Fine Arts Commons^™

Reclaiming Female And Racial Agency: The Story Of Dido Elizabeth Belle Via Portrait And Film, Madison Blonquist

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

This paper explores the complex relationship between artists and their subjects, particularly with regard to race and gender. Using Niki Saint-Phalle’s definition of “truthful representation,” I consider the issues that race and gender pose to this ideal using the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, an eighteenth-century aristocratic woman of mixed race. The intriguing life of Dido Elizabeth Belle is especially relevant to today’s evolving definition of intersectional feminism. Her portrait Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her Cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1779, formerly attributed to Johann Zoffany) challenges the idea of “truthful representation” because it was presumably painted by a …

The Intersection Of Manufacturing Technologies And School Music Programs, Leslie Prunier

University Scholar Projects

The objective of this project is to design and manufacture a musical instrument, a marching baritone horn, out of plastic. It is constructed out of both PVC pipe and 3D-printed components. Utilizing this project’s documentation, a high school student could use a 3D printer and other basic tools to make their own musical instrument for a fraction of the cost of purchasing one. This documentation will produce a horn tuned in the key of B flat with one functioning valve, and suggestions for future work to make the other two valves functional as well.

Two-Faced And Vulnerable, Stephanie Wright

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

A helpless calf suspended by a balloon. A dog attempting to focus through a set of blinders. Vultures circling over an abandoned bed. The situations in which these animals find themselves might seem, at first glance, quirky or ambiguous. But we can easily empathize with their perceivable state. Through fables, myths, religion, everyday interaction, and animal husbandry, we have made animals and emotions recognizable metaphors for humankind. These animals address broader human experience; certainly the notions of “human nature” and culture are themselves human constructs. We self-consciously work to define our existence through the separation of the concept of “society” …

The Rug's Topography, Rana Young

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

My complex relationship with photographs began when I was young. I remember tearing images out of publications and bringing them to my dad prepared with questions. Where I grew up, normative values defined by anatomy at birth impacted an individual’s gender perception and performance. Raised by a single father, I experienced a non-traditional family structure in my home. Seeing photographs portraying the “wholeness” of family contradicted my reality. Those psychological impressions provoked my curiosity and propelled me to solve the mystery of what existed beyond the scene depicted.

In retrospect, my search for missing context stems from an interest in …

Archetypes In Clay, Kaylea N. Williams

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The artist discusses the background, ideas, and work entitled Archetypes in Clay, for the completion of her Bachelor of Arts Degree and undergraduate research for the Fine and Performing Arts Scholar program at East Tennessee State University. The artist used this development of work to explore personality types, and how they can be portrayed through clay vessels. In particular, the artist shows her work, how she created the vessels, the testing involved, and the struggles she faced. Archetypes is the focus behind the concept of this project. Her work includes four ceramic vessels, created with clay and finished with glaze. …

Immigrant Stories: Exploring The Conflicts That A Filmmaker Must Face In A Documentary, Berenice Saez Briceno

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to address the personal conflicts that a filmmaker must face in the making of a documentary. It contrasts definitions and theories with the experience of producing the documentary entitled Immigrant Stories and the ethical implications of making it. To conclude, it summarizes the results of the study as final thoughts.

Art Infested Water, Graduation Edition, May 2017, Nova Southeastern University Department Of Performing And Visual Arts

Department of Performing and Visual Arts Newsletters

No abstract provided.

On Remembrance, Ashley Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My works are inspired by autobiographical memories — especially those that are traumatic. However, the works rather discuss the nature of how memories are recalled, stored forgotten, remembered, manipulated, constructed, reconstructed, and destructed. Memory is a pseudo reality, that grounds on past events but is different from the objective truth. Memory is one’s own creation, which is formed by the body and mind through time, space, and experience. Then it is stored in the mind, within the infinite void of dimensional space. In my writing, I’ll explore John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces, Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida, Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed …

A Hazy Bliss, Anna Joo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. These last she had bought to tone in with the new dining-room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really why she had bought them. She had thought in the shop: "I must have some purple ones to bring the carpet up to the table." And it had seemed quite sense at the time.

When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids …

Auc Buile, Benjamin Davis

Theses and Dissertations

The contents of this work include a script of the play Auc Buile, a description of the writing process, an analysis of the piece both as written text and as a performance, and a projection of what might be the next stages in its development. The play itself is a representation of the struggle to create. It allowed me the opportunity to put into practice much of what I learned during my time in the Masters of Fine Arts program.

Interspace Suit, Moriah Okun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My thesis work investigates the transformative possibility of mediating the space between ourselves and others, the tension between solitude and loneliness, and the disconnects between mind and body, personal and shared experience, and artist and viewer. The basis of my process is stitching and coiling — a practical and symbolic act of joining together material that serves as structure and surface. I am inspired by work that explores this middle space, like that of Archigram, Lucy Orta, Lygia Clark, and Ernesto Neto. These artists first showed me what it was possible to create when the viewer’s body becomes the site …

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Cultural Biases In The West And The Disadvantages Created For Eastern And Eastern-Influenced Art, Taylor Bowie

Senior Honors Theses

Culture has always had a substantial influence on how art is perceived and executed. Artists have, more often than not, let their own backgrounds and experiences influence the way their art is produced; those who merely view art form opinions about works through their own cultural understanding. What makes art and what their own backgrounds allow them to distinguish art as is often defined by cultural origins. My observation is that, in this new age, there are distinct cultural biases, particularly within the U.S., that create social pressures to produce certain types of art, and anyone who operates outside that …

Shannon County Warrants, Judge Bockman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Finding amusement in the realm of the grotesque can alleviate some of the uncomfortable and inevitable parts of our nature. In my work, by creating images closely related to cartoons or other benign media (i.e. puppets, old country songs and toys.), I am able to illuminate the dark aspects of the redneck culture in a blithe and lighthearted manner inviting the viewer to contemplate and challenge regional stereotypes.

My Books: Creating Bilingual Worlds For Children, Maria Gerasimchuk-Djordjevic

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In my fourth semester of graduate school, I wrote and illustrated my first, full, bilingual, 32-page children’s picture book – What do you like/ Що тобі подобається? I have since continued to explore and pursue the social aspects and influences of nationalistic conflict among the population of war-torn Ukraine. These books express my hope and confidence in a new generation, especially in the immigrant community. The cultural exposure from my youth, yielding autobiographic experiences, as well as observations of a new culture, are prominent in my work. The bilingual aspect of my books is central to my work in general …

Meat Cake, Todd Wilson Reynolds

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

There is a language being spoken in visual art; a rhetorical dis­course that uses semiotics to communicate with a viewer. My research has fo­cused on way s to break the traditional ideas of narrative in photography . By focusing on the forms of delivery, and by combining digital and ana­logue techniques, my work forms a distortion of communication that forms a new language to communicate with the viewer. Much of this research has led to a specific form of communication that has been termed "punk" which began as a musical and artistic movement in the 70's. This sty le, both …

Radio Spring, Kristian Louis Warren Einstman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Abstract

This thesis, submitted for completion for the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, is a manuscript of poems entitled Radio Spring. The collection reckons with distance. The poems move through a domestic landscape, observing the ecstasy and despairs of a variety of relationships within a widespread community. Through subjective, sensual experience, the distinct movements of the collection explore the process of separation, lamenting loss, and the process of acclimation to the limits of distance. In the final movement the poems reach an acceptance that the members of any relationship must remain individual and that there is joy in …

Cultural Influences Upon Soviet-Era Programmatic Piano Music For Children, Maria Pisarenko

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Russian Revolution and the ensuing Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) spawned an era of Soviet music education that resulted in generations of gifted musicians. Soviet-era piano composers contributed to the emergence and the development of a unique style of piano training, a Soviet piano school, represented by great pianists and music educators known all over the world. Recent research on Soviet-era piano music focuses on non-programmatic piano compositions. The research conducted in this work appears to be the first to produce a comparative overview of major programmatic piano compositions for children written during the Soviet era.

In Cultural …

The Dream Maker Man // Body Of Christ // Je Ne Sais Pas // Internal Method, Ashley Lester

Gandy Dancer Archives

No abstract provided.

Taiwanese Traditional Musical Idioms Meet Western Music Composition: An Analytical And Pedagogical Approach To Solo Piano Works By Tyzen Hsiao, Yi-Chuan Tsai

Dissertations

Since Western classical music was introduced in Taiwan, many contemporary Taiwanese composers have been experimenting with different musical forms and techniques. The members of the Third Generation of Taiwanese Composers began to lead the modernization of Taiwanese music after 1960. They proposed the establishment of a specifically Taiwanese musical tradition, one which would reach out to Taiwanese audiences through the incorporation of familiar folk songs and musical idioms, while incorporating Western compositional techniques and forms.

Tyzen Hsiao (蕭泰然) (1938-2015) was one of the most influential Taiwanese composers. His music is a blend of Taiwanese traditional musical idioms and Western music …