Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Blacklisted. Hollywood 1950, Ana Gonzalez

Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest

Storytelling prize winner in the 2025 Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest.

A successful screenwriter is falsely accused of being a Communist sympathizer and must endure suffocating censorship, surveillance and the struggle to preserve both his creativity and his freedom.

Record Scratch: The Podcast, Kate Widmer

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

“Record Scratch: The Podcast” is an attempt to gather some of the history of Missoula’s alternative music scene from the 1990s until now, to contribute to documentation of Montana’s art scenes as well as to summarize and finalize my two and a half years of doing music reporting in Missoula. For the podcast, I interviewed four people who are active in Missoula’s music scene. Our discussions range from their youth through to the present day, giving several perspectives on Missoula’s changing music culture, as well as what it means to be a punk in Montana. My guiding reason for this …

Creating An Ofrenda, Sara Hinojos

Open Educational Resources

You do not need to be Mexican to celebrate Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). What you need however is a deep and thoughtful cultural understanding of the practice. This lesson plan teaches students what Dia de los Muertos is, the influence of colonialism (past and present), how mainstream media understands the celebration in the U.S., and how local communities honor the celebration. This approach is from a media studies perspective and a particular focus on art, specifically altar making or making an ofrenda. Writer, philosopher, tejana Gloria E. Anzaldúa details that altars are “‘the sanctuary of the …

Drawing 1 Course Syllabus, Fall 2025, Jennifer Sullivan

Open Educational Resources

This introductory drawing course offers an immersive, practice-based exploration of observational drawing from life. Emphasizing perceptual skills, students will engage with key visual principles—such as proportion, space, perspective, and composition—through projects focused on still life, the human figure, and portraiture. Working with graphite, charcoal, and ink, students will develop both technical fluency and expressive range, learning to convey presence, mood, and memory through mark and form. The course blends rigorous studio practice with critical looking and discussion, encouraging students to cultivate their own artistic voice through sustained attention, experimentation, and care.

How To Remain A Stranger / Encountering, In A Basement, Hannah Rotwein

Theses and Dissertations

How to Remain a Stranger / Encountering, in a Basement consists of two parallel essays. On the lefthand side of the page, How to Remain a Stranger explores the ways that the legend of the Wandering Jew, the Tradescantia genus of plants, peddlers, and exile relate to my practice of collecting, sorting, and combining found objects. On the righthand side, Encountering, in a Basement describes my thesis exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Focusing on the idea of the encounter, I detail the materials, considerations, and processes behind four of the ten sculptures in the …

The Paradox Of Value, David Enrique Guarnizo

Theses and Dissertations

The present thesis project examines how, in the United States, and especially in the state of Virginia, archetypes of "wealth," "value," and "identity" have been constructed in relation to land and territory. This analysis explores the tension between the inherent value of life on the land and the economic value that can be derived from it. This tension is exemplified by a theory known as the "paradox of value", also referred to as the "paradox of water and diamonds", which was developed by the renowned Scottish economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. This theoretical framework serves as a fundamental axis for …

Orb Weaver, Quinn Standley

Theses and Dissertations

Orb Weaver is a 24-minute experimental video/lm. This essay does not explain its meaning, as viewers should feel the power to trust their own interpretations. Instead, it reflects on the process of making the lm interwoven with autobiographical thoughts.

Bathroom Still Life, Savannah Allred

Inscape

Savannah Grace Allred was born in 2000 in Gilbert, Arizona. She currently lives and works in Provo, Utah, while also attending Brigham Young University where she will receive her bachelor’s in art with a minor in art history. Allred has already been included in various school exhibitions and hopes to show her work in other spaces. Upcoming shows include the 38th Annual Spiritual and Religious Art of Utah Exhibition.

Barn Dreams, Michael Shoemaker

Inscape

Michael Shoemaker is a poet, haikuist, photographer, writer, and editor from Magna, Utah, where he lives with his wife and son and enjoys looking out on the Great Salt Lake every day. He is the author of four book-length poetry/photography collections, and his photography has appeared in several newspapers, literary journals, and art gallery exhibitions. He has also received an Artist Career Advancement Grant from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums for 2026, 2025 and 2024. He will be the artist-in-residence in May 2026 at Zion Canyon Mesa.

Autumn's Warmth, Noémie L. Côté

Inscape

Noémie L. Côté is an award-winning artist who transforms landscapes into symphonies of color and reimagines familiar scenes with renewed vitality. Her open-impressionist style invites viewers to see the world through her unique lens, feel a deeper connection to nature, and embrace the beauty and wonder of the world around them. Based in Ottawa, Canada, Noémie is represented in galleries across the north.

Field And Mountains, John Swofford

Inscape

John Swofford graduated from Clayton State University with an Associate of Arts degree in painting. He was featured in Create! Magazine issue #47 (2024). He was selected for the Aedra Fine Arts online exhibit: Rise (2024) and he was featured in L’EXPOSITION Autumn exhibition and catalog (2024). He was included in L’EXPOSITION Holiday Lights and Joy • exhibition (shown on one of the screens at Times Square throughout the day on January 4, 2025).

Creation, Fall, Atonement, Rachel Jensen

Inscape

Fourteen years ago, Rachel took an art class that reignited her passion for creating art. Through additional classes and experimentation with a variety of media, she found herself drawn most often to colored pencil, soft pastels, and acrylic paint. After initially focusing on nature and portraits, she eventually felt compelled to create works of art with deeper meaning that symbolically represented the complexity and nuance presented by challenges in her life.

Marcescence, Ben Liebl

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Marcescence is the withering yet attachment of a leaf to its stem. This withering but futile persistence conceptually intrigues me, as well as the inclusion of nuance into dichotomies. In this installation, many of the forms are derived from the burls and galls of trees, phenomena resulted from damage but a testament of healing--scar tissue--to anthropomorphize. Here, I use marcescence as an extended metaphor, to relate with that very persistence. This body of work sheds off personal items, writings, former works of art, and memories, which, have undergone transformation to be gawked at before their next transition.

The next part …

Wavering Masculinities, Riley Rist

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Wavering Masculinities is a compilation of anthropological research, exploration of self-identity/belonging, and deep dive into the cultural expectations of heterosexuality (as it relates to gender expression). The works convey a physical connection to my anthropological research to produce imagery about masculine behaviors and appearances, and the deviations of those appearances and behaviors. This exhibition looks at the line between masculine and feminine expression from the male-identifying perspective to inquire about the amount of feminine traits that can be possessed until sexuality is questioned/assumed (and why does being feminine have to be a bad thing?! )

Perception As Creation In Swann's Way, Ethan D. Snowball

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is written with such detail that it overwhelms both the reader’s and the character’s sensory experience. Despite all the details, each character takes their senses of the world and strings them together as coherent images and stories. Proust shows that perceptions and memories are malleable, as individuals perceive objects in a way that brings entire stories or images to their conscious experience. The way that Proust’s characters take sensory objects and create images shows that each character can consciously interpret the world around them. Social images find themselves competing with the personally constructed images of an …

The Masa That Holds Us: Indigenous Epistemologies And The Food We Share, Necahual Gamboa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The U.S. higher education system is built on histories and infrastructures of colonization, white supremacy, and western imperialism. Among many of the institutions produced from a history of domination and genocide, the systems of higher education need to shift their focus to decolonial frameworks including Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing and being) in order to work toward true reparations between these imperial systems and the Indigenous people they have displaced and disregarded. This project brings these systems into question, but also uses art, prose, and storytelling to better align with what it means or what it could look like to …

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.

The Divine Invitation To Co-Creation: The Effects Of Creative Practice On The Vocation Of Clergy In The Anglican Church Of Canada, Dawn Dickieson-Leger

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Creative practice has been confirmed as having benefits for health and well-being for people as well as an effective spiritual practice aiding in discernment. Clergy find their purpose in their sense of vocation, often formed and discerned in the context of seeking ordination. The researcher, an Anglican priest and amateur artist, presents a renewed idea of vocation as co-creation with God by engaging in creative practice. Throughout the dissertation she offers reflections from her own experiences in art, health recovery, and ministry. Fifteen Anglican clergy were interviewed about their vocation, ministry, and creative practice. Each of these clergy met the …

Grasshoppers, Ants, And Philosophical Fables, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Aesop contrasted the ant’s virtues of industry, forward planning, and group loyalty with the idleness of a cicada interested only in merry-making and music-making. That contrast is challenged in many picture book versions of his fable. What does it mean to work? What is the value of making music and art? Can finding delight in an occupation be as important as denying gratification? When is it right to refuse help to someone who asks for it? This review compares six picture books—Ant and Grasshopper by Luli Gray (2011), The Ant and the Grasshopper by Amy Lowry Poole (2000), The …

Arts & Literature: Beyond Mourning: Art As Healing A Decade After The Yazidi Genocide, Sarwa Azeez

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

When Books Come Alive: Crafting A Clean Book-To-Screen Adaptation Worth Watching, Larah C. Cox

Masters Theses

The Things We Leave Unfinished is a screenplay adaptation of the novel of the same name by Rebecca Yarros. In this story, audience members will watch as the characters fall in love during both World War II and the present time, and experience how these themes become unbreakable family ties and strong women. This thesis, due to the importance of availability of clean entertainment for Christians to enjoy, explores what is necessary for a filmmaker to provide that kind of film, and seeks to find the answers in what makes a book-to-screen adaptation successful and worthy of an audience (both …

I See You Too, Moe Kennedy

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Moe Kennedy is a senior biology major and Bonner Scholar at DePauw University. They love acrylic and oil painting, as well as making jewelry, woodworking, and occasionally writing poetry. Their artistic focuses are queer expression as well as botanical and insect life. In their free time, they enjoy animated shows and movies, hiking, and playing guitar.

Mo(U)Rning One, Abby Mcarthur-Self

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Abby McArthur-Self is a senior English writing and German major. They have personal beef with creative nonfiction and an eye for strange and slightly garish.

Caught In The Funnel, Samaira Snow

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Samaira Snow is a sophomore at Depauw University where she will double major in studio art and art history with a minor in education. She loves to challenge herself by learning techniques to recreate famous pieces along with creating original pieces.

Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema, Vetri Nathan

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that …

Promoting Cultural Belonging Through The Arts: Community Partner Snapshot Of Latino Art Midwest, Kayla Vasilko

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

Kayla Vasilko just completed her Master’s degree in communication with a focus on semiotics and the impact of higher education on positive social change in the Purdue Graduate School and the PNW Department of Communication and Creative Arts. While earning her degree, she had the opportunity to complete a service-learning project to celebrate Spanish culture through the arts and work the community partner Latino Art Midwest. Latino Art Midwest works to promote understanding of the role of arts and creative expression among Midwestern Latina/o communities. Students can explore their site, “view the art, and interpret the unique qualities of Latina/o …

The Hoosier Slide: Promoting Engagement With Environment, Kayla Vasilko

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

With unsustainable production models and a plethora of other damaging activities, humans’ strain on the environment has made it impossible to assume that the planet’s ecosystem will sustain future generations (WWF, 2018); our response to this crisis will impact current and future generations and all other species on Earth (Global Stewards, 2022; United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2022). To make a difference, education about the problem needs to be furthered. I worked with the PNW Westville Warriors and the Michigan City Lubeznik Center for the Arts (a community center dedicated to offering programming that balances joy with critical thinking, with …

The Synagogue At Ḥorbat Merot: Its Construction Phases And A New Interpretation Of The Finds (Hebrew; English Summary), Emmanuel Damati

'Atiqot

This article focuses on the ancient synagogue uncovered at Ḥorbat Merot and offers a new interpretation of its various phases. Three strata were identified: Stratum I, predating the synagogue, from the Early Roman period; Stratum II, the construction of the synagogue and its use, with three phases dating from the Byzantine to the Early Islamic periods; and Stratum III, when the building served as a dwelling in the Mamluk period. In the Ottoman period, an Algerian village existed on-site. The excavation of the synagogue yielded many finds, including coin deposits dating from the fourth and fifth centuries CE; a treasury …

Greek Inscriptions From The Byzantine-Period Monastery At Ḥura, Yulia Ustinova

'Atiqot

Five mosaic inscriptions adorned the halls of the Byzantine-period monastery at Ḥura, four of them in Greek and one is bilingual. One inscription belongs to an early phase of the building, from the late fourth or early fifth century CE, while the other inscriptions belong to the monastery of the sixth century CE. Two of the latter inscriptions contain dates within the last quarter of the sixth century CE.

A Byzantine-Period Monastery At Ḥura, Daniel Varga, Rina Talgam

'Atiqot

A building identified as a monastery, probably associated with the nearby Byzantine settlement at Ḥorbat Ḥur, was paved with four mosaic pavements containing four Greek inscriptions and one bilingual inscription in Greek and local Syriac. The inscription in the prayer hall indicates that the building was a monastery, probably founded in 575 CE. The monastery’s cemetery, located to its southwest, was well-preserved including four sealed graves of adult males, possibly monks. The mosaic art in the monastery deviates from the period’s trends, depicting figurative images and implicit crosses. This, and the location of the monastery, suggest that the monastery served …