Visibly Invisible: Reclaiming Atlanta Black Architecture Through Black Expression,
2025
Kennesaw State University
Visibly Invisible: Reclaiming Atlanta Black Architecture Through Black Expression, Sean M. Spencer
Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year
Architecture has long grappled with questions of self, community, and cultural identity. While the number of Black architects is growing, architecture that genuinely reflects Black identity remains rare. This lack of representation has contributed to a sense of invisibility for Black communities within the built environment—whether by design or neglect. There is an urgent need to define and celebrate Blackness and Black space in ways that reflect the cultural richness of Black communities. As George Will points out, broad labels like African American or African often obscure the unique cultural experiences within Black communities. Historically, the lack of economic and …
The Intersection Of Spirituality, Commerce, And Art In The Work Of William Keith,
2025
Lindenwood University
The Intersection Of Spirituality, Commerce, And Art In The Work Of William Keith, Joan Gallagher
Theses
This thesis examines the nineteenth-century Tonalist artist William Keith, focusing on how he successfully integrated commerce, art, and spirituality to achieve financial success, artistic innovation, and spiritual depth. While scholars often emphasize the symbolism and religiosity in his work, they tend to overlook his financial accomplishments. This study explores Keith's background, religious influences, and artistic development within the cultural, economic, and social context of nineteenth-century America. As a Tonalist, Keith produced popular works for the art market; as a Swedenborgian, his art reflected the spiritual principles of that faith. Unlike his East Coast counterparts, Keith’s California-based landscapes captured the dramatic …
Encountering The Imaginary: Félix Régamey In Japan And The Legacy Of Japonisme,
2025
Macalester College
Encountering The Imaginary: Félix Régamey In Japan And The Legacy Of Japonisme, Nicolas Moiseyev
Art and Art History Honors Projects
This thesis critically examines Félix Régamey’s transformative role in the development of Japonisme, highlighting his pivotal contribution to bridging Western perceptions and authentic Japanese culture during the late nineteenth century. Through an exploration of his firsthand experiences in Japan, Régamey emerges as a multifaceted and paradoxical figure—an artist, educator, and author—whose pursuits reshaped the narrative of Japanese art and cultural exchange in France amid the fervor of Japonisme. His immersion in Japanese society enabled him to engage directly with its artistic traditions, which he skillfully translated for European audiences. This study reveals Régamey’s efforts to challenge the prevailing Orientalist stereotypes …
Cuentos De Barro,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Cuentos De Barro, Daniel Anthony Vasquez
Theses and Dissertations
Cuentos de Barros addresses the complexities of creating art and processing indigenous heritage and personal history as a Salvadoran immigrant within a neo-colonial society. Centering ritual, care, and healing, the artist imbues sculptures with tenderness using abstract forms and the tactile manipulation of unfired clay and graphite.
Stitch Theory,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Stitch Theory, Brittany Adeline Adama King
Theses and Dissertations
This paper weaves personal history together using “stitched” citational text, supporting the concept that an archive can function as support, as worn; as garment.
Folds,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Folds, Bayan Abukiwan
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.
The Logic Of Car Accidents And Other Digestive Processes,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
The Logic Of Car Accidents And Other Digestive Processes, Rosalie G.L. Smith
Theses and Dissertations
In this essay the author explores the artistic process via an analogy with digestion. The author goes on to explain their work via components of their practice, described as organs.
An Archeology Of Looking,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
An Archeology Of Looking, Marco G. Dasilva
Theses and Dissertations
Marco DaSilva’s mosaics explore camouflage and syncretism, blending symbols from American culture, Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian deities and queer spaces. His work examines objects as relics, where identity is hidden and revealed. By integrating simple materials and transforming them into unique compositions, DaSilva creates hybrid objects where all of his worlds intersect, crafting his own mythology.
Moiré And Its Ineffable Liquidity: A Study Of Pictorial Watered Silk In The Works Of Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini And Raphael,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Moiré And Its Ineffable Liquidity: A Study Of Pictorial Watered Silk In The Works Of Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini And Raphael, Olivia Birkelund
Theses and Dissertations
This study explores pictorial moiré in Renaissance Italian paintings, arguing that its liquid appearance held spiritual and humanist resonances beyond luxury. Through dissemblant facture, artists Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna and Raphael rendered a moiré with overtones of the Incarnation, sacred fluidity, and fertility, creating meditative sites of theological and cultural meaning.
The Past In The Present: Photography, Vietnam War, And Memory,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
The Past In The Present: Photography, Vietnam War, And Memory, Yuya Kawata
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis focuses on three contemporary artists—An-My Lê, Dinh Q. Lê, and Harrell Fletcher—who use photography to explore the contentious memory of the war in Vietnam. Addressing different contexts in which the war is remembered, their works invite careful reflection on how to approach the elusive past.
Tears, Blood, And Milk: Frida Kahlo's Depictions Of Maternity,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Tears, Blood, And Milk: Frida Kahlo's Depictions Of Maternity, Jenny Mushkin Goldman
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes Frida Kahlo’s representations of miscarriage, childbirth, and breastfeeding as departures from idealized portrayals of womanhood in post-revolutionary Mexico. Drawing on Catholic and Mesoamerican imagery, Kahlo reframes the maternal body as a site of resistance, engaging mexicanidad (Mexicanness) to counter its patriarchal constructions of national identity and gender.
Apocalypse As Utopia: The Exorcisms And Memorials Of Las Yeguas Del Apocalipsis And Queer Liberation In Chile, 1987-1997,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Apocalypse As Utopia: The Exorcisms And Memorials Of Las Yeguas Del Apocalipsis And Queer Liberation In Chile, 1987-1997, Nicolas Poblete
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis provides a comprehensive history of the queer activist-art collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1987-1997) and their performance-based resistance to the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), cultural homophobia, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Through art actions blending ritual, protest, and queer poetics, the collective redefined public space and national identity, envisioning a utopian queer apocalypse rooted in memory.
The Imposition Of A Narrative Line: The Bildungsroman As Form In Contemporary Art,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
The Imposition Of A Narrative Line: The Bildungsroman As Form In Contemporary Art, Brianne Chapelle
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the work of contemporary American artists and writers Moyra Davey, Chris Kraus, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms within the context of feminist art history, theory, and practice in the post-1970s artworld. While often read as autobiographical or self-referential, their work across media uses personal narrative as a means of engaging broader theoretical and institutional concerns. Through the literary form of the bildungsroman, these artists employ narrative, fiction, and memoir—often through new and time-based media, but also through interdisciplinary modes rooted in writing—to reflect on their ongoing education as artists within an increasingly globalized Euro-American artworld. By …
Hemispheres Of Faith: Mapping The Global Journey Of An Ivory Rosary Bead At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Hemispheres Of Faith: Mapping The Global Journey Of An Ivory Rosary Bead At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Mary M. Thompson
Theses and Dissertations
Hemispheres of Faith reattributes a carved ivory rosary bead in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Quito School in 18th-century Ecuador. Through examining the trade history of the Manila Galleons, material analysis, and iconographic study, Hemispheres of Faith challenges the bead's European origins and reveals the object as a product of global exchange, devotional practice, and colonial artistic collaboration within the Spanish Empire.
Black America, Ethiopianism And Ethiopians: Tizita (ትዝታ), And The Longing That Binds,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Black America, Ethiopianism And Ethiopians: Tizita (ትዝታ), And The Longing That Binds, David Brunberg
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis maps the concept of Ethiopia within the development of Black American peoplehood and Pan-Africanist thought, while shedding light on the deep influence of an American-inspired Pan-Africanist ethos on the works of two Ethiopian-American bridge artists, Julie Mehretu and Aïda Muluneh specifically, and on art production more generally as expressed within contemporary Ethiopia. They are “bridge” artists because they straddle an international space between Black American and Ethiopian identities. It explores the following questions: How did an American Ethiopianism morph into or become synonymous with Afrocentrism? What crosscurrents can one see in contemporary art production in Ethiopia, and its …
Intersections: Gastro-Politics Aesthetic And Contemporary Chinese Art,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Intersections: Gastro-Politics Aesthetic And Contemporary Chinese Art, Fan Du
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines how contemporary Chinese artists use food as a medium to explore ritual, trade, politics, and cultural identity. Centering on The Note of Food, an exhibition I curated, it draws on Arjun Appadurai’s concept of gastro-politics and Lu Xun’s nalaizhuyi (“grabbing doctrine”) to analyze how artists strategically appropriate cultural resources amid tensions between East and West, and tradition and modernity. Merging curatorial practice with food and visual anthropology, the project uses exhibition-making as both method and object of inquiry. As a native anthropologist working as both curator and researcher, I propose a model of curatorial anthropology that …
Louis-Léopold Boilly’S Toddler In Mamluk Costume, Circa 1803: Feminism And Orientalism In The Napoléonic Era,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Louis-Léopold Boilly’S Toddler In Mamluk Costume, Circa 1803: Feminism And Orientalism In The Napoléonic Era, Jessie Polk
Theses and Dissertations
Privately held until it came into the Met collection, Toddler in Mamluk Costume by Louis-Léopold Boilly was not widely known and hasn’t been extensively studied. This thesis seeks place it in context and argues that it is likely a portrait of a girl, a niece of Napoléon I, Zénaïde Bonaparte.
Piecemeal,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Piecemeal, Max J. Eisenberg
Theses and Dissertations
Exploring the history of photographic manipulation both inside and outside of the camera from the late 19th century until today. My work plucks out cultural and local signifiers from the state of Florida, and the American South as a whole, and disseminates them using a constructed symbolic vernacular in the form of in-camera collaging on large format film.
The International Art Show For The End Of World Hunger By Artists To End Hunger,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
The International Art Show For The End Of World Hunger By Artists To End Hunger, Coty Heinz
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the development of The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger, organized in the 1980s by the New York nonprofit Artists to End Hunger and a broad network of volunteers. It also considers the exhibition’s context, lead organizer, and impact within an extensive international tour.
Geraldo De Barros’S Fotoformas: Towards The Construction Of New Forms Of Legibility,
2025
CUNY Hunter College
Geraldo De Barros’S Fotoformas: Towards The Construction Of New Forms Of Legibility, Jay Bravo
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the legibility and reception of Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas within Western art institutions, using MoMA’s 2021 Fotoclubismo exhibition as a case study. It argues that the integration of Brazilian modernist photography into canonical narratives often hinges on strategic affinities with Euro-American frameworks. Drawing on institutional critique, postcolonial theory, and the concept of Anthropophagy, the study explores how Fotoformas challenges conventional photographic discourse and reveals broader dynamics of artistic legitimacy and representation.
