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City University of New York (CUNY)

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Articles 121 - 150 of 8063

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory And Material Rhetoric In Dindga Mccannon’S Fiber Arts Practice, Mary Lisette Morris May 2026

Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory And Material Rhetoric In Dindga Mccannon’S Fiber Arts Practice, Mary Lisette Morris

Theses and Dissertations

“Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory and Material Rhetoric in Dindga McCannon’s Fiber Arts Practice” examines mixed-media artist Dindga McCannon’s interdisciplinary career and practice. It argues that her research-driven homages to Black women’s lives and achievements challenge divisions of fine art and craft through cultural memory, material rhetoric, and textile-based archival strategies.


Humanist Abstractions: Zilia Sánchez’S Forms Of Symbolism And The Reframing Of The Picture Plane, Sydney Srnka May 2026

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 May 2026

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.


The I Need More Time Machine, Suzanne L. Schulz May 2026

The I Need More Time Machine, Suzanne L. Schulz

Theses and Dissertations

The I Need More Time Machine imagines alternatives to gendered overwork and exhaustion. Incorporating animation and the interviews of twelve NYC-based female and nonbinary artists who are caretakers and full-time workers, the film dwells in spaces of fatigue and repetition — from the vantage point of commuting — then draws on forgotten feminist and utopian housing blueprints to create science fiction-inspired, fantasy-imbued sites for gendered flourishing. The animated fantasy segments imagine elastic time, deep rest, experiments in collaboration, and liberating feminist spatial possibilities


Do Clothes Make The Man? Ftm Crossdressing In The 18th-19th C. Anglo-American World, Aidrian Graber May 2026

Do Clothes Make The Man? Ftm Crossdressing In The 18th-19th C. Anglo-American World, Aidrian Graber

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze the legacy of "Female Husbands" and other female-to-male crossdressers in the 18/19th c. Anglo-American world and how such people can illuminate the field of transgender history.


Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa May 2026

Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

Juan Hinojosa’s thesis explores collage and assemblage through discarded materials, pop culture, and personal history. He transforms found objects into layered works that reflect consumption, memory, and American identity. Moving between sculpture, painting, and installation, his practice examines excess, nostalgia, and the tension between what is consumed and what consumes him.


Grass As Green As Money, Andrew Dominguez May 2026

Grass As Green As Money, Andrew Dominguez

Theses and Dissertations

Grass as Green as Money looks at golf and painting, making comparisons based on class privilege and barriers to entry to examine the audience’s role in determining meaning in an artwork. It establishes historical research into the artist’s paintings’ aims to produce self-awareness within a contemporary art context.


One Long Yawn, Dylan Musler May 2026

One Long Yawn, Dylan Musler

Theses and Dissertations

Dylan Musler contextualizes her painting and ceramic work. She explores themes around time, the grotesque, transference, holes, and dirty snow piles.


Transient Landscapes, Selena Lozano May 2026

Transient Landscapes, Selena Lozano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores a technical shift from studio to plein air observation and contextualizing urban landscapes through art history and memory. By investigating the tension between permanence and erasure amidst rapid gentrification, the work utilizes painting and photography to mirror the physicality of El Barrio in East Harlem.


Covert And Overt Expression: Understanding Jazz Through Individual And Communal Values, Jalen F. Grandchamps May 2026

Covert And Overt Expression: Understanding Jazz Through Individual And Communal Values, Jalen F. Grandchamps

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that jazz— particularly the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s–70s—can be understood through the lens of covert and overt expression, a framework tracing its lineage to earlier Black musical forms like Spirituals and Blues. Covert expression, defined here as coded or survivalist communication (e.g., Spirituals’ biblical allegories for liberation), emerges under conditions of violent oppression; overt expression, by contrast, reflects unfettered artistic agency and direct protest (e.g., Mingus’s "Fables of Faubus").


Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite, Lauren Cline May 2026

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite, Lauren Cline

Theses and Dissertations

In “Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite,” artist Lauren Cline uses her process-based approach to painting as a metaphor for the relationship between mundanity and eternity. Utilizing various frameworks, including the autobiographical writings of Hélène Cixous and the theology of Simone Weil, as well as examples from her own artworks,  the artist suggests that there is a universal human need for the dissipation of the singular, isolated self, and explores various ways that this can be achieved.


5010, Clare Hu May 2026

5010, Clare Hu

Theses and Dissertations

Working with the structure of a table top, Clare Hu churns through digital image and woven cloth, asking how much each medium can bear.


The Process Of Othering: Grief And Shame In Kanafānī’S “The Land Of Sad Oranges”, Eman M. Ahmad May 2026

The Process Of Othering: Grief And Shame In Kanafānī’S “The Land Of Sad Oranges”, Eman M. Ahmad

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how “othering” shapes Palestinian experience through Ghassan Kanafani’s fiction and Frantz Fanon’s theory. It argues that othering produces grief, survival, and resistance rather than assimilation, and proposes a model centered on power, dehumanization, and identity to explain how domination is sustained and challenged.


A Special Place In Hell: The Iconography Of Judgment In Twelfth-Century Sculpture And Manuscript Illumination, Nina Piper May 2026

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 …


Heirloomed: An Italian-American Daughter Weaving Past And Present, Catherine Santino May 2026

Heirloomed: An Italian-American Daughter Weaving Past And Present, Catherine Santino

Theses and Dissertations

Amid a string of family deaths, writer and journalist Catherine Santino found herself preoccupied by the idea of lineage and inheritance. As she digs into her Sicilian heritage, she explores how the traditions and values set forth by her family’s matriarchs have shaped the woman she’s still becoming. From grappling with the shame caused by the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings of purity to examining how Italian food customs impacted her body image, Santino interrogates the complicated truth that the belief systems she was raised with offer both comfort and torment.


Science, Fiction, James Nick Peelor May 2026

Science, Fiction, James Nick Peelor

Theses and Dissertations

Science, Fiction is about death, mental health, UFOs, and having a mutifaceted art practice rooted in a DIY ethos.


Sonic Rupture And Embodied Politics:
Reconfiguring The Aesthetic Regime In The Syrian Uprising, Lynn Shabani May 2026

Sonic Rupture And Embodied Politics:
Reconfiguring The Aesthetic Regime In The Syrian Uprising, Lynn Shabani

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the Syrian uprising of 2011 emerged as a sonic and embodied rupture within an authoritarian aesthetic regime that had long governed public sensibility. Through chants, song, and coordinated movement, political agency took form as collective, affective practice, transforming vernacular repertoires into infrastructures of mobilization, audibility, and resistance.


On A Small Strip Of Land On The Great South Bay: A Vaudeville, Kev Berry May 2026

On A Small Strip Of Land On The Great South Bay: A Vaudeville, Kev Berry

Theses and Dissertations

In this epic, genre-exploding tragedy about the Long Island Serial Killer case, On a Small Strip of Land on the Great South Bay unearths the complex story of police corruption, sensationalized violence, and the broken dreams of the women discarded along Ocean Parkway.


Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert May 2026

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.


Into Dust, Olivia Lutz May 2026

Into Dust, Olivia Lutz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines charcoal as both material and metaphor, tracing its relationship to grief, memory, light, and transformation.


A Fine Arts Program For No. 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, Paul Richert-Garcia May 2026

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 May 2026

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 May 2026

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 May 2026

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 May 2026

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 May 2026

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 May 2026

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.


Voyager, Ben K. Voss May 2026

Voyager, Ben K. Voss

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores painting as a site of meditation, time and (un)knowability.


Containment, Quin Mittelstead May 2026

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, …


The Creek And The Cave, Zoe Geltman May 2026

The Creek And The Cave, Zoe Geltman

Student Theses

A play.