Theses and Dissertations

Systems and their inherent design underlie everything in contemporary life. Design exists to facilitate interaction, to ease workflow, to keep us producing. As such, it exerts its own control.

Through disassembling recurring conventions in design, I look to break with preconceptions of logic. To deny functionality. In doing so, my intention is to dislocate the user from the usual patterns of applicable systems.

The resulting discomfort may feel strange, disembodied, but it should be embraced. Long have capitalism’s solutions created more problems. In the face of this complexity, and beyond it, there can be freedom.

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

Jared Friedman’s work creates monuments out of banal common objects. Through acrylic paintings on- Astroturf, burlap, canvas, and upholstery fabric- he explores the ambiguity of the unremarkable, such as the condenser coils on the back of a refrigerator. In, (Not) Knowing, he parses the difference between knowing and understanding.

The Collector Psyche: Eli And Edythe Broad As Agents Of The Western European Art Market, Alexis Soohoo, Damon Willick

Honors Thesis

This paper explores the existing literature on contemporary art collectors and their corresponding private museums. This analysis specifically examines the relationship between late collectors and Los Angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, one of his partner institutions LACMA, and a prominent artist in his collection, Jeff Koons.

Much of the published information about Broad appears in documentaries about LA, museum catalogs, magazine articles chronicling the philanthropist’s rise, and graduate theses and dissertations about the habits of mega-collectors. The range of literature is concentrated in short form analysis or press release style descriptions, a conspicuous difference from the documentation around other …

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

Redefining Anger For Sexual And Gender Minorities Using Art As A Visual Voice, Kirsten Ranheim

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Art therapy is an increasingly popular approach for addressing trauma and anger in clinical settings. This literature review explores the connections between art therapy, trauma, gender, and anger, drawing on a range of studies and theoretical perspectives. Background is provided on the history of anger within the context of societal institutions, interpersonal power dynamics, psychiatric nosology, and social justice movements. The review concludes that art therapy is ideally suited as a trauma-informed approach to addressing anger in the therapeutic setting. This is due to the unique opportunities that art making provides for helping individuals express and process their emotions nonverbally, …

Hailey's Hearing Aids, Hailey Marie Garcia

Whittier Scholars Program

Individuals from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community are likely to experience more anxiety and depression due to defective cognitive, social, communicational, and emotional skills (Azizi et al., 2019). The word “disability” is embedded with historical negative connotations with phrases such as “deaf and dumb” because if they were deaf or mute then they were automatically labeled as inferior (Horovitz, 2007). Since the 18th century, the DHH community has been seen as incapable, even inhuman, hence the development of emotional deficiencies that bleed into one’s perception of society and their self esteem (Gallaudet, 1886).

How do you navigate a hearing world …

Personal Equation, Nicholas Hobbs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The body of this paper is a formatted version of text which exists natively on the web and is accessible at www.personalequation.art. Its non-linear narrative is meant to accompany and mirror, not describe, the artwork in the exhibition. The following two paragraphs are copied from the exhibition statement accompanying Personal Equation, which is on view in the Reading Room at the Fayetteville Public Library from April 3 to June 30, 2023: A personal equation is one that attempts to account for the inevitable role of subjectivity in scientific observations. The term was coined by astronomers in the 18th century who, …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.^[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create …

Ritual And Digital Craftsmanship: Imprudent Practices, Mik Patrik Mcdonnell

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This essay explores the role of traditional and digital craftsmanship in my art practice as it relates to provocative imagery. I tackle the question of how my practice is influenced by my audience. My process and products both aim to agitate the ascetic individual. The argument opens on a poetic, personal note, before defining craft/craftsmanship and its social reception according to scholarship. I outline the intended audience for my work being those akin to my mother: christian, middle-aged, and leaning conservative. Because I employ devotional, virtuosic craftsmanship I argue my work is effective at provoking dialogue with these persons who …

Interweaving: Play, Craft, And Femininity, Glory Loflin

All Theses

My thesis Interweaving: Play, Craft, and Femininity pulls from the visual language of Craft materials and practices to generate large-scale, often colorful works that reflect on my current understanding of being a woman in America. Raised in the conservative South, this body of work arose out of an attempt to understand the American political climate with respect to women’s bodies and where my artistic voice is present in that conversation. My research for my thesis exhibition began with an investigation into the matriarchal history of craft-based fiber practices in my family. Soon thereafter, I actively wove traditional Craft processes in …

Props, Bianca Walker

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In their artwork Bianca Walker takes a refreshing and historically engaging approach to the act of painting. After researching through photographic references of black people from the early 1900s the artist reimagines these photographs as painted portraits using a drip painting method purposely eliminating paint brushes from their practice. Incorporating more utilitarian materials such as drop cloth and palms, the artist’s relationship to the traditional act of paintings versus their current practice mirrors the current point of view placed upon and change of view that they would like to be seen in conversations around black working-class people from this period.

Artificial: A Study On The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Art, Hayden Ernst

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

In the past three to five years there have been significant improvements made in AI due to improvements in computing capacity, the collection and use of big data, and an increase in public interest and funding for research. Programs such as ChatGPT, DALL•E, and Midjourney have also gained tremendous popularity in a relatively short amount of time. This led me to this project in which I aimed to gain a deeper understanding of these art generator AI and where they fit into art as a whole. My goal was to give recommendations to museums and exhibits in Omaha on what …

Rethinking Graphic Design Pedagogy For The Cuny Academic Commons: On Process, Generosity, And Creative Collaboration In Mapping A Foundation Graphic Design Course For Faculty And Instructors, Suzanne Dell'orto

Publications and Research

The creation of an Open Education Resource with the CUNY Academic Commons for a foundation course in graphic communication at Bernard M. Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY) is a natural extension of the generous visual and written communication that is at the heart of Graphic Design. Graphic designers are inherently collaborative, working through a shared visual and written language to communicate. This Open Educational Resource (OER) serves as a base template to be shared department-wide with all instructors at CUNY and beyond to provide a framework for instruction for this studio course that is taught as a …

Reflections On The Heuristic Power Of Contemplative Art In Teaching And Research, Patricia Morgan

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

In this article I discuss the heuristic power of combining contemplative and creative practices using different stages of my research into learning through contemplation. This began with a realisation I had, in my first meditation retreat, about the similarities between creative and contemplative consciousness. It initiated twenty-three years of applied and theoretical research that started with contemplative art workshops I ran in rehabilitation centres. In PhD research that followed I tested a hypothesis of learning through contemplation founded on the concept of an elemental ground of learning that contained an integrating force I termed the feeling nexus. In later …

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …