Digital Commons Network^™

An Invitation, Ashley Harris

Masters Theses

I am currently navigating between the concepts of body, material, space, and surface. I’m exploring ways to document and understand the full extent of my physical body in relation to the boundary and extent of my personal space. Each of my works displays strategies to understand my body and personal space. My intention is to confidently advocate for myself, particularly when my presence is questioned. At a time in which my body and presence are inherently political, I’m finding an urgency in how I articulate what my body is, the spaces my body navigates, and the surfaces to which my …

Sometimes Like Butterflies, Edward Steffanni

Masters Theses

Perhaps the most radical thing to do is to embrace the tension, being between the heavens and earth. Maybe regardless of identity, sometimes the earth is not enough but there are moments I’ve experienced where the distance between heaven and earth blurs. These are instants where my troubles do melt like lemon drop: the smell of freshly cut hay in a field nearby, seeing a baby goat’s tail wiggle while he nurses his mother, or making love behind the barn. These are moments on earth when something else comes into focus.

All Bodies Wander, Haley Mackeil

Masters Theses

This thesis describes how aspects of the environment can evoke the presence of a living organism. It discusses several projects by Haley MacKeil that are based on research within the natural world that includes documentation of sites, processes, installations, and artifacts made through video, glass, and papermaking. MacKeil’s practice forms a threshold between two worlds, two bodies, two different understandings—it creates sites for connections with something, someone, or a place that cannot be directly accessed.

Hybrid Garment, Diya Wang

Masters Theses

What is in the overlap between jewelry and clothing? Does the combination of jewelry and apparel create a new, significant,way of seeing art?

Hybrid Garment is a series of work that explores the overlap between fashion and Jewelry. As an artist and designer, my background and training prepared me to dissect and rebuild the relationship between and potential of jewelry and garments. The potential of hybridity serves as a methodology to combine and conflate the two disciplines.The essence of this work carries the idea of inclusivity, it encourages people at all levels to wear them. In addition, anyone wearing it …

Mars Is For Fags, Justin Quaid Grubb

Masters Theses

The overarching theme dealt with in my work relates to the Space Age - specifically the predictive futuristic approach to product design and the pop culture that came out of the movement. During this time, technological advancements permeated American culture. Manufactures made the future accessible to everyone and futuristic living became symbolic of innovation, progress, and prosperity. A blueprint for a futurist suburban utopia was forged and the American people were ready to embody the new “American Dream.” Residential Mid-Century Modern architecture emerged as the new site for this dream and along with it came a new way of life. …

Creative Learning: Art As A Language For Students With Diverse Learning Styles, Lana Gunn

Masters Theses

We all can experience a challenging time when finding the right word or sentence to describe something. However, for some individuals, this occurs every day with every sentence - so what if art were used as a language for those who have difficulties communicating their thoughts in traditional ways? Many children experience great difficulty when it comes to expressing their emotions and communicating verbally. However, the same children often thrive in the art room. Through art, the author believes that children can discover new ways to understand and explain what they are learning. In this thesis, the author explores what …

Beauty Still Lives Here: Narratives Of Radical Self-Love, Deshun Peoples

Masters Theses

This exhibition is primarily concerned with the act of taking up physical and socio-political space. Through the use of form, design, color, and installation this work places various histories and traditions of both ceramics and resistance in communication with one another. The red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Pan-African/Black American flag are proudly displayed against a warm, calm, pale green backdrop to highlight the importance of mental health in all endeavors, especially in the emotionally taxing labor of social, political, and economic protest in the battle for humanity, life, civil rights, equity, access, and decision-making power.

Cognitive Development & Art Education: Relationship, Suitability, And Future Implications, Zheng Yao

Masters Theses

In this thesis the author sought to discover linkages between Art, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Cognitive Science through a review of scholarship surrounding the integration of cognitive theories, art, and education. There have been numerous studies that claim that art education in elementary and secondary schools improves students' academic performance, interpersonal skills and improves attitudes to life. Nations meanwhile constantly modify standards and frameworks for teaching and learning in the visual arts. However, despite these changes, the author wondered to what extent, if at all, new standards-based visual arts curriculum frameworks were responsive to concepts within cognitive theory. This qualitative study …

When Art Education Meets Environmental Issues: The Interconnectedness Of Art And Science, Eunhyung Julie Chung

Masters Theses

In recent years, we have come to understand that the environmental crisis is no longer what we see in books or screens but it is what we are facing now. Along with the public's increasing interest in the environment post-COVID, this thesis explores the role of art in enhancing awareness of critical environmental issues. Through a literature review, the author examines theoretical concepts at the core of the history of art and science in search of ideas about the interconnectedness of science and art. The review explores why an interdisciplinary approach to education is vital to learning about environmental issues …

Building Empathy At The Intersection Of Art, Nature, & Culture: A Field Guide For Art Educators, Jasmine Gutbrod

Masters Theses

This thesis is an offering for those compelled to use art and design learning as a way to strengthen the resiliency of our collective cultures. By integrating intersectional place-based pedagogy into art and design learning, art educators can resist the idea that humans exist on a hierarchy with each other and other species. A deeper understanding of place can build empathy for both nature and culture, and can help educators imagine alternative classroom models that focus on building empathy within a learning environment. The importance of place is examined through a literature review, contemporary artist analysis, case studies, and interviews …

The Non-Traditional Student Enrolled Full-Time In Art School, Sarah Kathryn O'Brien

Masters Theses

The unique needs, experiences, and contributions to the classroom of non-traditional students enrolled in a full-time undergraduate art program have been under-addressed in academic research. In this thesis, the author surveys existing research and reports on a series of surveys and some follow-up interviews conducted with both students and their professors. This thesis aims to identify the unique circumstances of non-traditional students in higher education and particularly in art school. The author identifies specific opportunities for fruitful continued research and application.

Counting Pebbles Wasn't Even A Class In High School: Seeing Visual Arts Education Through A Process-Forward Lens, Em Xiangning Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores process-forward visual arts education in the Greater Providence arts education community. The researcher conducted interviews with arts educators as well as administrators working within organizations guided by a “process-forward” philosophy. Interview transcripts are analyzed to identify any emergent themes of intended and actualized student learning outcomes as well as other commonalities which exist among the interviewed organizations. This investigation found that, within these organizations, multiple, significant forms of student learning outcomes were identified that extended well beyond any particular aesthetic merits of the artistic products created by students

The author calls, in this thesis, for a recalibration …

Sensory Refreshment: Tcm Reconsidered, Ni Tang

Masters Theses

With the rapid development and expansion of our cities and the economic demand placed on residents, city dwellers are under more personal stress than ever. Long commutes, overtime work, irregular rest, unhealthy diets, urban pollution and noise all adversely impact wellbeing. These unhealthy conditions overwhelm the mind and make residents mentally and physically sub-healthy. Sub-health is a state between complete health and sickness, which is especially common in large cities. The sub-health rate in Shanghai and Beijing has reached more than 70%.

Chinese medicine can regulate the human body from a holistic perspective and help solve sub-health problems. Chinese medicine …

A Study Of Pedagogical Approaches To Inform Instructors On How To Help Ease The Transition Of A Flute Student Switching To Oboe, Mai'ya Jackson

Masters Theses

Young band students are seldom allowed to begin on the oboe, due to the specialized difficulties of the instrument. It is more prevalent for a student to begin on another instrument, such as the flute, and transition to the oboe after some initial experience. Many students switch to oboe from flute, since both instruments have similarities in fingering and wind technique. However, there are significant differences between the two instruments. These differences include embouchure formation, articulation, octave keys and alternate fingerings, intonation adjustment, and double reed care. If a student is not able to receive individualized instruction during this transitional …

Unsung And Unheard: An Analysis Of The History And Impact Of Female American Vocal Composers, Shannon Marie Myers

Masters Theses

American female composers create music that is pedagogically valuable and should be included in the repertoire commonly used by undergraduate vocal students. The purpose of this research is to provide awareness of the existence and the contribution that American female composers have made to standard vocal repertoire and their pedagogical value. The essential question answered as part of this research is: how have the American women composers contributed to the development of standard vocal literature? Additional sub-questions addressed in this research include: 1) What historical factors (culturally, economically, etc.) have influenced the rise of female composers in America beginning in …

Imprints Of Home, Sara Burashed

Masters Theses

I’ve always been interested in how home’s domesticity holds memories of space and objects that link back to people. This thesis explores home’s importance in holding memories of comfort. Yet architecture, being the physical embodiment of home, lacks using home’s ephemeral quality as an advantage in designing space.

This thesis will explore how objects from home that link to architectural parts of home can be used as tools for comfort and familiarity within the public realm. The objectives of this thesis is to create a public intervention that aims to create nostalgia of home.

The project will use home’s ephemeral …

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla

Masters Theses

This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …

This Trash Is Someone Else's Problem, Lauren Goodman

Masters Theses

This Trash is Someone Else’s Problem reimagines object design practices through a decolonial lens that embraces responsive approaches to the local environment and the communities that steward it. It advocates for design justice and social equality. The physical work was developed from discarded scraps of industrial waste harvested from the Providence area, such as wire fencing, oil drums, rebar and steel tubing. It was created without the use of expensive tools, machinery and materials in favour of a less extractive approach to design. In conjunction with the studio work is a series of community gatherings focused on low-fi ceramic pit …

Posthuman Ecologies, Christine Chang

Masters Theses

As we move further into the Anthropocene — an epoch of geologic time where human activity has caused significant impact on the planet’s natural systems — we can no longer ignore the environmental consequences of our actions. The artificial disconnect between humankind and wilderness has caused us to create built environments that reinforce a false separation from natural landscapes.

Modern architectural movements push us towards surroundings that create disconnect from our sensory relationship to matter and temporality. We must engage with the inevitable decay of the built environment to restore our neglected senses. Reconnecting architecture to local ecologies through adaptive …

Space Between Memories: Pause, Young Jae Cho

Masters Theses

The early 20th century was an important time for economic development and modernization around the world. However, the Republic of Korea spent decades suffering under Japanese colonial rule. For that reason, preservation or demolition of buildings built during the Japanese colonial period remains a polarizing topic. Many of these structures have been demolished or neglected, unrecognized for their historical and architectural value. Although Koreans learn about the colonial era in school, if those physical places experienced in their daily life gradually disappear, they will forget this difficult history. These structures should be a space where people can feel historical lessons …

Living · Sharing · Connecting : Rebirth Of Longchang Apartments Heritage Community, Linhong Jiang

Masters Theses

The Longchang Apartments, which the British designed during the Shanghai Concession Period, is considered a building of great historical importance. However, the disconnected relationship between this historic building and the ever-developing modern society surrounding it becomes more and more evident over time. The backward living conditions of residents and management fail to meet contemporary needs, which intensifies various conflicts between different user groups within the historic site.

This thesis proposes a different way of living in high density within historic structures and explores a new program focusing on user groups’ behavior and interaction to activate the site. The adaptive reuse …

Unraveling The Living: Reframing Cramped Housing As A Social Living, Dong-Zoo Han

Masters Theses

In Seoul, people of the poorest economic status live in compressed units no larger than 32 square feet, known as “sliced housing.” The majority of these residents hope for better living conditions, but they are unable to move for multiple reasons. This is an interwoven sociological issue that requires intervention proposals that improve the physical and mental wellbeing of the people in these housing situations. This thesis demonstrates possible architectural interventions that will enhance the quality of life and support systems within Seoul’s “sliced housing” villages.

Other urban villages in Seoul in similar states of degradation have been destroyed, with …

Remember Me: How We Can Modify The Home For People With Dementia, Wenjin Wang

Masters Theses

More than 50 million people live with dementia worldwide. For reasons of familiarity, affordability, and psychological comfort, the home is uniquely preferred by people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers for aging in place. Ample studies show that built environmental features (e.g., furnishing, lighting, layout) influence the daily lives of PwD. These features can be modified easily and with fewer disruptions to daily life at home. However, most PwD and their caregivers usually have little knowledge of what can be achieved through simple interventions to environmental features.

There is a great need for an exhibition to explain the dementia-friendly home …

Reinforcing Connection Within Collective Housing: A New Vision Of Red Steel City, Guangyi Niu

Masters Theses

Red Steel City is a historical residential complex built 64 year ago for the first workers of the Iron & Steel Complex in Wuhan, China, under the help design guidance of the former Soviet Union. Equipped with educational and medical facilities, this “City” nearly meets every need of the residents. Where residents worked boosted the development of steel, which is considered a prerequisite for industrialization, and where they lived became the template for the era when China was finding its footing in its incredible drive to industrialization.

The original plan of Red Steel City did not consider practical conditions like …

Preserving Modern Architecture & New Railway Infrastructure In New Delhi, Yash Sahai Gupta

Masters Theses

New Delhi/ Naiee Dilli is one of the cities in the world which has been destroyed and rebuilt 10 times since 3100BC. Starting with the name of Indraprastha and ending with Lutyens’s Delhi in 1911AD. Currently, Delhi still shows the footprints of all the 10 destroyed cities. The major change happened during the Lutyens’s planning and after the post-independence where India started getting engaged with the new construction technology with industrial materials which were introduced by the colonizers. The architecture of post-colonial Delhi was to change the image of a growing city to a developed city. An era where Indian …

Responsive Markets: Structures Supporting Economic Activity In Postcolonial Mumbai, Bilal Ismail Ahmed

Masters Theses

This project aims to envision a market that engages activity and brings in life from surrounding markets – connecting better into its environment. The project fits into a larger discussion on how architecture left behind by a colonial regime might be addressed formally and conceptually.

Dead Space: The Changing Discourse Of Death: How To Design A Contemporary And Enduring Funeral Practice, Xin Wang

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to design my grandfather’s cemetery to regain a piece of my personal memory. It also seeks to situate this issue in the contemporary context of the pandemic, which helped inspire my topic. I started my thesis in a very turbulent year. I found myself missing family members far away on the other side of the earth.

How are they doing now?

I suddenly missed my Grandfather’s village, which I had only visited once a year prior to the great pandemic. My Grandfather passed away when I was very young. I get along well with my Grandmother, but …

The Bridge / The Stream / The Home: Interactive Social Housing Typology In Wuxi, Weiyi Xia

Masters Theses

Wuxi is a city built on the regional river system. For thousands of years, the city layout developed along with the river channels. The rivers served people’s daily living, farming, and transportation needs. Social life among residents had also developed at the communal and transitional space along the rivers, mainly at the intersections where the bridges were. As Wuxi’s industry and commerce developed rapidly in the 20th century because of the convenient water transportation system, Wuxi’s urban area expanded widely in a short time. However, Wuxi’s overwhelming urban expansion happened too fast and lacked sophisticated urban planning consideration. This decision …

In Service Of _____; An Inclusive Architectural Collage Practice, Blair Ramsey

Masters Theses

This Thesis asks these questions: who do we serve as architects, what does engagement with marginalized communities look like, what tools and methods are used to represent this process and these communities, and overall, how can architects create safe and inclusive space?

Collage is the critical mechanism for how this work is done and how I wish to practice in the future. Collage is used for documentation, representation, communication, and participation. All in the hope of designing a space with and for the queer community. Vital to the work is the idea of sampling from an existing image-based media that …

Ecotourism In Vacationland: Shoreline Development And Economic Inclusion On The Southern Maine Coastline, Quinn Christopher Wilcox

Masters Theses

The tourist economy in Maine, while profitable, has been a catalyst for the removal of local communities on the coast through the privatization of ecosystem services. Inclusive master planning that reconnects Maine’s coastline to its upland areas in the southern beach region will restore a lost local and working class identity. This proposal enables year-round and flexible programming and stewardship of the natural environment, and challenges the current model of commodification of a landscape and its people. Furthermore, celebration of the right of way to ecological systems and development of supporting markets for both the working and playing communities of …