Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …

Las Representaciones Figurativas Del Sitio Arqueológico Cuidad Del Jaguar (Honduras): Espacio Sagrado, Conceptos Compartidos Y Diálogo Entre Mesoamérica Y La Zona Andina, Geydy Rodríguez Wood

Actas seleccionadas del SIMPOSIO ARTE 4.2: Migraciones en la imagen prehispánica: transitando territorios del pasado al presente. 58º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2025.

El sitio arqueológico Ciudad del Jaguar-T1, se encuentra ubicado en el noroeste de Honduras. Pertenece al Área Intermedia, considerada zona de frontera y paso entre Mesoamérica y la Zona Andina. Esta ubicación facilitó que, durante la época prehispánica, fuese un sitio de migraciones e interacción constante entre culturas del norte y del sur del continente, que dio origen a una civilización hasta ahora desconocida, que se formó, desarrolló y tuvo una significativa producción artística. En el presente trabajo propongo el estudio y la lectura e interpretación de las imágenes figurativas representadas en los objetos excavados, como también su utilidad y …

Aves, Felinos Y Ofidios En Los Templos Montaña Amerindios, Sarai Ramos Muñoz

Actas seleccionadas del SIMPOSIO ARTE 4.2: Migraciones en la imagen prehispánica: transitando territorios del pasado al presente. 58º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2025.

El siguiente estudio se centra en la comparación de las representaciones pictóricas de aves, felinos y ofidios de algunos de los principales Templos Montaña, tanto de la zona andina, como de Mesoamérica. Dentro de él se pueden apreciar las similitudes y diferencias arquitectónicas y escultóricas simbólicas de estas imágenes. El análisis comparativo se realiza a través de un estudio iconográfico e iconológico de la arquitectura escultórica de dichos templos y de cada una de las representaciones zoomorfas relacionadas con el concepto del Axis Mundi prehispánico, centrándose en el águila, el jaguar y la serpiente. Al mismo tiempo se analiza la …

Waxing And Waning: Hidden Interiors Of Grassroots Expression, Asmita Baskar

Theses and Dissertations

Concealed interiors historically emerged from necessity in response to dominant systems around surveillance, control, and visibility. These hidden spaces carefully regulated access, cultivated intimacy, and enabled self-expression within grassroots groups and marginalized communities. Operating free from surveillance and in contrast to surrounding architectural and urban systems, these concealed spaces were not formally “interior designed”, yet they reveal how communities activate the interiors they encounter to retain agency.

Scholarship on grassroots resistance is largely examined through sociology, anthropology, psychology, or political science, with limited literature directly linking interiority, interior design, and resistance within covert spaces. This thesis addresses the gap in …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Front Matter, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Review - Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Annie Dell'aria

Art Inquiries

Shahzia Sikander’s work spans traditions from multiple continents, eras, and media. Trained in the traditional miniature painting of South Asia and Persia, yet creating monumental pieces that command space both inside and outside the gallery, this artistic polymath maintains a signature style rooted in sumptuous detail and motifs that drip with layers of meaning. In Collective Behavior, a multi-part, career-spanning traveling museum exhibition of works made over the past 35 years, Sikander’s full array of talent and artistic evolution is on display.

Review: The Visionary Art Of Minnie Evans, Cynthia Fowler

Art Inquiries

The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans was a small exhibition of 16 drawings and paintings by Minnie Evans (1892-1987) on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, which holds a significant collection of her work. Evans was born in North Carolina and spent most of her life in Wilmington. Her artworks are colorful compositions rich with decorative details that illustrate her dreams and visions. But the exhibition attempted to expand our understanding of Evans’s work beyond them. Divided into three categories — “Wilmington Landscapes,” “Spiritual Nature,” and “Visual Culture” …

A Formidable Female Network: The Role Of Women In William Henry Fox Talbot’S Establishment Of Early Photography, Rose Teanby Phd

Art Inquiries

This paper explores how women assisted William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) to establish his Photogenic Drawing and Calotype photographic processes in Great Britain and Europe. Utilising preserved contemporary correspondence as a primary source of unedited transcribed conversations, the genesis of photography can be revisited from an alternative viewpoint of extensive familial collaboration. Letters between Talbot and his female relatives exposed a sophisticated network of interconnected mid 19^th century social elite, providing multiple opportunities for informal advocacy and timely dissemination of the new scientific art.

Epistolary exchanges from 1839 to 1858 provide new insights into women’s subtle, less visible influence …

Review: 60th October Salon - What’S Left?, Rachel Klipa

Art Inquiries

Spread across nine venues and public spaces in Belgrade, Serbia, the 60th October Salon’s concept posed a pressing question: What’s Left? In a moment marked by oppressive capitalism, cultural erasure, and the slow dismantling of socialist ideals, this year’s biennial resisted nostalgia and nationalism. Instead, it probed the emotional and political residues of systems in flux, examining how art can sustain memory, provoke continuity, and imagine new futures in uncertain times.

Art Inquiries Volume Xx No 1 2025 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Review: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Jessica J. Stephenson

Art Inquiries

In 1987, Luna Luna, a fairground/immersive art installation, opened in Hamburg, Germany. A decades-long project in the making, it was conceived and realized by André Heller, a Vienna-based avant-garde artist, musician, film-maker, and author favoring multimedia work including circuses, parades, variety shows, firework displays and poetic gardens. Over the course of three months, about 300,000 attendees traversed Heller’s Luna Luna’s exuberant space with performances, music, and rides on art works that took the form of Ferris wheels, carousals, infinity mirror rooms, puppet shows and other theatrics. The works were created by more than 30 artists including notable 20 …

Exhibition Review - Sung Tieu: 1992, 2025, Lina Alam

Art Inquiries

Over the last decade, we have witnessed the ascendancy, consolidation and mobilization of far-right movements around the world – not least in Germany. The Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu lives there and produces mixed-media work on recent histories of state violence, racism, migration and surveillance. In her solo show 1992, 2025 at the KW (Kunst Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Tieu expanded on her previous projects about the 1980 labor recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that resulted in nearly 70,000 Vietnamese workers relocating to Germany. Her new body of work …

Future Interior Of The Past: An Air Terminal Comes Of Age At Detroit-Willow Run, Joss Kiely

Interiority

After the Second World War, manufacturing plants were no longer needed for wartime production levels, prompting the closure and repurposing of industrial facilities that became obsolescent overnight across the United States and in the manufacturing region of Southeastern Michigan. Located twenty miles west of Detroit, the Willow Run airfield in Ypsilanti was one such case. Best known for the massive B-24 Liberator manufacturing plant designed by Albert Kahn that opened in 1942 as Air Force Plant 31, the airfield played a key role in ending the war. Just to the south, a Kahn-designed hangar was loosely repurposed in 1946–1947 as …

The Arch And The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsitǎ, Ana Popescu

Masters Theses

The Arch and The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsită (You Are Walking Around with a Painted Crow)

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics in the Department of Ceramics of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

By Ana Popescu, 2025

Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:

Lesley Baker, Shoji Satake (Chair), Heather Bhandari, Tucker Houlihan

Date: May 17th, 2025

Location: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island

To be opened for self-reflection in 10 years, on May 17th, 2035:

I’ve been mulling over how to make …

The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

Presence Of The Past: The Translation Of Traditional Culture Into Contemporary Form Among The Igbo Peoples Of Southeastern Nigeria, Nelson Agalaba

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture serves as the physical embodiment of a group’s cultural values, history, and social dynamics- or identity. The arrival of European colonialism and modernism brought about a paradigm shift, prioritizing a universal European aesthetic and “international style”, displacing indigenous architectural traditions and severing the deep connections between culture and the natural and built environments. The global south has experienced the brunt of this process, especially the African continent. For example, the Igbo peoples of southeastern Nigeria have lost nearly all examples of their building traditions and have been in a constant struggle to create an architecture that captures their rich …

The Changing Kitchen: Analyzing Sears Mail Order Home Kitchens And Gender Inequality In The United States Between 1908 And 1940, Ella G. Penney

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Sears Roebuck & Co mail order home was no exception to the idea that architecture and design are products of culture and society. Penny Sparke, a scholar of domestic interiors, writes that design is informed by “economics, politics, technology, culture, society, our psychological make-up, ethics, and the world’s ecological systems” (Sparke 8). In 1908, Sears responded to an increase in demand for single-family housing by releasing a home that could be delivered right to your door. This study investigates the ways in which gender inequality, particularly, the confinement of women to domestic space and housekeeping labor, manifests itself in …

Review: The Shape Of Power: Stories Of Race And American Sculpture, Jiaying (Gloria) Dai

Art Inquiries

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, co-curated by Karen Lemmey,

Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, ambitiously asked: How does American sculpture

intersect with the history of race in the United States?1 Positioning itself as the first major survey

exhibition of American sculpture in decades, this exhibition featured 82 sculptures created by 70

artists spanning from 1792 to 2023.

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Front Matter, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

An Interview With Sharon Lee Hart, Mysoon Rizk, Sharon Lee Hart

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Spirit And Invention: Drawings By Giambattista And Domenico Tiepolo, Roberto G. Peredo

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Speculations On Brunelleschi’S Pazzi Chapel, Howard A. Risatti Professor Emeritus, Donald Schrader

Art Inquiries

Why speculate on Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel? As Giorgio Vasari wrote, many of Brunelleschi’s projects were not finished in his lifetime and not as he wished. The lesson to be drawn, says Vasari, who was writing a century after Brunelleschi’s death, is that “anyone who wishes to leave a memorial of his existence should complete it in his own lifetime and not put faith in anyone else.” Since Brunelleschi died well before the chapel was completed, issues have been raised for over a century about its inconsistencies regarding the open loggia, the barrel-vaulted portico, and the façade. This paper addresses …

Corsets Off. Camille Claudel And Polish Women Sculptors Of The 19th Century, Beata Niedzialkowska

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, And Self-Determination Since 1969, Shannon Bewley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Full Issue, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Black Artists In America: From Civil Rights To The Bicentennial, Mallory Sharp

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Shape Of Time: Korean Art After 1989, Saehim Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.