Fine Arts Commons^™

The Liminal Space Of Dreams: Narration Of Dreams In Graphic Novel And Comics, Muyang Li

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the dream as a narrative in graphic novels and comics, examining its character as a subconscious experience depicted by means of visual storytelling. Focusing on psychological, symbolic, and aesthetic functions of dream narrative, I demonstrate that dream narration offers an allegory by means of which both creator and reader can explore issues of identity, desire and trauma in an intimate and healing way. In analyzing these functions of dream narration, I draw upon ideas from theorists such as C.J Jung, Freud and other scholars who have engaged their work on the psychological perspective of the experience of …

Illustrated Nonfiction In The Screen Age, Katie Klaras

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

The addictive qualities of our phones and incessant demands on our attention pose consequential challenges to individuals and the collective. In the age of screens, what are illustrated nonfiction books uniquely positioned to offer modern audiences? This essay seeks to understand how the genre can serve as one possible antidote to the infinite scroll. I examine the qualities of three illustrated nonfiction texts: Abbi Jacobson’s I Might Regret This, Shaina Feinberg and Julia Rothman’s How We Got By, and Nora Krug’s Diaries of War. The essay considers how the slower pace of the reading experience, the careful curation of image …

Lines Of Thought: The Cartoon As A Phenomenological Object And A Philosophical Tool, Thomas Attwood

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Cartooning’s greatest strength is its simplicity. This essay argues that the cartoon’s inherent modesty and accessibility are central to its philosophical utility, and that its spare visual language conveys more than meets the eye. Drawing on phenomenology, it considers cartooning as a process grounded in the body, and it investigates the bodily encounter between the viewer and the cartoon. Through an analysis of cartooning work by Saul Steinberg, R.O. Blechman, and Liana Finck - a “family of cartoonists” - it demonstrates how a line-drawn, representational cartooning language can transform the act of looking into a participatory experience that interrogates issues …

America Is Banking On You! Selling American Ideology During World War Ii, David W. Maupin

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay uncovers advertising from World War II found in tear sheet archives. Through deep reading and contextual analysis, this essay seeks to determine what these advertisements—found in magazines, newspapers, and posters—were asking their viewers to do in response to the global conflict of the 1940s. It argues that advertisers used emotions and racism to entice citizens of specific classes to invest, enlist, and align their values with American ideals. The creators of these advertisements were hired by American companies, who used government sponsored tactics to woo citizens to the American Ideology while keeping the corporate brand in the public …

Froggy People: Anthropomorphism And Slice-Of-Life In Autobiographical Comics, Maddie Baker

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores how the following three comics categories overlap and interact with one another: slice-of-life, anthropomorphic, and autobiographical. I search for reasons why comic makers would choose to tell their own daily life stories using animal avatars rather than their own faces. While each of these three categories has been studied extensively individually, I hope to find additional insights by observing how comic makers employ the genres together as storytelling devices. Each category has unique narratological power which impacts the reader’s experience. For example, anthropomorphism affects how the author and reader internalize and relate to characters. Slice-of-life comics are …

Hauntological Warfare: Explorations In Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, And Online Affect, Roy Uptain

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis, Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Aesthetics, investigates how ideological power continues to shape contemporary reality through both overt and spectral means. Drawing from concepts like hauntology, psychological operations (PsyOps), and disinformation aesthetics, I examine how propaganda does not simply vanish once its immediate goals are achieved, but instead lingers—reshaping memory, identity, and cultural narratives through what I call hauntological warfare.

My post-conceptual research-based art practice engages this terrain by creating site-specific installations, performances, and media works that make these invisible forces perceptible. Works such as Kill Zones (for Boeing) (2024), r/RoastMe (2024), …

Unmeasured, Detached, And Isolated: The Legitimation Of A Domesticated Identity, Eva M. Agüero

MFA in Visual Art

Unmeasured, detached and isolated explores the lingering effects of colonialism on identity, behavior, and cultural perception through the lens of my personal experience as a Venezuelan immigrant in the United States. I investigate how colonial legacies—especially those codified through manuals of etiquette like Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras—continue to shape self-perception and societal expectations. Through video, sculpture, miniatures, and installation, I reconstruct a visual language that resists simplification and reclaims complexity. Engaging with the symbolic weight of tropical imagery, domestic spaces, and hybrid aesthetics, my work challenges Eurocentric frameworks and examines the figure of the migrant …

Undefinitive, Lan Mu

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis project, Undefinitive, examines the cyclical process of destruction, transformation, and rebirth through installation, ceramics, and text. With a deep unease toward my own gendered body, I investigate how vulnerability, both physical and psychological, can become a site of resistance and empowerment. Drawing from feminist theory, Chinese mythology, and stream-of-consciousness narratives, my work explores the monstrous and the fragmented as inseparable states of one’s becoming. Through references to body art, speculative fiction, and queer theory, I reimagine femininity and queerness as forces capable of dismantaling societal structure and forging new modes of existence.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where …

Digital And Physical Spaces: All At Once, Addyson Hoey

MFA in Visual Art

In this thesis, I explore our experience of digital and physical spaces in the ever-increasing presence of technology. By investigating the intersections of these spaces, I focus on how our experiences in the physical world are processed through the digital space, to re-merge in lived spaces. Through digital collage paintings, I explore how assisted chance and machine destruction can be productive in the formation of space that is not possible on the screen. By using the drop shadow as primary content, my work takes on the arrangements of surface and space—rather than the requirements of the physical world. In addition, …

Transmutation, Sam Berger

MFA in Visual Art

My artistic practice is about change itself. I am inspired by the doubling and layering effects that came out of Surrealist Photography. Scale, fracture, and doubling are intentional components of my process. I combine those methods to create complex works of art, focusing on the untamable light that I hope to capture when making my images, which often are self portraits. Poetry is an integral element of this thesis text as well as my art making process. Through my poetic work I hope to offer my audience a glimpse into how I see and experience the world. This thesis text …

Places, Please!, Catie Cook

MFA in Visual Art

Growing up in the American South as the daughter of a scenic designer, I frequently found myself on both the physical stage of the theatre and the metaphorical stage of gender performance. Through immersive oil paintings, I seek to visually represent where these two experiences merge, depicting imagery and characters from my childhood staged in theatrical and uncanny environments. In this thesis I explore the canine motif as my primary subject, positioning the Dalmatian as a self-insert and exploring the show dog as a foil to the Southern beauty. Building upon Judith Butlers theory of gender performance, and Laura Mulvey’s …

Go Cry About It!, Grace C. Ryder

MFA in Visual Art

I have always been a crier. I have always felt deeply and intensely. Goodbyes, heartbreak, joy, and empathy—I’m grateful to feel it all, even when it hurts. My artwork often investigates vulnerable topics through making the personal public using self archival and diaristic elements. Inspired by my familial and romantic relationships, I explore my connections to other people and how I memorialize and honor them. My painted works often depict ephemeral objects, establishing their value through the use of oil paints while my sculptures are often exaggerated, oversize forms, emphasizing the passage of time.

From January 1st to December 31st …

The Kinship Of Creatives, Saba Saif Ur Rehman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This research essay contends that artists and creative individuals must recognize their agency in shaping societal narratives, particularly during times of technological and political upheaval. The essay draws on the insights and contributions of visionaries like Walter Benjamin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tomm Moore to emphasize the power of imagination and creativity in addressing real-world issues. It argues that previous technological advances have often reinforced hierarchical and oppressive systems, benefitting a select few while neglecting the masses. As we enter the fourth Industrial Revolution, this essay calls the artists to reclaim their tools from being co-opted for exclusionary and …

Adler, Asterios, & Maus, Crystal Ganatra

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Adler, Asterios, & Maus examines how small visual decisions in illustrations make up a language. And when the dialect changes from the predominant one in a graphic novel, something novel happens. A scene or specific quality gets the spotlight. It also explores how these visuals tie to Adlerian psychology and El Refaeian ideas on autobiography, behavior, and emotion. It identifies through two interesting grpahic novels- Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli and Maus by Art Spiegelman- how these ideas can be used to understand ourselves. It intensely zeroes in on specific moments of visual language shift. Some of these change range …

Comics As Confrontation : A Case For Breaking Silence Around Sexual Abuse In Comics, Manimanjari Sengupta

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In this essay I will provide an overview of the socio-cultural and legal attitude towards sexual violence in India, as evidence of the need for bringing survivor’s narratives out into public view. I will look closely at Indian comic artist Shromona Das’s Naming and Shaming (2018) , American artist Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998), and my own comic Feral (2025), to elucidate the ways in which comics are a potent medium for survivors to confront, not only our own memories by stringing together a sequential narrative, but also the audience, with the visualization of a lived …

Hot Girls Don't Worry About Copyright: Trans/Formative Works And The Femmage Lifestyle, Czeslawa Wojtkowski

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis examines the ways in which collage is an ontologically transgender medium due to its freedom from traditional artistic formal and narrative structures. Considering that many trans experiences center around dichotomies, juxtaposition, and self-definition, collage is the best equipped to communicate these experiences in innovative ways. Through interrogations of feminized labor and the ways in which the art world upholds harmful gender binaries, as well as discussions of Femmage, maladjustment, and obsession, I argue that the fragmentary nature of photomontage, digital collage, and videomontage can externally express the multitude of feelings and identities contained within a body, to a …

Trans-Dimensional Coexistence: I No Longer Hold You But I See You, Keren Guo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

We live in a world where impermanence is the only lasting truth. Fleeting moments and fading relationships reoccur in our lives, but the journey continues, nonetheless. My practice projects my individuality onto universal connections between humans through depicting worlds full of colorful imaginations, experiences, creatures, and figures. I draw inspiration from work by Inka Essenhigh, Yoko Ono, and Pipilotti Rist, studying contemporary artists’ use of colors, materials, and audience participation to make an array of works from paintings to an interactive installation as my final work. Additionally, I look into historical sources about mythical creatures and religious beliefs to enhance …

Go: The Race Against Resignation, Townsend Baird

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

How do we go about deriving meaning in the information age, when culture has replaced society, decentering religion? My art practice seeks to answer this with storytelling, specifically in how archetypes can connect mythology, history, and personal narrative to build a functional personal mythology. Through painting fantastical portraits collapsing the compositions of Christian iconography with contemporary motifs, the installations tell strange and humorous narratives. My thesis piece focuses on the marathon, in the context of the original myth of Pheidippides, the common misconceptions about this myth, the infamous 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon, the 1978 Boston Marathon, and my experience …

Containers Of Becoming, Embodied Thresholds: Wearable Art As Performance, Bei Qi Ms.

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My interdisciplinary art practice investigates wearable sculpture as a tool for emotional processing, identity negotiation, and embodied performance. Beginning with early works like a cape made from thrifted scarves—exploring how different wearers transform the same garment—I have expanded their role into vehicles for personal and collective meaning. Drawing from the work of artists including Nick Cave, Stan Brahkage, Lucy McRae, Lucy Orta, and Rebecca Horn, I examine how bodily concealment, distortion, and constraint can foster new modes of self-discovery.

Over time, my practice has evolved to incorporate performance, time-based media, and psychological frameworks. For example, my choreographed dance Enneagram: Beings …

Held Together, Falling Apart: Classical Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome As Embodied Abstraction, Chloe S. Macaulay

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Reconciling life within a body defined by fragility, I create worlds of connectivity to embody and refigure Classical Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (cEDS)–a connective-tissue disorder causing hypermobile joints, fragile skin, easy bruising, and poor wound healing. Large-format oil paintings employ a multi-layer method, layering paint like skin to reform the body onto canvas. Drawing on Surrealist automatic processes and theories of unconscious production, my methodology combines intuitive, process-based mark-making with traditional oil painting techniques and experimental material practices to subvert and reassert artistic agency, weaving between control and surrender. Scientific imagery, particularly SHG imaging of cEDS collagen tissue, informs a visual language …