Contemporary Art Commons^™

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Mind In Hand, Anna Olson

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This thesis explores the intersection of art and psychology as it manifests in my art practice, particularly in the medium of weaving. The contemporary frameworks of memory and archive provide the basis of this discussion, as well as findings from the field of Art Therapy. Difficult emotions like loss and grief often show up in my work, and I will discuss how artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sophie Calle also utilize these concepts. In weaving, I capture my internal mental states, memories, and perceptions of the future in a variety of found and gifted objects. Guided by the precedents set …

The Nature Of My Nature; A Story About Relationships, Andrew Mcilvaine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings.

I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through …

Complexities Of Chinese Contemporary Art, Hongjia Chen

Master's Projects and Capstones

Throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), art has always been state-dominated and driven by governmental and political agendas. In comparison to fellow artists in the Western world, historically, Chinese artists have lacked the freedom to express their passion and creativity through artistic forms. The contemporary art movement in China, however, maneuvers around this challenge and provides a more positive direction—one in which artists have a stronger voice and economic benefits are combined with governmental support and encouragement of art activities that enhance social capital and one’s habitus. To some extent, this is changing, with the first …

Painting, Geography, And The Body: Charting The First Two Decades Of Mary Corse’S Art, Sarah A. Meller

Theses and Dissertations

Mary Corse has always maintained her position on the periphery, and her work has generally been excluded from art historical scholarship. This study illuminates the ways in which the first two decades of Corse’s practice were in fact in dynamic dialogue with broader impulses and concurrent trends operating at the time.

Strange Woods, Song Park

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …

Misassembled Monsters, Jenn Brown

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is a narrative of personal and material history. Through my work in painting, sculpture, and installation, I seek to share my story of emotional armoring in an attempt to connect to an audience. In my work, I look to my personal memories of growing up in a small, midwestern town and armoring myself with emotional barriers against its social construct of “normalcy.” Inspired by Medieval suits of armor and the characteristics of Goth culture throughout history, I employ my work to present the stage of a theatrical battleground. Creating each of my pieces is a fight for the …

The Commodity Club: Commodity Fetishism In Modern Art And Tattoos, Shelby Maiden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The current culture of commodity fetishism that surrounds both modern art and tattoos are disproportionately a part of the perpetuation of an artificial sense of society and community. It promotes the notion that by simply by inking the deeper layers of their skin or by spending millions on a painting that somehow one becomes elevated and enters an elite space, or club, of people like them.

Representations Of Mainstream And Marginalized Subjects In The Work Of Diane Arbus, Grace Short

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

This thesis considers the photographs of the twentieth-century photographer, Diane Arbus. In America during the 1950s and 60s, Arbus photographed both marginalized and mainstream subjects including dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, debutants, socialites, and celebrities. At one point in her career, she expressed an interest in family portraiture and, indeed, a number of her images depict families.

Scholars who have written about Arbus, such as Susan Sontag, Carol Armstrong, Anthony W. Lee, and John Pultz, have formulated theories about Arbus’s motivations, although their findings focus on individual features of her work. Sontag argued that Arbus exploited her unorthodox sitters whereas Armstrong …

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …

Creating 1968: Art, Architecture, And The Afterlives Of The Mexican Student Movement, Mya B. Dosch

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The student movement of 1968 in Mexico City staked a claim to urban space. Through mass gatherings in the Zócalo, posters in the streets, and marches past prominent landmarks, student activists countered the spectacles of national unity designed in preparation for the 1968 Olympic Games. These competing claims to space came to a head on October 2, 1968, when government agents fired on activists and bystanders gathered in Tlatelolco Square, killing dozens and imprisoning thousands more. Scholars and essayists have since framed 1968 as a watershed moment in twentieth-century Mexican history and the massacre at Tlatelolco as a “wound” …

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of her collaborations …

Think Natural ! Une Nécessité Qui Ne Se Cache Plus, Cedrick Nzolo Ngamobu

Artl@s Bulletin

This contribution raises questions regarding the search for mediation and transition found in pedagogy and the creative process. This can be posed as a response to an affirmation of identity, coupled with a search for philosophical autonomy. The need for mediation or transition is a necessity that we all seek in different ways and according to our respective contexts. In teaching in a school of art or fashion, it is a question with different variables that leaves the field open to all forms of questioning and brings to the fore the confrontation of modes of expression.

Au-Delà Des Rivalités Provinciales : Poétiques Visuelles Tropicalistes Et Autres Projets D’Art Étendu Depuis La Perspective Du Nord-Est Brésilien, Ayrson Heráclito

Artl@s Bulletin

This text is a compilation of writings published during the course of our research for the 3^rd Biennale of Bahia (2014), for which we worked in the curatorial team. These investigations reflect on the genealogy of Northeast Brazil’s contemporary art, seeing this region as unrestricted and non-essentialist. The production of certain artists is considered within an expanded context. To this end, we employed the idea of PEBA (Pernambuco-Bahia), while attempting to come to terms with the possibility of existence of a family, united by the desire for a poetic turn in the tropics.

The Lubumbashi Biennial: Towards New Protagonisms, Daniella Géo

Artl@s Bulletin

This article reflects on the role and relevance of the Lubumbashi Biennial (DR Congo), taking into account its specificities, context and modus operandi, as well as making brief parallels with other recurring art events in an attempt to situate the Congolese biennale within the histories of contemporary art biennales. The text provides first-hand commentary on the Lubumbashi Biennial, in particular its fourth edition in which the author formed part of the curatorial team.

Histoire Picturale De Laurent-Désiré Kabila (1997-2001), Donatien Dibwe Dia Mwembu

Artl@s Bulletin

This article considers the story of the late Laurent-Désiré Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as told by the popular painters of the city of Lubumbashi. Its shows how popular painting contributes to the knowledge of LD Kabila's reign, by serving as a support for oral history. Indeed, the commentaries of the paintings made by their authors or by critics unveil a chapter of history. Placed next to each other according to their theme and chronological order, popular paintings depict the highlights of the history of a given region in a specific area such as politics, economy, culture, …

Le Paradigme « Art Africain » : De L’Origine À Sa Physionomie Actuelle, Henri Kalama

Artl@s Bulletin

This study relooks at the problematic concept of "African Art". The conceptual evolution of "African Art" coincides with three realities: firstly, that the art discovered in Africa was described as uncivilized; secondly, that this art capitulated with the colonial past of Africa; finally, that this art of an underdeveloped continent. In such a context of emergence, this art has been or is still exploited by ambitious and interested promoters. Hence, there is an imperative need for contemporary artists to overcome all these influences to produce works whose ontological values and universality cannot be challenged.

Les Nouveaux Défis Du Métier D’Artiste En République Démocratique Du Congo, André Yoka Lye

Artl@s Bulletin

The history of art institutions in D.R. Congo is relatively old compared to the rest of Africa. This justifies the know-how of Congolese artists since 1930-40’s, even if the general trend was, for a long time, reliant on amateurism and mimetism of European production. With the integration of art institutes into university education level since 1971, the issues and challenges became precise and appeared to be possible to overcome: professionalization, rooted and applied research, community building and international competitiveness, with the urge of solidarity with countries and experiences from the South.

The Us’S Economic Promises Are Over: An Interview With Miguel Luciano, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. The island was left without electricity and clean water for months. However, the natural disaster was not the only cause of this lasting devastation. The financial fall-out from predatory loans, which led to Puerto Rico’s inability to invest funds in its own infrastructure, caused an enduring humanitarian disaster. Artist Miguel Luciano (b. 1972) in this interview discusses his work in relation to the 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis and the legacy of the over 100-year span of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory, which gives the US disproportionate control over …