Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Crossing The Divide Between Art And Craft, Kristin Harsma

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Throughout history, various qualities of art have gone in and out of fashion, works declared high art being considered most important. However, there has always been a hierarchy of not only subjects of art but also of media used to create art. Some media, such as fibers, stained glass, mosaics, and even ceramics, are considered on the lower end of this scale, due to their associations with certain processes and function. I argue that it is illegitimate to maintain a hierarchy based on processes and function, for all works of art require some knowledge and skill of one's craft, whether …

The Art Of Being: A Study Of The Relationship Between Daoism And Art, Jessica Ortis

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Ever since the beginning of time, artists have been inspired by the religion they choose to follow. Sometimes religion was the subject, but more often than not, one had to really dig deeper into a work of art to understand the religious meaning. In my paper, I focused on contemporary Chinese artist Song Dong, who uses his artistic abilities to reflect the ideals of Daoism. Focusing on a couple of more well known works by Song Dong, one can see that he shows how one is able to move down the path to lead a more full life through the …

A Contemporary Spin On Tradition: Xu Bing's Cultural Exploration, Karen Obermeyer-Kolb

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

This paper analyzed the artwork of Xu Bing and his exploration of cultural values, specifically of language in China. Chinese is one of the oldest written languages of the world, with forms established by 1000CE. One of the purposes of classical Chinese calligraphy was self expression. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s brought a shift to this tradition by using large characters as propaganda. Xu Bing uses prominent symbols of culture and language, stemming from the classical teaching of his parents and his work experience during the Cultural Revolution, to convey views of society, as well as to …

Mona Hatoum And The Biographical Influence On Cross-Cultural Exchange, Nicole Shelton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Artist Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut and educated in London, has experienced the boundaries and displacement of exile. These have become influential in her work and are implied within some of her statements. Compared are the external experiences of a double-exile directly to her subjectivity, culminating in a discussion of works of art such as Light Sentence (Fig. 3) and Homebound (Fig. 7), and highlighting the issue of cross-cultural exchange. This artist is one of many exhibiting cultural exchange within art as a manifestation of hybridization of different cultures, even if the artist does not acknowledge this multiplicity. …

From Runway To Museum: Creating Successful Exhibitions Showing The Interrelationship Between Fashion And Art, Erica Kroening

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Historically, high-end fashion has been reduced to ideas of materialism and functionality in the eyes of the average person. What has commonly been overlooked on the runways of New York, Paris, and Milan was the idea of fashion as an object of art. Some designers, artists, and art historians have always given fashion the warranted classification as art, but this concept is not yet accepted by the regular museum visitor. This paper focuses on three high-end fashion exhibitions that show when a designer’s inspiration and vision is successfully translated into a museum setting, it encourages the visitor to see the …

The Hierarchy Of Rococo Women Seen Through Fashion Paintings, Sanda Brighidin

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The style of Rococo evokes a variety of feminine attributions; women were usually depicted in works of art in a decorative manner. Many of the interpretations of these paintings focus on the luxurious clothes and lavish backgrounds. Artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau and Francois Boucher were responsible for elevating a very elegant view of Rococo women of Rococo within the public’s eyes. But there were also depictions of non-aristocratic women that were geared more to the middle class (bourgeois). After reading a number of articles and book chapters on Jean-Baptiste- Simeon Chardin, and visiting the Louvre museum in Paris, I became …

Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (Mis)Representation By German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890, Sarah Hermes Griesbach

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their …

Qin Chong - A Quest For Ars Veritas, Curtis Carter

Curtis Carter

No abstract provided.

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

In Search Of The Artist: The Influences Of Commercial Interest On An Art School - A Narrative Analysis, Michael Leonard Sette

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study will investigate how identities and roles of the artist converge with competing identities and roles fostered at the institutional level within an art college as revealed through the marketing literature that they produce to attract students and business partnerships. The sociological focus for this proposal is the tension between art as a creative expressive endeavor and art as a commodity that has entered into social transactions unintended by the original expression of the artist. The researcher documents and describes (via narrative analysis) how an art school negotiates competing relationships between the pressures to teach and promote art …

Infinity, Carmen Fodoreanu

CGU MFA Theses

My current paintings are not finite objects. They test the quantum world of possibilities by exploring the idea of continuity and change. They generate, with each viewer, a state of self-reflection that in exchange promotes a wide range of unpredictable feelings and reactions that became thoughts and beliefs. For a painting of mine, there are multiple or infinite solutions and I, along with the viewers, search for answers. To suggest this state of infinity I extend the paint from the actual canvas onto the walls that host it. My paintings present no borders, no frames: just fluidity.

Jack Wilson Mfa Thesis 2014: Chasing The Unicorn, Jack T. Wilson

CGU MFA Theses

More than anything, my art practice is about overcoming the proclivity to collude with stagnation. Somewhere in the middle of the endless pugilistic battle between consciousness and unconsciousness lies my work, positioned in between the tension of the known and the unknown. The line and the absence of it. The edge and the center. Instinctively, we surround the unknown/other with fear. When encountering a dark shape lying in my path, I automatically jump. The stick might be a snake. Although my survival mechanisms have built walls between the light and the dark, through my work I wish to illuminate things …

Visual Tension In Graphic Design, Raven Heinstein

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

My thesis explores the use of visual tension in various graphic design areas and works. It delves into the purposes of creating visual tension and in which instances it can be most effective, as well as most ineffective. It discusses the use and creation of visual tension with design hierarchy, rhythm and dynamics, symmetry and asymmetry, negative and positive space, color relationships, and typographical design. I will define visual tension, discuss its relevance and significance, and show informative examples. I'm using mainly secondary research in the form of textbooks and examples by other designers, but I have also included a …

Wouldn't It Be Funny If, Taryn Sirias

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Examining both historical comedic development and personal conceptions of comedy in art, “Wouldn’t It Be Funny If…” explores the validity of the joke as a means of critical inquiry and communication between artist and viewer, and attempts to figure my own artistic practice in this larger tradition.

Experiments In Remix And Worldmaking, Jesse Firestone

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The rate of consumption is at an all time high and cultural attributes are endlessly appropriated in order to make fresh, new products. The market can bring the marginalized into the mainstream and expedite the process of assimilation; however, in the process, cultural symbols/ideas/identities are depoliticized and removed from their origins, leaving only a hollow shell. In Gimme $helter, Jesse Bandler brings together clothing, posters, blankets, and chackis, effectively turning the Des Lee Gallery into a place of commerce. Gimme $helter is able to seamlessly occupy two distinct spheres of culture: within the gallery, Gimme $helter offers an intimate critique …

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject Of Art And Architecture, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production with, in Part One (The Gray and the Black), an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines. Initially surveying the shift from Cultural Ecology to Cultural Studies to Cognitive Capitalism, the essays of Part Two (What is “Franciscan” Ontology?) return to certain lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, foremost the recourse to artistic production as both a …

Tried It With Glasses Off Too; Sometimes., Nolan John Fedorow

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

I use a small wedge of wood as a tool to pick out food scraps that find themselves lodged between my teeth. I also use a small wedge of wood as a tool to keep a straight door from swinging freely on a crooked house. The small wedge of wood I stuff in between the floor and door as a tool is a controlling apparatus, much like landowners who use fencing to keep people from walking repeatedly through their land and inadvertently creating a path where they shouldn’t. A wooden door stopper will come to adorn a perpendicular-patterned patina across …

Creativity In The Elementary Art Classroom: Incorporating Strategies For Encouraging Creativity, Hannah Kim Sions

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Virginia art educators base their lesson plans on the Visual Arts Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools. Although creativity is implied in these standards, they are not directly mentioned; it is possible that lessons are not encouraging student creativity. Through a review of literature, this study explored the role of creativity in the elementary classroom, the role of creativity in the art education classroom, and strategies to encourage creativity in students. Findings suggest that creativity can be incorporated into lessons through a variety of strategies. Creativity is a lifelong process, and strategies that are incorporated into lesson plans, will …

Learning To See, Jade Webber

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Learning to See is a written document accompanying the culmination of my three years painting at a graduate level. Through an exploration of line, color, shape, light and bears I traverse the wandering heart of painting. This document is an exploration of the place in which people become bears and bears become mountains.

Insert Title, R. Abram Deslauriers

Theses and Dissertations

It is a gestural sensibility forever suspended in the material as it cools. With each movement to and fro, I become fully immersed and given over to the activity of glassworking, where the simplest impressions whisper of fantastic melodies. I remain open to it: conducting a collision: a symphony of riffs, vamps and arpeggios. Constructing the chorus in disjunctive phases as if it forms out of its own directive. The polyphonic rhythm of decisions converge into a new composition, now completely obscured from the intro—existing in reference only to itself and you

Psychic Fax On Vibrate, Received On Phantom Limbo, Jake Borndal

Theses and Dissertations

I offer a cloud of observations about language and art. I will prioritize my questions about how language operates in art, the way it functions within my own studio practice, and locate aesthetic interstices throughout. There will be insights gleaned from the various orderers of order (Lacan, Saussure) and orderers of disorder (Derrida, Agamben), walks in terra-incognita, and even some poetry on my part. I will take this chance to orient myself among different structures and deconstructions that have piledup around language, aesthetics and art.

Risd Pod 2014 Alumni Research Report, Project Open Door

Publications + Documents

Research and report by Craig Dreeszen, Ph.D., Dreeszen & Associates with Dr. Paul Sproll, Head, Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design (TLAD) and TLAD MA research assistants, Karina Esperanza Yanez, En-Ling Lu, and Lauren Allen, Rhode Island School of Design Funding for the research provided by the Surdna Foundation. Dreeszen & Associates was commissioned to work with the Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design faculty and graduate research assistants. The research objective was to identify, find, and collect data and stories about the paths taken by Rhode Island teens (RI POD alumni) who …

Polly, Megan E. Zagorski

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Eclipse: Theories In Contemporary Art's World, Bethany Burton

Student Scholarship

Globalization and New Internationalism have quickly become two of the most common and comprehensive theories for discussing contemporary art in the early twenty -first century. Moving beyond the formal qualities of a Eurocentric paradigm today's art movement is often associated with ephemeral practices that span outside of both national territories and museum walls. While activating public pace and integrating electronic multimedia, artists and curators have begun to challenge the formal art institutional apparatus, showcasing a worldwide spectacle that merge together Western and non-Western art.

Dreamcatcher From Mao's Last Revolution: My Venture Into Creative Social Documentary Video, Christopher Shea Howard

Student Publications

Dreamcatcher From Mao’s Last Revolution is a filmmaking venture into creative social documentary production undertaken by this filmmaker as his own experimental departure from narrative feature film production and the fiction genre. This thesis report not only describes aspects of this film production that are specific to the methodology of documentary film production, but also describes the film’s cinematic expression of memory and the filmmaker’s telling of the story. Some cinematic and conceptual aspects of the story are related to the film’s influences, specifically to those theoretical concepts and techniques employed by documentary filmmaker, Werner Herzog.

The documentary story is …

Black Success Is Never Simple: An Interview With Architect Curtis J. Moody, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

An interview with the principal designer and CEO of the largest "minority"-owned architecture firm in the world.

Recording The Learning Curve During The Mastery Of Glassblowing, Katie L. Corticelli

Senior Honors Projects

Fire and inspiration melted glass art’s enchanting ways into the center of my passions. Lampworking is a small-scale method of glass blowing, which is the term to refer to an art form where one shapes molten glass into a variety of items. To create glass art, propane and oxygen supply a flame torch which melts the glass. Gravity and rhythmic hands work symbiotically to shape glass rods and tubes. The result is unique three-dimensional visual art.

After years of aspiring to work with borosilicate glass, the opportunity to incorporate the endeavor with academia presented itself. Through months of time and …

Chicken Line Art, Jennifer Mullen

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Stranger In The Forest, Audrey Schroeder

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.

Bird Line Art, Jennifer Mullen

Arrow Rock

No abstract provided.