American Art and Architecture Commons^™

Raphael Montañez Ortiz And Alternative Art Spaces, 1966–1971: From Repulsion To Exaltation, Ana Cristina Perry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1960s, Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz built a successful and provocative career in New York. Throughout the decade, Ortiz created sculptures, performances, and events that were part of a sustained investigation into how embodied destructive and uncomfortable actions could physically confront rationality and objectivity. His works attend to how rationality and objectivity were valued in the United States as a consequence of colonization and imperialism. Beginning in 1969, Ortiz overtly addressed how museums are directly implicated in systems of oppression, protesting with the Art Workers Coalition and founding El Museo to meet the needs of the …

Physical Accessibility And Historic Preservation In Historic House Museums Of The Southeast, Abby Milonas

All Theses

Museums are a public good, as they provide educational recreation and preserve cultural history, and so it is crucial that they are physically accessible to as many visitors as possible. The aim of this study was to understand what architectural features of historic house museums are the least accessible and what has been done to ameliorate these challenges. The survey used in the study was developed using the guidelines for making historic buildings accessible as described in the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards. It was distributed by email to representatives of 220 historic sites, of …

A Nomination For The Oliver La Farge House To The Historic Santa Fe Foundation’S Register Of Properties Worthy Of Preservation, Hayden D-L Mcafee

Architecture and Planning ETDs

647 Old Santa Fe Trail is a traditional one-story adobe house in the territorial style. Constructed in 1867, it has a long history and has played a significant role in the development of Santa Fe. Sitting on the original path of the Santa Fe Trail and later Route 66, it has witnessed over 150 years of history both outside and within its doors. It was occupied by the Pulitzer Prize winning author and respected anthropologist Oliver La Farge from 1947-1963. La Farge was an important figure in the Santa Fe community, most recognized for his novels and activism, advocating for …

Home: Where The Art Was, Molly Mcclain

History: Faculty Scholarship

California plein air artist Alfred R. Mitchell (1888-1972) and his wife Dorothea Webster Mitchell designed a unique studio space in the Arts & Crafts style in their home in Golden Hill with the assistance of architect Lloyd Ruocco.

On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon

Criticism

What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …

A Part Apart, Spenser Atlas

Masters Theses

I am fascinated by connections. Things that click, snap, slide, and hold. I care about the ways in which objects meet, looking for answers in the space between. What binds one thing to another?

I believe the world is presented to us in pieces. It’s hard to say how it all comes together. It's easy to believe things are shapeless and detached from each other. Connection is a bridge, a way of linking one thing to another that reveals interdependence, and eventually moves outwards to express a correlation between pieces, once assumed to be discrete and isolated.

This work is …

Creative Figures: Portraiture And The Making Of The Modern American Artist, 1918-1930, Sasha Nicholas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1918 and 1930, American artists began depicting themselves and their intertwined circles of creative collaborators with unprecedented intensity. Creative Figures: Portraiture and the Making of the Modern American Artist argues that American artists turned to their own images during this formative period of American modernity to vie for cultural authority and to navigate pressing questions of creative, social, and national identity. The dissertation studies a kaleidoscope of portraits that exemplify this phenomenon, focusing on paintings and photographs by Berenice Abbott, James Latimer Allen, Thomas Hart Benton, Florestine Perrault Bertrand Collins, Imogen Cunningham, John Stuart Curry, Aaron Douglas, Yun Gee, …

The Gilded Tropics: Winslow Homer And John Singer Sargent In Florida, 1886-1917, Theodore W. Barrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the Floridian works of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent in the context of tourism, race, and the environment as perceptions of the tropics in an Anglo-American context. Both artists sojourned in Florida and produced a number of watercolors and related oils that not only testify to a rapidly-expanding tourist industry to the Sunshine State, but also update the Romantic myths of the tropics with a more sober, ironic Realist take. While Homer and Sargent continue to be popular subjects for studies and exhibitions on their own, this dissertation is the first to consider how their shared …

The Politics And Piety Of Neoclassical Architecture: How Early American Elites Practiced An Old Religion To Subvert The New One, Christopher Saint-Carter

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

The Western political revolutions of the 18^th century established the ideals of liberty, patriotism, and democracy the United States government grounds its identity into this day. The motive of these ideals, particularly their visual manifestation in Neoclassical government architecture, remain unquestioned. This study provides a historical analysis of the psychology informing the early American elite’s choice to structure the new nation around Roman political and aesthetic standards. Chronicling the subservience inherent in Roman civic religion, as well as the internalizing nature of visual propaganda, the borrowed ancient schematic proves to be a method of de-revolutionizing the American people at …

Complexity Of Perfection, Ayanna M. Johnson

Honors Capstones

Many of the first art galleries and museums existed in places where elite individuals were allowed. The constant pursuit of achieving perfection in many circumstances may stem from a white supremacist narrative that often stagnates creativity from achieving its full potential. This sends a series of alarming messages to artists as they tend to lose the initial interest they have for their medium by attempting to achieve a level of perfection that is unattainable. As a result, this notion can shed light on the social impact art can have in society and the relationship with the type of artwork displayed. …

Archi-Comics, Timothy Gatto

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Humor in architecture is not at the forefront of architect’s minds, this comes from architects need to be deemed serious. This way of thinking is what has backed architects up into a corner banal and stagnant architecture. Architecture is the art of context, everything in architecture is referential. Humor is foundationally the exact same way, the incongruity theory makes humor possible by putting a concept into context with things and finding contradictions in the process, thus developing a joke. Each of these arts, humor and architecture, are that of context and when architecture is delivered like humor, it points out …

The Chicana Mural Movement: A Reclamation Of Mesoamerican Iconography, Jennifer Vander Els

Theses and Dissertations

An examination of the deployment of indigenous Mexica iconography by Chicana artists during the Chicano Mural Movement. The ethno-national concept of Aztlan, corn and Corn Women, and the deities Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui were restructured in Chicana murals to uplift and recognize the achievements of the women of the Chicano community.

(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.

Los Días De La Calle Gabino Barreda: The Social Circle Of Remedios Varo And Benjamin Péret In Mexico, 1941-1947, Esther R. Levy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the social circle of Surrealist exiles that formed at the home of Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret on Calle Gabino Barreda between 1941 and 1947. This group is immortalized in Gunther Gerzso’s painting Los Días de la Calle Gabino Barreda (1944) and includes Gerzso, Varo, Péret, Esteban Francés, and Leonora Carrington. This thesis argues that the environment cultivated on Calle Gabino Barreda provided these artists with a place to expand on what they learned in Europe to develop their Surrealist practice in Mexico.

Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the rise of the consumer market toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the production of decorated fine ceramics that became powerful modes of popularizing new ideas in the United States regarding independence, national symbols, and abolitionism.

"Those Common Everyday Things We All Know": Roger Brown's American Art, Jake Brodsky

Theses and Dissertations

Roger Brown (1941–1997) was an American artist associated with the Chicago Imagists. Borrowing elements from American visual culture to construct an idiosyncratic language of motifs, Brown’s paintings demand a mode of attention—of looking, searching, recognizing, identifying—that parallels the structures of feeling that constitute being in America.

“Block Island Stories”: Preserving And Showcasing Block Island’S Rigorous History Through Virtual Adaptation, Alexander Pretorius

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

The Moral Hygiene Movement In The United States, 1840s—1920s, Marissa Seib

History Theses

During the 19th and 20th centuries, the mental health care system in the United States underwent a series of reforms in an effort to better care for some of the country’s frailest citizens. This period, called the moral hygiene era of mental health care, emerged from a further understanding of psychiatry and psychology which led to structural changes in the mental health care system.

This thesis examines the beginnings of the Kirkbride system, which sought to reform the whole of American mental health care through landscaping and architecture as well as the specific treatment plan for each individual. Using case …

Lars Gustaf Sellstedt: Art In Buffalo And The Buffalo Fine Art Academy, Shannon N. Gilmartin

History Theses

This Master’s Thesis Project researches the life of a forgotten Buffalo artist, Lars Gustaf Sellstedt. He was born in Sundsvall, Sweden and started his life as a sailor when he became a cabin boy as an early teenager. For most of his young life until his mid-twenties, Sellstedt was a sailor traveling to all corners of the world. He started his journey as an artist while in between sailing jobs. Over many decades he portraits locally and abroad mainly in the Caribbean Islands. Sellstedt was one of the few artists in 19th century Buffalo, sharing the profession with William J. …

The Midwestern Aristocracy: Anders Zorn's Portraits In Gilded Age St. Louis, Rebekah Hoke Brown

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

To the American aristocracy of the Gilded Age, painted portraits functioned as pictorial symbols of one’s taste, power, and status. This thesis evaluates the motivations of a provincial elite in St. Louis, Missouri, and sees their taste for portraits by Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, as the result of the intersection of myriad cultural and ethnic allegiances. Situating Zorn as a trans-Atlantic artist, this thesis functions as a patronage study, evaluating the portraits and goals of specific St. Louis patrons and analyzes Zorn’s role as an active agent in the art market, leveraging his public persona to establish aesthetic authority over …