Contemporary Art Commons^™

Art History Zine, Estelle Artus

Open Educational Resources

Open Assignment

The Art Of Martin Wong, And The Traditions He Drew From, Janie Mendosa

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

Martin Wong was a singular figure in the art world, drawing from diverse influences including Pan-Asian traditions, Western modernism, social realism, and the emerging graffiti movement. As a queer artist who lived in urban New York City to San Francisco's Chinatown, he existed on the margins.

Staging Reception / Perception: Transhistorical Bi-Directional Dialogues Between Etruscan Visual Cultural Objects And Giuseppe Penone's Contemporary Sculptures, Shelby Morgan

University Honors Theses

I use the occasion of the March 2024 exhibit,"Vulci. Goods for Mankind. Goods for Gods." at Milan's Luigi Rovati Foundation to consider how the museum's staging of Etruscan visual material cultural objects and contemporary sculptures by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone prompts viewers to perceive transhistorical bi-directional dialogues between the viewer and material culture as well as between the ancient and contemporary objects themselves.

Via a close reading of the exhibition while leveraging the three frameworks of aura, imprint and classical reception I analyze how the staging of the hypogeum creates a place of atmosphere. I argue this is done through …

Radiance After Exile: Visionism And The Art Of M, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This essay introduces and critically examines Visionism, the artistic philosophy developed by contemporary Australian painter M. Emerging from a practice shaped by early success, prolonged creative exile, and eventual return, Visionism is presented not as a stylistic movement but as a visual philosophy concerned with atmosphere, symbolism, transcendence, and the persistence of intensity after critique. Situating Visionism within contemporary debates surrounding postmodernism and metamodernism, the essay argues that M's work occupies a distinctive position within a broader cultural shift toward renewed engagements with meaning, affect, and sincerity.

Drawing on the artist’s own reflections, alongside theoretical perspectives from David Sudnow, Timotheus …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

My Mother The Mountain, Ricky Vasan

Masters Theses

Teach me How to Write a Love Song

I catch a glimpse of my mother sitting on her bed in her bedroom from the bathroom mirror. What a rare occurrence! One I am not fortunate enough to witness as often as I would like. A moment that I know —even before it has occurred—will one day become my dearest desire for wanting to turn back time. This moment is a mirage. Once I return to my senses, after the passing of a twelve-hour lag, it will already be too late.

This is the place where I wish to work from. …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Love In Passing Time, Elysa T. Adams

Masters Theses

Elysa Adams, 2026

Love in Passing Time reflects on how the Black church has molded my understanding of faith, family, and community. Working across relief, screenprint, sculpture, and sound, my practice explores how knowledge is shared across generations through music, tradition, and adornment.

The exhibition draws on my upbringing as a pastor’s child, in which the church serves as both a spiritual and communal home. These experiences appear through sculptural paper garments based on childhood memories, tambourines featuring the faces of people who have impacted my life, carved portraits of my grandparents, and sculptural pews that reference the architecture of …

Jewelry As A Portable Sanctuary, Yuhao Li

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how individuals remain intact in the presence of emotional difficulty. Rather than treating protection as withdrawal, the research proposes that stability emerges through the construction of an interior structure capable of holding vulnerability without collapse. Drawing on psychological theory, philosophy, and spatial thinking, it frames emotional repair as a spatial condition: an interior that can contain experience and be returned to when external conditions become unstable.
Within this framework, jewelry is redefined as a material extension of this interior. Positioned between body and world, it operates as a structure of containment, functioning as a portable …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

41.82379°N, 71.38497°W, Xiaotong Cai

Masters Theses

I, Xiaotong Cai, have known an abandoned bridge was lifted and stuck at 64-degree from 1976. I have walked and bent down towards it for over 60 times, each paralleling a journal entry. The visits and 27,351 words (up until May 5th) are the living proof: observation, encounters, correspondence, collectively and personally. It’s been nine months since it emerged in flux. Two flesh. A moving outsider and a still bridge. How can an Unused giant activate a human body? Who is the attractor and intervener?

Here, my solution is to conduct a series of small gestures. I say, interpreting without …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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Painting As Sfx, Callie Coccia

Masters Theses

Almost all of the subject matter I have been preoccupied with these past two years (and my adult life) has originated from a place of dissonance. There’s a narrative experience that things like wax figures, midcentury film, and theme parks insist upon. That narrative insistence contrasts with an observed reality. Epcot does not have a slice of Italy housed within the park, Bette Davis does not have an evil twin (A Stolen Life [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock is not Alfred Hitchcock. Yet these narratives are so overbearingly convincing or coercive that their sweaty alternate …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Synecdoche: Archiving Violence In Schools, Jillian Whitney

Art Theses and Dissertations

K-12 Educators often find themselves thrust into a swamp of politics they never asked to enter. It is in this swamp that educators strive to meet students’ social, emotional, and educational needs. However, issues such as school shootings, racism, and gender inequality all make it difficult for schools to be what they should be: an equalizing, safe place where children can learn. These problems weaken the school system and harm public interest while leading to teacher burnout.

Synecdoche: Archiving Violence in Schools is a body of paintings and experimental artist books that responds to the everyday experiences of the educators …

Nurtured Meaning: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study Of The Tree Of Life In Contemporary Women's Art, Christina A. Defilipp

Educational Studies Dissertations

The Tree of Life has historically flourished across cultures as an archetypal image of interconnection, regeneration, and continuity. In the Anthropocene, however, its symbolic vitality is reframed by the realities of environmental crisis. This study investigates how contemporary women artists across the globe sustain and reinterpret the Tree of Life’s meaning to express themes of ecological, spiritual, and cultural relevance. Employing a qualitative design grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology, the study analyzes publicly available artworks and published reflections, including interviews, catalog essays, and artist statements. A purposive sample of twenty women artists from diverse cultural traditions forms the dataset, each represented …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

A Methodological Dismantling: Manet's Olympia And The Rupture Of The Western Reclining Nude, Abigail Charlotte Van Hoak

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The question is whether Édouard Manet was shaped by his era or doing the shaping, and Olympia answers it. It was not an accident but a methodical dismantling of a centuries-old tradition, and by refusing to look away from modern life he forced everyone else to reckon with it too. The reclining nude has never recovered. For centuries, artists from Titian to Ingres constructed a genre around idealized bodies, mythological distance, and an uncontested male gaze that rendered real women into timeless passive objects. Manet inherited that tradition and refused to perpetuate it. Through the theoretical frameworks of Berger and …