Contemporary Art Commons^™

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, …

Alone In The Crowd: Appropriated Text And Subjectivity In The Work Of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liz Linden

Faculty Publications

The practice of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is perhaps the best-known exemplar of relational aesthetics, a distinction first made by Nicholas Bourriaud and affirmed in the writings of many subsequent art critics; but the critical focus on the interactive aspect of his works has tended to rely on utopian modes of community engagement, which ignore Tiravanija's strategic deployment of relational, interactive structures to implicate the viewer, publicly, in problematic political positions. Tiravanija commonly uses appropriation in his artworks as a way of exposing viewer's biases and this paper focuses specifically on his use of appropriated text to explore divided subjectivities …

Sondage Autour De L’Exposition Internationale Pour La Palestine De 1978, Nasser Soumi

Artl@s Bulletin

En 1978, une Exposition Internationale pour la Palestine se tint à Beyrouth dans le but d’exposer les œuvres d’artistes internationaux solidaires du peuple palestinien, dans un quartier contrôlé par les Palestiniens et fréquenté par des militants libanais et arabes pro-Palestiniens. Lors de l’exposition, Nasser Soumi réalisa un sondage auprès du public palestino-libanais. A cette époque, son travail artistique ne correspondait pas à l’art révolutionnaire pratiqué par la majorité des artistes palestiniens. Sa préoccupation était la problématique existentielle de l’être humain—y compris celle des Palestiniens. Au-delà du public, il s’agissait donc à travers ce sondage de mieux se comprendre lui-même.

Past Disquiet: From Research To Exhibition, Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti

Artl@s Bulletin

An exhibition of an exceptional scale and scope took place in Beirut in the middle of the civil war and today, its archival and documentary traces have been almost entirely lost. The International Art Exhibition for Palestine opened in the Spring of 1978, comprising some 200 works donated by artists hailing from nearly 30 countries, to be a seed collection for a museum in exile. This is a transcript of a presentation of the transformation of research into an exhibition format and a virtual walkthrough of the show Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, …

Between Paris And London: Contacts And Exchanges Of South American Artists In Europe (1950-1970), Maria De Fatima Morethy Couto Dr

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper calls attention to a network of artists, dealers, and critics from Europe and South America thanks to whom, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, Paris and London welcomed and fostered a certain form of South American avant-garde art. Accordingly, it discusses the European reception given to five South American artists active in Paris and London —Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Sérgio Camargo, Jesús Rafael Soto and Julio Le Parc—whose artistic practices were sometimes related to kineticism. It highlights the impact they had on the European art scene, as well as the role of several cultural agents who were …

L’Art Espagnol De L’Europe À L’Argentine : Mobilités Nord-Sud, Transferts Et Réceptions (1890-1920), Laura Karp Lugo

Artl@s Bulletin

Au tournant du XX^e siècle, Buenos Aires était une vitrine privilégiée pour la diffusion des artistes espagnols qui, pour promouvoir leur œuvre, ne bénéficiaient dans leur pays que d’une faible structure. Réfléchissant sur les imbrications entre la situation du marché de l’art espagnol et la réception des artistes espagnols en Argentine de 1890 à 1920 environ, cette étude contribue à éclairer les raisons de cette immigration massive et la manière dont ces circulations artistiques se sont opérées. Cet article analyse des questions d’identité et d’histoire du goût, dans une approche intercontinentale qui relève de la méthode des transferts culturels.

Le Triangle Des Circulations Artistiques Transnationales, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Catherine Dossin

Artl@s Bulletin

L'étude des circulations artistiques à l’échelle mondiale est désormais un champ en pleine expansion ; mais celle des circulations transcontinentales reste un domaine plus réduit. De même, alors que les études de transferts artistiques et culturels bilatéraux sont désormais chose courante, il est plus difficile de trouver des études dans lesquelles un système triangulaire est mis en évidence – où la circulation artistique, qu’il s’agisse d’œuvres, d’artistes, d’esthétiques ou de styles, fait intervenir un nombre au moins ternaire de référentiels culturels, et où les effets de transformation, d’adaptation et de réadaptation sont donc particulièrement complexes. Or, avec un peu d’observation, …

Individualism In Portraiture: Accounting For The People In Our Lives In Identity Representation, Erin Miller

Honors Projects

This joint research and creative honors project challenges the traditional painted portrait of Western culture. I do this through a study of the history of portraiture compared to construction of identity in the contemporary world. I argue that the traditional portrait of a single and serious individual doesn’t truly express what it means to be human today. Instead, I propose that a “sociological portrait” may be more accurate because it accounts for both the large, societal constructs that shape our identity as well as our more personal and emotional states. I argue that the most accurate way to unite those …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

The Artist And The "Information" Machine: Conceptualism, Technology, And Design In 1970, Jeremiah William Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the dialectical relationship between conceptualism and design in the year 1970, by focusing on Kynaston McShine’s landmark exhibition Information, held at the Museum of Modern Art. Specifically, it centers on the understudied “information machine,” a film apparatus designed by Ettore Sottsass, Jr., for use within the exhibition.

Sanitation Celebrations: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’S Performative Monument With/For/By Sanmen, Diya Vij

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work teaches us something new about what monument-making can be when it is socially engaged. The durational process and motivating desire to elicit gratitude for the DSNY labor force of Ukeles’s residency in the Sanitation Department raises pressing questions about the conventional nature of how monuments are typically conceived and executed and to whom these works are directed. Analysis of her three-part performance Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of New York City’s First Art Parade, just one engagement within her long-term performative monument, explicates the intricacies of Ukeles’s process-based performative practice in terms …

Fragmentality, Elena Volkova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary art is dedicated to the conversation between the past and the present, the established and the experimental; it becomes more and more trans-border, as life itself. Nowadays, people live in the world, where their beliefs, ideas, politics, and religion are constantly colliding. The more people expand boundaries and develop connections, the more complex and tangled our society becomes as a system.

FRAGmentality presents a set of mixed media pieces incorporating painting, weaving, embroidery and three-dimensional elements dedicated to these contradictions in the modern society. It deals with structures within Social relations and human nature.

Being a representative of a …

Elsewhere, Amber Law

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses the work in Elsewhere, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at East Tennessee State University in the Reece Museum, located in Johnson City, Tennessee. The exhibition is displayed from March 1 through March 31, 2016 and consists of 17 color photographs and 3 videos representing a body of work that visually communicates the photographer’s interest in transient lifestyles.

The influence and research regarding the concept is communicated by a focus on artists, literature and art historical knowledge that pertain to Law’s work. The artists included are Rineke Dijkstra, Jocelyn Lee, Lise Sarfati, Stephen Shore, Robert …

Site Responsibility : Eco-Art And Environmental Ethics In The Anthropocene., Nicholas Flint Collins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary theory for examining the ethical dimensions of contemporary eco-art, based on the conceptual interplay between the art historical discourse of site specificity and philosophy of environmental ethics. It considers how eco-art redefines site specificity as eco-ethically-oriented site reform, and argues that eco-artists’ site-reformative actions are not only environmentally impactful and beneficial, but are also site-responsible because they realize humankinds’ moral obligations to respond to the human-caused ecological crises of the present by improving the degraded conditions of specific sites and amending site-destructive conduct. Site-reformative eco-artworks in turn yield variable propositional content that demonstrates site responsibility …

The Moving Image In Public Art: U.S. And U.K., 1980–Present, Annie Dell'aria

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the work of artists who use moving images in contemporary public art. Specifically, these works are understood through their interactions with spectators and the practices of media consumption and public interaction these passersby negotiate when they encounter a work of moving image-based public art. To this end, I argue, through an analysis of public art, that screen spectatorship is an inherently situated experience.

The project of this dissertation is two-fold. First, I outline a typology of moving image-based public art by dividing significant practices into three categories—the enchanting spectacle, the ludic interface, and the illumination of place. …

Export / Import: The Promotion Of Contemporary Italian Art In The United States, 1935–1969, Raffaele Bedarida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Export / Import examines the exportation of contemporary Italian art to the United States from 1935 to 1969 and how it refashioned Italian national identity in the process. I do not concentrate on the Italian art scene per se, or on the American reception of Italian shows. Through a transnational perspective, instead, I examine the role of art exhibitions, publications, and critical discourse aimed at American audiences. Inaugurated by the Fascist regime as a form of political propaganda, this form of cultural outreach to the United States continued after WWII as Italian museums, dealers, and critics aimed to vaunt the …

Shadows And Light. Ernie Gehr Exhibitions At The Museum Of Modern Art, Sean M. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines exhibitions and media installations of Ernie Gehr’s work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), beginning with the pivotal 1970 show Information, which presented four films by Gehr. Wait (1968), Transparency (1969), Reverberation (1969), and History (1970) were screened alongside work by other avant-garde filmmakers and video artists in a circular viewing booth in the gallery space, in a show featuring works now considered masterpieces of conceptual art. It also considers the two site-specific video works, MoMA on Wheels (2002) and Navigation (2002), which Gehr created for the lobby space at MoMA QNS, …

Logique Circulatoire De La Photographie Imprimée. Le Cas Des Revues D’Avant-Garde Tchèques., Fedora Parkmann

Artl@s Bulletin

The members of the Czech avant-garde group Devětsil accorded great importance to photographic illustrations in the magazines they published throughout the 1920’s. Securing photographs from foreign contributors played a key role in the group’s strategy to develop and maintain an international network. This paper examines these photographic reproductions as traces of a transfer of formal and iconographic innovations in photography from abroad to Czechoslovakia.

Nothing Behind The Sun, Sebastian Fierro Castro

Theses and Dissertations

painting as a containment exercise, and as such, a tool that allows us to interiorize the world