Contemporary Art Commons^™

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Aztlán Del Sol, Marcus Zúñiga

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

An artistic writing developed from the themes and concepts of an of art installation made by a visual artist of Mexican-American descent from New Mexico. The work references the relationship of Aztec mythology to the American Southwest, art theoretical discourse in object oriented ontology and aesthetics, and key ideas in astronomy. Additionally interwoven is an expanded sense for interpreting ancestry and history under the constructs of multicultural conceptions of time, specifically cultures with notable spiritual rituals of Sun worship and observation.

History In Crisis: Museum Programming During The Covid-19 Outbreak, Lindsay Mcconnell

Honors Thesis

The subject of my research is how museums adapted their public programming in response to COVID-19. The goal of my research is to analyze how successfully museums shifted their community engagement programming to online platforms. Since I hope to work in the museum field of programming, I was motivated to conduct this research. Not much research can be found on this topic because COVID-19’s effects on museums are still unfolding. My research could provide a foundation of ideas to build on. To begin, I read articles about the relationship between museums and technology. I applied this knowledge to analyze how …

Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar

Theses and Dissertations

The works of Silvia Gruner (born 1959) illustrate the use of time registers as strategies to express contemporary subjectivity’s experiences with globalized environments between 1986-2014. Through this approach, the artist connects her production to the social politics of Mexico to critique the effects of globalization on Mexican society and culture.

Optimistic And A Little Flawed, Christian Schultz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accompanying exhibition to this paper, Optimistic and Flawed is a body of drawings and objects that explores the liminal space between playful and intended actions. Inspired by the landscape of the yard and the actions that take place within, the goalless play of a child and the laborious maintenance of an adult. The value of play exists within labor and labor exists within play. The drawings observe this through the theoretical framework of telic and paratelic motivational states as they relate to drawing. Abstracted yards and landscapes provide a space for the labor of the hand. A history of …

Do You Want To Be Tender?, Leah Grant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, you will find a body of writings and artworks that reflect Leah Grant’s art practice and research. Throughout the paper, you will see Leah alternate back and forth between her artwork and writings. Leah Grant addresses her personal experience as a Black woman and what it means it explore vulnerability through understanding how the relationships around her affects the relationship she has with herself. Leah has created a collection of poems, prints, and video and audio collages that assist her with revealing and concealing.

Made Of Water, Covered In Mud, Nicole Norman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My fixation on water as metaphor is a product of my cosmic design; Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I am made of water, begging to be held. Anything liquid has this same desire. I use my art practice to examine the fluidity of physical and digital spaces; how they transform almost constantly. This is only possible through the use of containers that give form to abstract ideas and make them easier to drink (read: digest). Containers can vary in size and shape, but their purpose remains the same. A drinking glass, a swimming pool, a creek bed. These are …

What's Going On Here, Joanna R. Pike

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is an installation depicting shirts and pants in various degrees of Recognizability. The Components vary from somewhat Unrecognizable to entirely Unrecognizable; Bumps and Blocks are interspersed and interrupt the Semi-logic of What’s going on here while adding repetitive elements to clarify the existence of the Semi-logic. The arrangement of the Components in the installation makes the Unrecognizable forms surrounded by the In-between Space into somewhat Recognizable versions of shirts and pants. The viewer does not fully recognize all the Components, but instead understands the implied Recognition given their existence within the installation. The ideas of Lists, Patterns, Systems, …

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

Shifting Sands., Rachid Tagoulla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shifting Sands is a re-exploration of the presentation of North Africans in colonial postcards, an examination of identity, and a critique of the modern Western museum. Since the inception of photography, colonizers used this medium- especially in the form of postcards- to categorize and exoticize Eastern peoples in order to more easily subjugate them. Shifting Sands is a series of reconstructed colonial postcards which challenges colonial-era stereotypes of North African peoples. The colonial gaze, represented by the camera lens, is subverted through a lensless image-making process in which sand is used to remove the subject from the colonial gaze and …

Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow

Honors Theses

“Art & AIDS: Viral Strategies for Visibility” examines the complex relationships between social stigma, healthcare, homophobia, and mortality, and how these impacted the lives of Western artists and manifested in their works. Most of the art discussed in this thesis was produced during the height of the AIDS crisis (late-1980s to mid-1990s). During this period, gay artists and their allies employed new strategies in their work to inspire activism, and convey intense emotions –– predominantly frustration, grief, and anxiety –– associated with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., the inaction of the Reagan administration was largely due to widespread homophobia kindled by …

Museum Studies 2021 Strata Exhibition Curatorial Seminar Presentation, Kristen Cooney, Justin Mitchell, Katie Sanfield

Art and Art History Presentations

Strata, a multi-sensory installation by Canadian artist Shannon Collis on display at the Berman Museum of Art, immerses visitors in an environment of deep sonic resonance and dynamic moving images that travel above and through Alberta’s Boreal Forest, the Athabasca River, and Fort McMurray to underscore the scale of the Fort Hills Suncor Oil Sands and Syncrude Oil Plant, the third-largest known crude bitumen reservoir on the planet. As part of the programming for the exhibition, each student enrolled in the Curatorial Seminar course (MS-200B-A) planned and carried out a creative project, reached out to other communities to get them …

Artists' Genres: A Brief Introduction To Post-Medieval Western Art, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Faculty Book Gallery

Artists' Genres is a brief introduction to the history of post-medieval Western art organized by the major genres. The book is designed as a basic textbook for high school- or introductory college-level courses or for individuals simply looking for an interesting guidebook into the art of this period and geographical region.

This is the revised edition of Artists' Genres: A Brief Introduction to Post-Medieval Western Art, which was released in 2018.

Program Booklet: 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium On African American Art And Art Of The African Diaspora, Howard University

31st Annual James Porter Colloquium

Program Booklet: 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of The African Diaspora is co-presented by Howard University’s Department of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at University of Maryland, College Park. This year’s virtual program will explore the theme “Defining Diaspora: 21st Century Developments in Art of the African Diaspora.” Sessions will investigate the ways in which visual artists and scholars are …

Circulation Of Images, From Recognition To Erasure: An Artist’S Response, Lei Xie

Artl@s Bulletin

This article revolves around my practice, as an artist, which has an essential link with images and their circulation. In a subtle way, painting offers me a language allowing me to explore the polysemy of the chosen image, to experience a vocabulary both figurative and abstract. My practice could choose and process "ordinary" images, which are diffused but whose diffusion does not alter the subject, and has no consequence on the latter. It can also retain images whose strength is intrinsic to their circulation, to their popularization, to their controversy, images which will however ultimately generate paintings, and simultaneously erasing …

How To Build A World Art: The Strategic Universalism Of Colour Reproductions And The Unesco Prize (1953-1968), Chiara Vitali

Artl@s Bulletin

What role did UNESCO play in the art world of the post-war era? This article makes use of published and archival sources in order to clarify the utopia of a “World Art” that shaped UNESCO and led to the “Archives of Colour Reproductions of Works of Art”, a project of worldwide collect and diffusion of images of “masterworks” inspired by Malraux’s “Museum without walls”. This case study focuses on one particular aspect of the project, the “UNESCO Prize”, conceived by the Brazilian art critic and Marxist intellectual Mario Pedrosa for the 1953 São Paulo Biennial.

Diane Arbus: Documenting The Abnormal, Lyla Cornman

Art History Senior Papers

The late Diane Arbus once said, “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw…there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.”[1] Arbus was aware that no one is exempt from others’ gaze, including herself, a theme repeated throughout her work. In this essay, I will be examining the work of Diane Arbus that showed intimate …

Cuban Art After The Revolution: 1960s-1970s, Elvis Fuentes

Open Educational Resources

This presentation features Cuban art after the Communist Revolution of 1959. It includes the rise of documentary photography and poster design as state-sponsored propaganda art, as well as changes in the visual arts from abstraction to figuration. It includes a brief chronology of Cuban art in the 20th century.

Care, Collectivity, And Disabled Futurity, Madison Whitaker

Art History Theses and Dissertations

How does care manifest in contemporary art? How do artists visualize kinship? These are some of the questions guiding this thesis. In considering the depiction of care in contemporary art, there is a limited application of the concept. Understood through the scope of feminist discourse on the sexual division of labor, care becomes restrained the context of familial obligation according to the nuclear family structure, such as in the case of parental obligation. This characterization of care implies that it is a burden upon the care provider and functions to exploit labor, especially on the part of women. However, this …