Modern Art and Architecture Commons^™

Pleasure Is All Mine, Lola Ogbara

Graduate School of Art Theses

One’s identity is shaped by many factors such as race, culture, physical appearance, nationality, and religion—amongst many more. As an artist, the subjugation of identity in the context of race, gender, and sexuality is a world I examine closely. Subverting myths of sexual deviancy and racial inferiority that perpetually pathologizes Black feminine sexuality, I often use and reference my own body to create avenues of power through physical and intellectual pleasure. Through material use of clay, metal, photography, and installation, I emphasize on how contemporary Black social cultures are able to write their own narratives in order to further progressions …

Talent Against Tradition: The Art And Life Of Kate Freeman Clark, Grace Moorman

Honors Theses

This paper explores the art of Holly Springs, Mississippi, painter Kate Freeman Clark, especially in association with the work of her teacher William Merritt Chase. Much of this paper is based on two extensive biographies: Cynthia Grant Tucker’s Kate Freeman Clark: A Painter Rediscovered, and Carolyn J. Brown’s The Artist’s Sketch: A Biography of Painter Kate Freeman Clark. Using a number of object studies, this paper explores the development of Clark’s work under the tutelage of Chase, highlighting similarities and differences that lead to the conclusion that Clark had a very real talent that she seemed reluctant to …

Savoring The Moon: Japanese Prints Of The Floating World, Madison B. Dalton

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Guided by the Director of the Madison Art Collection and Lisanby Museum, Virginia Soenksen,I served as the Curatorial Assistant for the Lisanby Museum’s forthcoming exhibition Savoring the Moon: Japanese Prints of the Floating World. The exhibition will highlight the Madison ArtCollection’s impressive Japanese woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e style. Ukiyo-e translates to“pictures of the floating world.” This style proliferated in Japan during the Edo period (1603 - 1868) and Meiji period (1868 - 1912), with visual themes that ranged from flora and fauna, Japanese ceremonies, kabuki actors, mythology, courtesans, and cultural pastimes. The estate of Charles Alvin Lisanby gifted over …

Requisitioned: American War Art Of The Second World War, Spenser Carroll-Johnson

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

The United States requisitioned artists to assist with military objectives and servicemen requisitioned art as a form of rhetoric. This research reexamines the role of “official artists” and thereby extends its definition to include the multitude of art they produced during the Second World War. The underpinnings of this thesis reside during the economic crises of the 1930s that brought about American emergency relief initiatives for artists under the direction of Holger Cahill and, by extension, Edward Bruce. For the first time in history, the American public engaged with state-sponsored art. Due to a symbiotic relationship that formed between the …

Paper Making: Finding The Scaffold, Tino Ward

Art Theses and Dissertations

Paper making combines my proclivity towards using found materials and the need to produce my own painting supports. This first part of this thesis chronicles the reasons I arrived at paper as my chosen medium, the objects I began to produce, and the projects that stemmed from those early experiments. The second half outlines my final work, a 1:4 scale model in paper of the 1966 exhibition 10, held in New York at the Dwan Gallery, which showcased the early minimal works of Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, …

Digital Landscapes Of The Mind, Ashley M. Dicaro

Art & Art History Student Scholarship

Major: Health Policy and Management
Minor: Italian and Studio Art
Faculty Mentor: Professor James Janecek, Art & Art History

For my independent study, I used Photoshop extensively. The software allows me to use digital imagery to maintain a specific color palette that translates to the time of day. This color theme is extracted from my personal photographs of favored landscapes, after which I build in layers to create whimsical landscapes. They are whimsical for their non-uniform distortions of perspective and viewing angle, a combination that is amplified by the painterly application of color. Technology allows me to paint, cut, collage …

Mid 20th Century America Through The Words And Lens Of Allen Ginsberg, Lily M. Conover

Art & Art History Student Scholarship

Major: Art History and American Studies
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Deborah Johnson, Art and Art History

Allen Ginsberg began producing provocative poetry in 1955 when he first devoted his life to writing. There was even a court case in 1957 to decide whether or not his most famous piece, Howl, should be banned for its content. All of this press made Ginsberg a famous poet; however, he also had what he called an “amateur hobby,” his photography.

In the same way he wrote, Ginsberg photographed the world around him: members of the Beat Movement, his friends, lovers, etc. Most of the …

Die Ästhetik Des Dritten Reiches, Aidan Turek

Senior Theses and Projects

The specter of fascism haunts democracies the world over, leading to valuable new research into the criminal fascistic regimes of the past, most notably Germany’s experience with Nazism. However, scholarship regarding the Third Reich often tends towards institutional and biographical portraits, leaving underexamined the deep connection between Nazism and the arts. Architecture was at the heart of the Third Reich’s cultural Weltanschauung and serves not only to inform us of the social mores affecting and informing leaders of the time, but also as a masterful depiction of how space can be manipulated towards ideological ends. By working through the built …

The “Olympiad Of Photography”: Fiap And The Global Photo-Club Culture, 1950–1965, Alise Tifentale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the global photo-club culture of the 1950s through the work of the International Federation of Photographic Art (Fédération internationale de l'art photographique, FIAP), founded in 1950. By 1965 FIAP united national associations of photo clubs in fifty-five countries across Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The regular exhibitions and publications of FIAP provided a unique platform where photographers living in the “second” and “third worlds” were welcome to present their work on equal grounds with their peers from the “first world.” FIAP, I posit, created a nonprofit, egalitarian, and open system of image production …

Labor And The Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, And The Tea Trade In Colonial India And Sri Lanka, 1880–1914, Leila Anne Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nineteenth-century colonial photographs of workers on tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka – with women in saris gently plucking leaves from lush bushes and men in sarongs operating heavy industrial machinery – are powerful symbols of a chain of production within the British Empire. My dissertation questions how these images of labor support a sense of nation-building that is defined by a new lucrative commodity: British-grown tea. Labor is at the center of my study, which aims to challenge the clear-cut division in current scholarship between representations of workers in industrialized England, and those in rural South Asia. I …

Salvatdre Dali. La Conquette Du Cosmos, Ii, University Archives And Special Collections, Prescott Memorial Library, Louisiana Tech University

Manuscript Finding Aids

This boxed set of numbered chromolithographs is apparently the work of the famed Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1988) although we have been unable to identify this title within his total work and the accessions record is lacking

From Spectacle To Collectible : A Reappraisal Of Katherine Dreier And Juliana Force's Pioneering Impact To Bolster The Ascendancy Of Modern Art In America, Caroline Holt Yarbrough

MA Theses

My thesis analyzes the critical and pioneering role that Katherine Dreier, Juliana Force, and other New York-based female cultural promoters played in advancing the education, acceptance, and appreciation of modern art in America. By illuminating the strategies these women used to accomplish their objectives to support contemporary artists and demystify modern art to the public, as well as elucidating the barriers they overcame as women driving for change in a male-dominated society, I seek to answer the fundamental questions of how and why women were able to play such a central role in creating the canon of modern art in …

Hut Annandale: Humblest Dwelling, Ruiqi Zhu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Lots of us have a dream deep down in the heart: to get away from the congested cities and live in a hut in nature. French port Jean Wahl once wrote: The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. In my project, he explored this dream and constructed a group of architectural structures by hand for those potential hermits. Studying at Bard College, I have found this region is a place with a great hermit culture. With the picturesque scene of nature and the location near the New York Metropolitan area, here the mid-Hudson Valley has attracted lots …

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

Painting A Modern India: F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, & Artistic Identity After Independence, Shay Afsheen Kothari

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Photogram Now And Then: An Investigation Of Contemporary Photogram Practice, Susan Melissa Andreas

Senior Projects Spring 2020

My senior thesis is an investigation of contemporary photograms. My thesis is not meant to be a comprehensive study of photograms but rather a look into how specific uses and treatments of it have evolved since its inception in the nineteenth century. A photogram is a photograph made without a camera. The paper begins with a look into nineteenth-century photogram practice to provide general information and context about photograms. The first chapter outlines when the photogram process was invented, who it invented it, how it was used, what its traditional steps were, and what the images looked like. A description …

Some Notes On Congruency, Ryan J. Rusiecki

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Some Notes on Congruency is an examination of the seemingly arbitrary methods in which the built environment facilitates order among its inhabitants (eg., parking lot striping, roadway signs). Asphalt fissures observed at the main intersection in Red Hook, NY were used as a starting off point for making the photographs contained within this book. A lens with a focal length that closely resembles the range of human vision was used to communicate the experience of discovering fissures from my perspective as a pedestrian and motorist. I was most captivated by temporal, subtle fissures, such as the replanting of flower beds …

Helen Frankenthaler : The Calculus For Gender Neutrality Within The Post Abstractionist Color Field Movement, Aelxandra H. Dodge

MA Theses

In a decade marked by the omnipresence of black-and-white television, McCarthyism, the end of the Korean War and the fledgling sounds of rock n’ roll, the 1950s invited American artists to utilize color in forms and abstractions to challenge the domesticated, safe boundaries established by European masters. The 1950s perpetuated dominate male, decision–making stereotyping while subordinating females as submissive, adorned homemakers. Sandwiched between the creative genius and evolution of the U.S abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and the emerging pop artists of the 1960s, the 1950s signaled the development and the ascendency of Helen Frankenthaler. As a woman artist …

Hilma Af Klint's Divine Commission, Paintings For The Temple : Modern Western Esotericism Embodied And Art Historical Norms Redfined, Hilary Cianciolo

MA Theses

Swedish occultist, scholar, and artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), produced a series of 193 paintings after receiving a commission in 1906 from a divine spirit who offered complex iconographic insight into human ontology. The resulting series of colorful abstract paintings would not only alter her life, but also redefine contemporary perceptions of the Western art historical canon. Although all works of art are inherently spiritual to a degree, af Klint’s, commission Paintings for the Temple, is an example of Modern Western Esotericism. The commission maintains the six principle characteristics the construct is defined by, including: Role of Mediations and Imagination, …

Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann

Artl@s Bulletin

Was the first documenta really beyond nationalism? documenta 1955 has been widely regarded as conciliation for the fascist legacy of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (1937), and as an attempt to reintegrate Germany into the international arts community. This article employs published and archival sources in order to understand if and how documenta was impacted by the legacy of nationalism in post-fascist Germany. A biographic sketch of Antonio Corpora (1909-2004) shows how the purportedly “universalist” selection criteria employed by documenta erased cultural specificity and solidified nationalist conceptions of center and periphery.