Contemporary Art Commons^™

The Role Of The Artist As A Social Critic: As Interpreted Through The Art Of Swoon, Allora & Calzadilla, And Ai Wei Wei, Jessica A. Hasara

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Abstract: This thesis argues that the artists Swoon, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ai Weiwei rep-resent three approaches to contemporary art drawing on the traditions of street art, performance art, and conceptual art to change our expectations of art, public space, and civil disobedience, challenging the limits of what we know as social criticism and building community. These new and lively ways of making art can be viewed in association with systems of thought like Danto’s work which pro-poses a redefined way of looking at art; and Dewey’s work which emphasizes the importance of an aesthetic experience as a way of …

Chester Cornett: Beyond The Narrow Sky, Chester Cornett, Kentucky Folk Art Center

Kentucky Folk Art Center Exhibition Catalogs

2014 Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibition catalog of artist Chester Cornett.

Garry Winogrand: The Art Of Street Photography, Micayla Beuley

Honors Projects

This exhibition proposal, designed for the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery located in the Fine Arts Center at Bowling Green State University, is designed to enhance gallery patrons’ understanding of and appreciation for street photography through a biographical analysis of the works of Garry Winogrand. In addition to presenting 30 photographs by this esteemed photographer, patrons are invited to actively participate in the creation of street photographs and provides a unique opportunity to display them alongside that of a professional in a gallery setting. This exhibition proposal includes a curator’s statement, formal exhibition catalog essay, list of works proposed, detailed floor …

Rod Library Mini Comic-Con, Program, 2014, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

Saturday, March 29, 2014 - 12:00pm to 4:00pm

Program distributed at the event.

Anxiety Of The Unknown In Art: Xu Bing's A Book From The Sky, Abigail Sease

Undergraduate Research Awards

Discusses Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky, an art installation piece composed of books, scrolls and banners written in pseudo-Chinese characters. The author posits that the purpose of the piece is to reflect the viewer's anxieties about the comprehension of language and information back onto themselves. The author's entry essay for the 2014 Undergraduate Research Awards is included.

Dance In The Museum, Claire Bishop

Publications and Research

This paper argues that the art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: …

Review Of Portraits Of The Artist As A Young Woman: Paintings And The Novel In France And Britain, 1800-1860 By Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Heather Belnap Jensen

Faculty Publications

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer’s ambitious study of real and fictitious woman painters in early nineteenth-century France and Britain explores the subject of female artistic self-fashioning at a critical historical juncture. Characterizing this as an auspicious time for the development of the woman artist, the author seeks to examine how historical figures and fictional characters both marked as well as facilitated this process. The stated rationale for the use of a comparative approach is that it enables the author “to highlight the dialogic context in which these novels and paintings were produced and consumed, and to map out aesthetic and political intersections …

Image Commodification And Image Recycling: Penelope Umbrico's Suns Sunsets From Flickr, Minjung “Minny” Lee

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

No Limitations : Tania Mouraud, Tania Mouraud

SWITCH

This article explores Tania Mouraud’s decades-long career in art, describing the different media she has used and how the evolution of technology has informed her work.

Science Fictional Transcendentalism In The Work Of Robert Smithson, Eric Saxon

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

In studies of American artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973), scholars often set the artist’s early abstract expressionist and Christian iconographical paintings apart from the rest of his body of work, characterizing this early phase as a youthful encounter with the enduring legacy of abstract expressionism in the late 1950s to early 1960s as well as a temporary preoccupation with ritualized Catholic imagery. This thesis argues for the inclusion of this early phase into Smithson’s career as a foundational period in which he established the set of problems that artistically engaged him throughout his life: issues of temporality, materiality, and universal entropy. …

Ritual Process, Kevin A. Baer

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art is a means for investigating the passage of time, the decay of physical things, and the truth of mortality. I explore these concepts through process-oriented sculptures that emphasize ritual and material. The process is communicated with the creation of relics, often existing as drawings or the remains of degenerated sculptures. These relics bear witness to the process. I focus on themes of temporal change and death because they remain central to our metaphysical and physical existence. I see a diminished reverence for the power of death in our culture, and through my work I aim to pay homage …

Hamza Salim Interview, Julian Coleman

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Hamza J. Salim is a Palestinian artist, architect, and community based activist from Chicago, Illinois. He earned his masters in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Chicago, Los Angels, London and Dubai. He is currently serving as the Project Director of the 12th Chicago Palestine Film Festival and is the Immigrant Community Coordinator at a non-for-profit social service agency, Arab American Family Services.

Bio from facebook.com/HamzaJSalimStudio/info

See also: http://www.hamzajsalim.com/

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

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

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

Exploring The Problem We All Live With: The Motivation And Ambition Behind Norman Rockwell’S Civil Rights Depictions, Kelly Richman

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

Using Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With (1964) a Civil Rights-era depiction of the integration of black and white students in 1960, I argue that Rockwell chose to portray Civil Rights themes in order to make an altruistic plea for equality. To demonstrate my claim, I have researched academic sources, journal articles that explore Rockwell’s views and painterly approach to race, and documents of important political events of the Civil Rights Movement. Through this research, I use textual evidence to conclude that Norman Rockwell was genuinely committed to promoting Civil Rights in his work.

David Lucas, David Lucas, Kentucky Folk Art Center

Kentucky Folk Art Center Exhibition Catalogs

2013 Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibition catalog for artist David Lucas.

Singular Spaces: Spanish Art Environments., Jo Farb Hernandez

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lessons In Playing: A Current Work Of Art As A Biopolitical Milieu, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.”

In more detail, …

Lessons In Playing: A Current Work Of Art As A Biopolitical Milieu, Tim Stott

Conference papers

This paper will examine how, when certain current works of art are presented as playgrounds, in which previously unknown persons encounter one another, their play is both complexly organised around play objects and other constraints and governed within what Foucault termed a biopolitical milieu. On the one hand, this development changes the values and qualities that might describe aesthetic play, or the play particular to the encounter with works of art. On the other hand, it tests Foucault’s analysis of how biopolitical techniques of governance “make live” and allow players “to be free to be free.”

In more detail, …

Review Of Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges In The Early Modern Atlantic World, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall.

Flow, Just Flow: Variations On A Theme, N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Richard Waller, Sarah Matheson

Exhibition Catalogs

Flow, Just Flow: Variations on a Theme
Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
University of Richmond Museums, VA January 29 to June 28, 2013

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first used the term “flow” in 1975 to describe “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.” Accordingly, this experience of single-minded immersion in an activity that is continuously challenging and rewarding is the secret to a vigorous and satisfying life.

Also referred to as “being in the zone,” this …