History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Tarot - Reimagined: Monotype Tarot Landscapes, Eleanor B. Nelson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Printmaking is a form of artmaking that utilizes transferring marks from the matrix to the final piece of paper, often through a press. These processes are able to create an edition of multiple identical prints. This is typically considered the highlight of using print processes; however, the process of making monotypes allows for one original piece. Through the process of researching and creating watercolor monotypes, I made a collection of ten original pieces, all depicting different landscapes throughout the Tarot deck. Each piece is 9” x 12” printed on a 13” x 17” piece of paper and created with watercolor, …

Edvard Munch And The Feminine Sublime, Saralyn Goodspeed

Theses

This paper explores the theory of the sublime in relation to Edvard Munch’s depictions of women. Departing from the common view that Munch was simply anxious about the “New Woman” that emerged in the late nineteenth-century, I argue that Munch’s conflicting emotions regarding women were sublime in nature, rooted in his childhood relationship with his mother. A formal analysis is conducted on three of Munch’s works: Inheritance (1897), Three Stages of Woman or Sphinx (1894), and Madonna (1895). These analyses link Munch’s representations of women to a maternal sublime.

Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus

Theses and Dissertations

What kinds of objects can still think when the self-contained aesthetic object can no longer be taken for granted? The historical ruptures that have placed painting under crisis have also brought into view the fallacy of artistic autonomy, raising questions about how value, contemplation, and meaning persist under conditions of deconstruction.

Beauty Over Perfection: The Idealization Of Drapery In Classical Greek Sculpture And The Stylistic Reinvention Of Roman “Copies”, Lauren M. Grover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Margarete Bieber’s claim that the drapery of Greek sculpture accurately reflects ancient garments. I introduce a method of tracing drapery to capture the garment pattern of sculpted drapery and argue that the drapery of Greek originals and Roman “copies” is an idealized representation of ancient dress.

Humanist Abstractions: Zilia Sánchez’S Forms Of Symbolism And The Reframing Of The Picture Plane, Sydney Srnka

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the culturally specific visual language within the work of Zilia Sánchez through an analysis of her biography and semiotic strategies, arguing that meaning in her work emerges through the materiality of form, rather than through conventional stylistic categorization. It reconsiders how art-historical movements are used to organize artists, proposing a framework better suited to Sánchez’s practice. The issues of reception and legibility have shaped Sánchez’s career as an exile whose experience of displacement informed her shaped canvases. These works articulated a simultaneously unique and universal sense of experience. In researching Sánchez’s history, an alternative story for the …

Surface Gestures: Contemporary Sculpture, Material, And The Possibilities Of Finish, June Kitahara

Theses and Dissertations

Through the work of Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Patty Chang, and Jes Fan, alongside performance, cinema, cultural figures, and twentieth-century sculpture, the thesis argues that the surface of contemporary works reveals the inextricability of aesthetics from technologies of gendered racialization, sexuality, and sensation.

A Special Place In Hell: The Iconography Of Judgment In Twelfth-Century Sculpture And Manuscript Illumination, Nina Piper

Theses and Dissertations

While art historians have focused on the meaning of individual scenes of the Last Judgment and collections of “monstrous” images, this thesis considers images of Hell and its inhabitants as a single subject. It investigates the space of Hell itself and the beings most closely associated with it—whether or not they are depicted within the space of Hell—to identify iconographical consistencies across those images. In addition, this thesis draws upon material evidence from the medieval world to interpret images of Hell, the Devil, demons, and the damned in new ways, identifying connections between the imagery and what artists and other …

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

A Fine Arts Program For No. 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, Paul Richert-Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reads Chase Manhattan's 1959 art program as a reconstitution of ornament. The spatial and affective work historically performed by murals, carved stone, and mosaic was now performed by collecting—contemporary art, ethnographic holdings, folk art—deployed by committee across a corporate modernist master plan stripped of the handcraft tradition.

Carved In Grief, Crafted In Power: The Alabaster Mourner Of Fernando De Antequera And Late-Medieval Royal Propaganda, Teresa D. Kinley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the alabaster mourning sculptures from the tomb of King Fernando I de Aragón at the Monastery of Santa María de Poblet.  Through formal analysis, material culture, and political theology, I argue that the ensemble functioned as a coordinated instrument of dynastic legitimacy, translating ritual grief into a durable technology of royal memory.

Landscaping The Exotic And The Ancient Through Picturesque: Reconsidering The Impact Of David Roberts’S Egypt And Nubia, Sophie Cooke

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers David Roberts’s use of picturesque art for imperial Britain and analyzes the ways Egypt and Nubia played an influential role in the cultural transmission of ancient Egypt. By confronting both antiquity and modernity, his Egyptian landscapes are evidence of how Western picturesque artworks influence historical narratives.

Signs In The Landscape: Authenticity, Ambiguity, And The Work Of Richard Long, Heather Green-Gulez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Richard Long’s walking-based practice as a sustained and direct engagement with lived experience, tracing his development through walking landscapes, marking, and documentation. It negotiates tensions between reductive and hermeneutic readings, ultimately arguing that Long gestures toward pre-agrarian land ethics, raising broader questions of authenticity in modern life.

Building Artistic Identity, Visual Heritage, And Contemporaneity Of The Arab World: Case Studies Of The 1974 Arab Art Biennale And 'Calligraphy In Contemporary Arab Painting' At The 1989 Havana Biennial, Amanda Msallem

Theses and Dissertations

The 1974 Arab Art Biennale held in Baghdad, Iraq, and the exhibition Calligraphy in Contemporary Arab Painting of the 1989 Havana Biennial in Cuba are unique biennial initiatives that represent a decisive transitional period of modern art of the Arab world, during which Arab artists moved from the aspirations of the Pan-Arab collective and toward increasingly individualized, experimental practices with local cultural specificity.

Isabel I Of Castile And Her Portapaz: A Queenly Expression Of Sovereignty, Legacy, And Piety, Alina Cui

Theses and Dissertations

What is a pax, and why does it matter to a queen? I argue that in the Portapaz Gótico at the Royal Chapel of Granada, Queen Isabel I of Castile drew from Rogier van der Weyden’s Miraflores Altarpiece to craft a new iconography, reflecting her unique political and devotional interests.

Hanne Darboven: Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time), Lindsey J. Poremba

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines post-war German artist Hanne Darboven’s 1978 work Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time). Bismarckzeit is a significant work where images, quotations, and equations meet and explore history. This thesis studies the different visual languages in Darboven’s installation, comparing her work with that of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

Book Review: More Historic Rural Churches Of Georgia, Austina Jordan

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Rooted Transformations, Ricardo D. Moctezuma

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In my ventures through art I realized that I underwent an experience that was tailored to my process of release. As I struggled to share my emotions, I became distant and dissociated, I felt detached from others and even from myself. This process was something I visualized in my art from, the Tears, to Self Destruction, to the Release and onto the Garden. I’ve always felt myself in a state of Release, partly healed and partly damaged. All I knew was that the garden represented a new beginning for me, I just never knew what that Garden was. Time passes …

Demolition By Intent: Evaluating Charleston's Red X Placard Procedures, Enforcement Practices, And Communication Methods In The Loss Of Historic Structures, Jessica Stech

All Theses

This thesis examines whether the procedures, enforcement practices, and communication methods associated with the placement of Red X placards in Charleston, South Carolina, contribute to the demolition-by-intent of historic structures. Red X placards, also known as unsafe placards, are placed on the front façade of structurally unsafe structures by the Charleston Fire Department to inform first responders in the event of a fire or other emergency. Although these placards serve as a life-safety tool, they may influence how vacant structures are perceived by family or developer owners and the public.

Through using a qualitative approach, this thesis analyzes the outcomes …

Weaving Ideology: Textiles In Florentine And Venetian Painting Of The Cinquecento, Ruben Verità

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Renaissance art historical scholarship has largely ignored the political and cultural significance woven into the representation of textiles, as well as their communicative potential in paintings. In this study, I examine how textiles in their various forms carry the potential to go beyond their normative categorization as decoration. Through a comparative analysis of the paintings produced in two politically distinct polities—Florence and Venice—during the sixteenth century, I integrate Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and Michael Baxandall’s period eye to elucidate how painted fabric was not the representation of a passive decorative ornament. Rather, it was an active and legible proxy …