Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Countersense, Avrie Allen

Masters Theses

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience, the conditions that shape it, and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making in graphic design, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, and always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Situational 情境中, Jo Zixuan

Masters Theses

The Chinese title of this book 情境中 (qíng jìng zhōng) translates directly to within the situation. Yet separately as three individual characters, qíng jìng zhōng means emotion, scene, within. A situation in my language is inherently an emotional scene, which requires us to account for more than the objective conditions, such as the geographical, economic, and social circumstances, as well as the subjective and affective experiences of individuals.

How can design analyze the context of given situations and construct new situations? The key terms organizing this book describe a movement. Site establishes the levels of context in which any …

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …

Frameworks, Hailey Lee

Masters Theses

Put on a pair of glasses. What do you see? People? Trees? Cars? Buildings? Now focus on the glasses themselves. Can you see the frame? Why is it that you donʼt notice it until now?

Glasses make the world feel clearer, sharper, more accurate. But what youʼre seeing is always a view inside a frame. The glasses give you a frame, and show you the world through it. Once you get used to that frame, you forget that everything you see is already inside one. Most of us forget that the frame of our glasses is always there—at the edge …

Mirth, Lauren Schell Farias

Masters Theses

In an era defined by unease, uncertainty, paranoia, distrust, and literal, limitless, and constant surveillance, the human condition has been sliced in half, scraped out, and plopped down to rot under a microscope and then sold skincare because we can see it’s crow’s feet. It’s not a pretty picture. If we zoom in a little and look at the minutiae…it’s even worse. But! If we zoom out a little bit after we zoomed in and try to get the focus right, it’s possible to distinguish the little squiggly shapes of joy.

If you can’t quite make that out, you might …

Seeking Ground, Shrishti Chatterjee

Masters Theses

Design increasingly sits within modern systems that reduce the world to narrow, instrumental categories. A tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And a graphic designer is a visual marketer optimising for reach and engagement. This leaves the designer without a sense of their place in the world.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived. To be grounded is to be connected to real-world implications …

Optimalism, Clara F. Cayosa

Masters Theses

Optima. Optimal. Optimism. Optimalism.

Optima is a humanist typeface created by designer Hermann Zapf (German, male)

Optimal is what design—and life—in 2026 wants to be: maximum productivity, maximum output. But optimal for whom, and by whose measure?

Optimism is what you find in jeepney decalomania, or sari-sari store signage in the Philippines. It is the joy of everyday making, an assemblage of color and humble material. In Clara Balaguer’s words: of turning shit into gold.

Optimalism is my (Filipino, female) thesis; an accumulation of what I've learned trying to persist in graphic design. This is …

\N: Playground Of Digital Interventions, Thea Kim

Masters Theses

How do we live within the digital world? Is the space a tool, a refuge, a playground, or something so deeply embedded that we no longer notice it at all? The digital strives to disappear. In becoming invisible, it becomes harder to question, quietly reorganizing how we perceive, act, and relate.

Yet, the digital was not always encountered this way. There were moments when we explored the web, hacked it, and played within it — out of our own curiosity, mischief, or simple pleasure. These practices, often informal and unintentional, expanded the medium from within, stretching what it could hold …

Fictional Truths, Saachi Mehta

Masters Theses

Fictional Truths starts with a question: What if storytelling wasn’t just content, or a way to pitch to a client, but instead became a way of approaching design? What if we could borrow from how narratives are built to reimagine how we design?

This thesis investigates how analyzing narrative structures opens up possibilities that traditional linear design frameworks simply can’t reach. Context shifts meaning. Through feminist revision and plural truth- making, I propose that fiction is a legitimate way of knowing, not separate from truth, but a way of producing knowledge that resists a singular perspective. Instead, Fictional Truths embraces …

Re-Assembly, Tonia Zhang

Masters Theses

Graphic design is bound by invisible defaults — software suites, standardized formats, and interfaces optimized for speed, profit, and frictionless output. Re-Assembly treats these standardized technologies not as neutral scaffolding, but as the primary material for critical inquiry. By dissecting this “default” infrastructure, the work exposes the logic of extraction and control baked into our templates and grids. Through a practice of subverting and rebuilding these everyday systems, design is pushed to operate under decentralized and open terms. This repositioning rejects the role of the designer as a surface technician, instead defining them as an active agent and an architect …

Mediated Landscapes, Image Road Trip, Faith Kim

Masters Theses

I do whatever I can to not work on my laptop. But when I do, I'm greeted with the pristine landscape of Mac OS Tahoe — it was Mac OS Sequoia for a long time until recently. These default wallpapers are engineered layers composing an image: mediated, highly designed, presented as though they were simply found. Where an image lives determines what it means.

From the digital camera to the phone camera, effortless distribution, infinite storage: photography has reshaped not just how we make images but what we think they're for. I'm as interested in moving existing images around as …

Temporary Constructions, Elliott Golden

Masters Theses

Temporary Constructions is a photographic series made by a process of multiple exposures, material assembly, and surface intervention on large format film. Working in a photographic lighting studio, I build provisional structures from scrap wood and metal and photograph the structures in multiple possible forms to produce images that are visually intelligible but spatially impossible. In my writing, I situate these images within a longer lineage of artists using photography to recast our relationship to surface and depth, and consider what that lineage reveals about contemporary mediation and the increasingly blurred boundary between image and object.

Productive Armature, Gabriel Ofem Peter

Masters Theses

What if water was all you had, what if your only source of survival was a body of water? I shudder to think that some people get to be put in this situation in the world we live in. As I understand the importance of water to survival, it is obvious that water can be the only lifeline of survival for a community. This is the experience for residents of Makoko, Lagos. Their survival depends on the Lagos Lagoon, a large body of water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. This research looks beyond the surface of what this community …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

Watershed Amendments: Assembling New Pervious Ground From Landscape Waste, Sophie Kaplan-Bucciarelli

Masters Theses

In Providence, Rhode Island, much of the downtown area is built over a vast historic tidal estuary. Though we no longer see the salt marshes, wooded bluffs, or meadows that once characterized this landscape, we recognize their absence in contemporary crises of urban heat, flooding, polluted soils and stormwater runoff, and habitat loss. These conditions are particularly acute along the city’s industrialized river corridors, where vacant lots and parking areas sit idle, their history paved over and potential constrained by limited imagination and resources.

These lots - already experiments in fill and land building after centuries of disturbance - can …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Chronos | Kairos: Exploring Time Through Experimental Comics And Artist’S Books, Rhea Pradeep

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how the reading experience of comics changes when they are presented in various artist’s book formats, particularly through the lens of time and space. This project encourages the practice of close reading, arguing that the physical form of a book is not only a container for the content, but also plays a part in its meaning-making. It shifts the narrative pace, perception of time and reader engagement. Research in this paper is heavily influenced by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. This interdisciplinary, practice-led research combines narrative analysis of experimental comics, close reading of …

Lost In The Current, Yeying Wen

Masters Theses

Lost in the Current explores “imaginary reality” through the language of print. In my illustrative two-dimensional prints, small figures inhabit an imaginary world emphasizing human fragility, resilience, and emotional tension. Through etching, lithography, mezzotint, book arts, installation, and papermaking, I investigate how individuals respond to fear, conflict, and instability. To me, printmaking is a meditative process that allows me to slowly digest my overwhelming thoughts and emotions. By constructing expansive microcosms populated by fragile figures, I attempt to visualize psychological states such as fear and fragility, as well as notions of duality. My works are both personal and observational as …

Resistant Silence Engraved Trauma, Silence In Domestic Spaces, & Acts Of Resistance, Priyanka Kumar

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that silence surrounding trauma within domestic spaces is not merely an absence of speech or a condition of voicelessness, but it functions as an act of resistance. Focusing on domestic abuse within patriarchal structures, this research examines the ways trauma is embodied, negotiated, and concealed in everyday life. Central in this inquiry is the figure of the “sole witness” to abuse, those who live in close proximity to violence, endure its aftermath and negotiate survival through subtle and often unseen acts of resistance.

I am not attempting to define trauma, but the thesis explores the traces trauma …

Textile Tectonics: Weaving Memory, Body, And Belonging, Jennifer Stageberg

Masters Theses

This work delves into the idea of home as a sensory experience. Separating the feeling of home from the physical space of the house I aim to create new spaces that give the occupant autonomy and foster intimate connections with the material of the architecture. This is done with the hope of creating homes more attuned to the human body that provide a sense of belonging.

I propose repositioning the home as an intermediary space between our bodies and our surroundings. Approaching it through the lens of textiles to explore the sensory experience a home could provide. A series of …

Through You I Will Feel, Mitchell L. Poon

Masters Theses

Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper.

The written thesis is a culmination of my time at …

Human After All, Ritu Mantri

Masters Theses

human

0. a being, relating to, or belonging to a person or to people.

1. an organism whose behaviour is structured by survival, instinct, and the immediate conditions of its environment.

2. a primate capable of thinking in abstractions. It makes marks, builds tools, and uses language to reflect on itself and the world around it.

3. a maker that increasingly constructs systems as a mirror of itself to store memory, meaning, and perception beyond the limits of its body.

4. an entity whose intelligence is increasingly indistinguishable from the tools and technological infrastructures it has built.

5. a superhuman …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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Specific Randomness, Xinyi Li

Masters Theses

Stability is not a default. It must be actively produced.

My work grows out of precarity. Everything around me is a running process, but nothing is guaranteed. This thesis is about how to keep form going under that condition. My argument is that pattern is the key: not as decoration, but as an information system that lets the effort of sustained construction be seen, while keeping its logic from being fully read.

I use computational tools to apply rules to source images. The condition of these source images is that multiple constrained processes are running at once, each following its …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

Open_______, Eitan Boiarsky

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how ambiguity can function as a deliberate design strategy rather than a condition to eliminate. While modern design traditions have prioritized clarity, efficiency, and immediate legibility, this work revisits Umberto Eco's concept of the Open Work and Oskar Hansen's Open Form to argue that openness is not a failure of design but a method within it.

Through a series of workshops and object-based experiments, ambiguity is structured as a design instrument that invites interpretation rather than delivering fixed meaning. Participants encounter unfamiliar forms with deliberately withheld information, producing moments of hesitation, speculation, and reinterpretation. These encounters demonstrate …