Fine Arts Commons^™

F/Utility: A Sculptural Exploration Of Futility, Utility, And The Absurd, Asha Cabaca

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis provides context for my MFA thesis exhibition, F/UTILITY, displayed in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University. My sculpture visually references various aspects of human culture, drawing from the natural environment, urban architecture, and ideas of work and play. These elements, often contradictory and incongruous, are, in fact, humorously subverted, transformed, and combined so that the resulting artwork is serious, playful, and arbitrary all at once. At the same time, the uncertain and sometimes involuntary interactivity of my work prompts a phenomenological viewer experience. My practice is informed by the philosophical and literary absurd, focusing on not-knowing …

Designing Into The Woods: An In-Depth Analysis, Jackson Berhow

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis is intended to provide insight into the costume design process for West Virginia University’s production of Into the Woods. This thesis will document the entire process, starting with a close reading of the musical exploring its symbols, themes, and characters with some theory crafting thrown in for good measure. This will be followed by the early stages of the show’s production, as well as a full explanation of the development of each character’s design throughout the show’s conceptual evolution. The show’s production process will also be explored, highlighting notable instances and how this impacted the costume design.

Drawing 1 Course Syllabus, Fall 2025, Jennifer Sullivan

Open Educational Resources

This introductory drawing course offers an immersive, practice-based exploration of observational drawing from life. Emphasizing perceptual skills, students will engage with key visual principles—such as proportion, space, perspective, and composition—through projects focused on still life, the human figure, and portraiture. Working with graphite, charcoal, and ink, students will develop both technical fluency and expressive range, learning to convey presence, mood, and memory through mark and form. The course blends rigorous studio practice with critical looking and discussion, encouraging students to cultivate their own artistic voice through sustained attention, experimentation, and care.

Birds Of A Feather: Peace And Conflict Founders Milton Schwebel And Luella Buros, Janet Carlson

Buros Center: Professional Staff Publications

Milton Schwebel, peace psychology pioneer, described Luella Buros as “a pillar of strength, her principles uneroded by age or economic well-being, her determination to struggle against social evils undiminished” (1992, p. 4). At age 90, Buros had just become the founding contributor to Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. Schwebel was its founding editor. In announcing the gift, he emphasized Buros’s steadfast commitment to pursuing peace, while recognizing her artistic accomplishments and her collaboration with her husband, Oscar, in establishing the renowned Mental Measurements Yearbook series (Buros, 1968; Buros, 1978; Carlson, 2023). She later provided funds to support …

From Ink To Code, From Binary To Boundless Reality—Until All Returns To Emptiness, Weitong Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.

Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.

Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, …

A Parting Repast, Debra D. Dowden-Crockett

Theses and Dissertations

Both the thesis document and exhibition comprise the story of my journey through grief, examination of loss, contemplation of death, and transformation through acceptance and relinquishment. I conflate art and emotion to put form to the complex human experience of watching a loved one die, having to say a last goodbye, and the mourning that ultimately follows.

I examine the rituals surrounding death, the role of memory, and the symbolic presence of food as a shared experience of both mourning and nourishment, the intimate moments of mourning, and the gradual process of finding peace and closure.

Featuring works from a …

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

The Paradox Of Value, David Enrique Guarnizo

Theses and Dissertations

The present thesis project examines how, in the United States, and especially in the state of Virginia, archetypes of "wealth," "value," and "identity" have been constructed in relation to land and territory. This analysis explores the tension between the inherent value of life on the land and the economic value that can be derived from it. This tension is exemplified by a theory known as the "paradox of value", also referred to as the "paradox of water and diamonds", which was developed by the renowned Scottish economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. This theoretical framework serves as a fundamental axis for …

Queer-Keying: Performing Video Processes As [Trans]Gressive Resistance, Wren Tiffany

Theses and Dissertations

As part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I transformed the 'Sponge' gallery on the top floor of The Anderson, VCU’s historic thesis exhibition home, into The Green Room, a neon green, immersive video and performance space featuring mirrors, disco lights, a foam tile dance floor, makeup stations, and a functioning green-screen editing suite. This hybrid drag rehearsal and ‘Chroma-key’ green video production room deepened both my understandings of Queer performance art and process-based art making during the Spring of 2025, through two public performance activation …

Essential Caretaking For Artists With Disabilities: Exploring The Overlooked Histories Of Hazel Knapp And Grandma Moses, Bryan P. Martin

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the intersection of disability studies and art history, addressing the underrepresentation of disability in scholarship, especially concerning medical sociology and caretaking. Focusing on two early-twentieth-century self-taught American artists, Hazel Knapp (1908–95), who fell into obscurity, and Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), best known as Grandma Moses, this is a comparative analysis of how disability influenced their artistic practices and shaped their divergent career outcomes. Knapp was born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurodegenerative disorder, and fell into obscurity due to a lack of support for her condition, but experienced a promising start to her career that included patronage …

Vessels Of Spirituality: Merging Faith And Form, Maryam Al-Tajer

Theses and Dissertations

According to traditional Islamic teachings, natural materials like frankincense, black sesame seeds, and sidr (jujube) leaves are valuable both physically and spiritually. Historically, they have been used for healing and purification. Nowadays, influenced by contemporary science, people tend to overlook their metaphysical value, focusing on their medicinal uses. Similarly, Muslims assign spiritual qualities to the Muqatta’at, the disconnected letters that preface several surahs of the Holy Quran, believing them to contain sacred power. In both of these cases, the material leads to the spiritual.

Through material experimentation, informed by religious texts, my thesis combines revered materials with sacred letter forms …

The Cut Worm Forgives The Plow, August Neuscheler

Theses and Dissertations

The explorations in this thesis writing are centered on William Blake’s proverb “The cut worm forgives the plow.” It has been reinterpreted as an allegory of history and energy. A theory of their relation is proposed based on forgiveness, a theory that accepts the palimpsest of orders as evidence for the abundance of the present moment. The writing focuses on questions of proportionality, scale, archaeological screening methods, planar cutting, and a critique of entropy as grounds for this theory. Some of its subjects include the Statue of Liberty, Kate Raworth’s donut economic model, sashimi, triangulation, Joseph Beuys’ “7,000 Eichen,” semiconductors, …

How To Touch Your Bile, Aleckxi Dorhofer

Theses and Dissertations

I have been reflecting on my past decade-long struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Reinterpreting this experience through the lenses of mythology and magic, I have constructed these Stygian carcasses (from the river Styx, which serves to separate the living and the dead) using my own bodily proportions in muslin, an intermediary material which requires transformation. In this work, I utilize these forms to symbolically rot for me as my body did, performing a type of sympathetic magic (magic worked from afar on another person) on myself, extending my life and allowing all which occurs between birth and death to affect …

Food Porn, Amanda Jordan

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Food Porn explores the seductive allure of consumer food culture, tapping into themes of desire, indulgence, and excess. Inspired by the bold colors and compositions of pop art, my work exaggerates the appeal of everyday treats, mirroring the glossy, hyper-stylized nature of advertising. Through large-scale formats, repetition, and vibrant hues, I examine how food imagery fuels obsession, status, and identity. The way we consume food visually is just as powerful as the act of eating itself, blurring the line between sustenance and spectacle. By magnifying these visual temptations, my paintings invite viewers to reflect on their own cravings, the power …

An Acceptable Time, Crystal Mccallie

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This scholarly work is my interpretation of the art in the exhibition, An Acceptable Time, which ecompasses a diversity of media that varies as much in material and process as the span of my life as mother, a steward of the domestic home, and a spiritual child-at-heart myself. At the center of the work is a contemplative beauty inviting the viewer to linger with the art and reflect upon the echoes of the past as they might affect the present. The formal delivery of illustrative realism, a mirage of pattern, and abstract layering draws out major themes of memory, nostalgia, …

Transformation Of Buddhist Musical Practices From The 7th-13th Centuries As A Response To Political And Social Disorder In Medieval India, Stephan I. Duran

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This article gives an account of the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from their earliest, datable instances, to the disappearance of Buddhist institutions from India proper, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song in contemporary Japanese, Tibetan, and Newar esoteric Buddhist communities. It is argued that the Buddhist musical theory and praxis of these three cultural spheres both preserve features of ancient and medieval Indian Buddhist music and sonically illustrate the transition from political and social order to de-centralized social organization, a shift that took place between the 7^th and …

A New Normal: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Gender Complexities In Los Angeles Social Justice Theatre Storytelling, Sue Hamilton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study uses autoethnography to examine the role gender plays in Los Angeles social justice theatre storytelling. Chronicling my autoethnography as a queer, nonbinary artist and social justice theatre practitioner, I will examine gender through the context of my social justice theatre company, Artists Rise Up Los Angeles (ARULA), by analyzing selections of its original, politically focused, professional stage plays performed from 2017 to 2019, utilizing ARULA’s emerging themes of gender expression and inclusion. ARULA was born out of a determination to create original social justice theatre storytelling to understand and transform reality by bringing theatrical expression to the environment …

Intersectional Opportunities For Drama Therapy And Counseling, Erica Craig-Mann

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the intersectional possibilities between the fields of drama therapy and mental health counseling through the lens of transformative learning theory. Specifically, the research sought to understand the lived experiences of professionals trained in both disciplines to identify how these fields might mutually inform, strengthen, and enhance one another through collaboration and/or dual training. Data were collected through a qualitative online survey and analyzed using thematic analysis. Five themes emerged: (a) Theoretical and Practical Overlaps and Distinctions; (b) Drama Therapy-Informed Counseling: Embodiment, Creativity, and Experiential Practice; (c) Counseling-Informed Drama Therapy: Frameworks for Practice, …

Mirrors Of The Reel: Black Women's Identity In American Cinema (2009-2024), Melanie-Penny Harrison

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study investigates whether white supremacy structures, embodied in Hollywood’s predominantly white leadership, drive negative portrayals of Black women in 31 mainstream American films from 2009 to 2024. Employing a mixed-methods approach—quantitative content analysis, qualitative content analysis (QCA), and narrative methodology—I code portrayals for racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, colorism, and internalized racism, classifying them as progressive (e.g., empowered roles), regressive (e.g., subservient stereotypes), or hybrid. Guided by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, the analysis examines narrative structures, character agency, symbolism, and dialogue to uncover intersectional patterns (e.g., race, gender, class) across three periods: 2009–2013, 2014–2018, and 2019–2024. Across these periods, cultural …

The Tender Flesh: Dwelling In Soft Wounds And Visceral Bodies, Madelyn Irene Turner-Havens

Theses and Dissertations

Within my painting process, I explore bodily interiority and exteriority in relation to the surface of painting, evoking a discomforting sense of corporeal (dis)embodiment, where haunted flesh becomes palpable. Indexing conversations with the body into the painting is a way to understand my body and create an experience of what happens when language fails to capture the complexity of sensation. Painting becomes a mediation with the canvas, a constant discovery of what can give shape to the intangible: how it feels when my skin folds into itself, bodily urges, and the soft texture of fatty tissue.

I let the parts …