Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Strata: Portraits Of The Alvarado & The Southwest, Kayla R. Duncan

Masters Theses

History isn't the past; it is a continuing unfolding of the moment, yet we cannot feel time. We see traces of age through patina on copper, the wrinkles on a face from decades of laughter, or the holes in your favorite shirt. Similarly within architecture, what remains: ruins and fragments serve as layers that indicate the passage of time. In what ways are these layers exposed? Hidden? Erased? How do we determine what layers are worthy to be erased, maintained, or glorified as use of a structure or place continues to evolve through time?

The history of Albuquerque spans the …

Held In Sediment, Kati Lowe

Masters Theses

This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, …

Deep Cuts: Bearing Witness To The Erosion Of Evidence, Maya Lakshmi Srinivasan Md

Masters Theses

In my Master of Fine Arts thesis in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, I examine the intersection of my dual practices as a general surgery resident and artist. Both disciplines require precision, incision, and tactility to navigate the human condition. My art practice is a method of processing the emotional toll of surgical training and the simultaneous societal erosion of scientific authority. My thesis work focuses on challenging the rise of medical pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism. The focal piece in this installation, In Tallow We Trust, consists of three woodblock relief prints at the scale of an …

Circling, Eun Yong Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis explores Korean aesthetic sensibilities from the perspective of material logic, placing at its core the process of reinterpreting and materializing them. Here, ※material logic§ refers to the relationships among materials that emerge from a particular group＊s accumulated understanding of materials, as well as from the ways in which they combine and use them.

Ambient Furniture, Andrew T. Goulet

Masters Theses

The designed object communicates an idea. Might that idea be an insight? This thesis seeks an ambient furniture of durable insight: objects that reward attention without demanding it, cultivating the conditions for a contemplative practice of everyday life.

Design is the materialization of mind. Through the conception and creation of things, thoughts are given form. Of all forms of thought, insight is the most precious. Insight contains within it the seed of transformation: to see into what was previously opaque.

Insight is empirical. It cannot be directly transmitted. It must be observed first-hand, rediscovered by each successive generation and translated …

Useful Useless Object, Jisu Han Jung

Masters Theses

If spicy ramyun is spicy for others but not for me, is it still spicy

ramyun? This question begins Useful Useless Object, my investigation

into furniture as a site where function, perception, and value are

constantly negotiated rather than fixed. From this question, I

explore how meaning is shaped by the unstable relationship between

object and user. In furniture, usefulness is often treated as an

objective standard, measured by comfort, efficiency, or practicality.

However, this project argues that usefulness is never universal;

it is subjective, relational, and dependent on individual experience,

expectation, and desire.

Through making objects that sit between …

The Right To Withdraw: Soft Boundaries And Material Refuge In The Workplace, Zhihao (Sky) Xing

Masters Theses

Traditionally, architecture has provided physical protection through solid structures and defined boundaries, while modern interior spaces have evolved further to serve function, efficiency, and the operational needs of society. These include open-plan offices, art school studios, and other public spaces like libraries. Although physical rigidity and operational efficiency have been well served by the modern built environment, the psychological experiences of those within it remain largely overlooked - a lack of privacy, emotional support, and space for emotional withdrawal.

This research explores why contemporary workplaces often expose individuals to sensory overload and why people often retreat to stairwells, restrooms, or …

¡Estamos Aqui!: The Underrepresentation Of Latinos In Professional Sports And Sports Media, Antonio Hernandez

University Honors Theses

The Latino population has had a long and complicated history within the United States. Since the turn of the 21st century, Latinos continue to become the largest minority group within the country. As the Latino population continues to rise, other industries have failed to properly represent the community. Within the world of professional sports, Latinos continue to be grossly underrepresented, with professional athletes from Latino backgrounds representing less than 6% of all professional athletes across all disciplines. This number is just under ¼ of the total percentage of Latinos within the United States. With Latino's influence of other cultural phenomena …

Crowd Control, Dalia Sadeq

Masters Theses

The relentless and inevitable expansion of the Masjid Al Haram is the premise of my thesis. Hajj and pilgrim growth are constants, demanding continuous growth of tawaf grounds. The centrifugal power of the Kaaba has always posed an existential threat to the buildings in its radius. The Al Saud monarchy has shepherded both demolition of nearby buildings and construction of the Masjid Al Haram. The monarchy aims for 30 million pilgrims annually, a Vision 2030 initiative.

My thesis visualises the inevitable expansion of the tawaf paths of Masjid Al Haram. The paths are horizontal, radial, and stretch over the landscape …

Boring Objects Bureau, Eric Fan

Masters Theses

The Boring Objects Bureau is an anti-sustainability design studio. Through its work, the Bureau is interested in developing new strategies that can challenge the stereotypes of what sustainability looks like for the products that underpin our modern lives.

The Bureau’s first investigation focused on the smartphone, a product where breakage and decay through obsolescence is inevitable. As a result, people are faced with either the expected sustainable approach of repair, which can be expensive and inconvenient, or replacement, which costs more and restarts the cycle. The Bureau therefore wanted to ask: could this breakage and decay instead be embraced as …

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

Lace Memory Lab, Xinyu Han

Masters Theses

Lace, originally developed from European religious garments, has long been treated as a decorative and secondary textile craft. With its delicate hand-weaving, intricate patterns, and lightweight quality, lace has been widely used in clothing and furniture, it has always remained at the edge of spatial design. This thesis focuses on lace as a material memory, exploring how its characteristics can be translated into architectural language and integrated into the spatial practice of adaptive reuse of old buildings. When I think of lace, I notice the similar nature of its craftsmanship and spatial concepts.

What happens when lace is no longer …

Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences That Live In Us, Juhee Cho

Masters Theses

The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, …

Within The Archive: Jewelry And The Poetics Of Historical Trace, Fusheng Zhong

Masters Theses

Jewelry is a poetic translator, through which my intense and complex engagement with history is materialized. By reinterpreting the classical Chinese poem Bring the Wine(Li Bai,752) through paper-based materials, I translate poetry infused with personal traces and a distinct stance into wearable objects that embody the weight of history.

Through jewelry, an art form carried in close proximity to the body, I engage with history by staging acts of document visualization, transforming poems and archival fragments into visual and tactile records.  I suggest that in conditions of informational overload, individuals may gravitate toward reductive positions in order to avoid being …

The Marathon Without Running: Experiencing A Runner's Sensorial Journey, Harin Kim

Masters Theses

The marathon is defined not by motion alone, but by the changing conditions a body moves through—and remains within—over time. Breath, cadence, heat, sound, crowd compression and attention fluctuate, producing phases that structure the race from within. These interior states are difficult to access by spectators from the sidelines, yet they are precisely what shape the runner’s experience.

This thesis begins with a simple but unconventional question: How can an exhibition translate the runner’s physical sensations and emotions into a multidimensional experience for spectators who do not run? Through a sequence of pop-up exhibitions placed along the New York City …

How To Make A Jumpsuit, Xue Huang

Masters Theses

Through interdisciplinary artistic research combining illustration, embroidery, garment construction, and installation, this thesis investigates how patriarchal narratives become internalized within the female body and disconnect women from embodied forms of feminine knowledge and vitality.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, Jungian psychology, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and feminist writings by Audre Lorde and Karina Blancarte, the project examines how systems of productivity, control, and gendered ideology shape both psychological experience and bodily perception.

The thesis culminates in a large-scale textile installation titled How to Make a Jumpsuit, consisting of embroidered silk panels, commercial jumpsuit pattern pieces, meridian imagery, sculptural …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …

All The Hours Of Light, Isabel Horgan

Masters Theses

My wisdom teeth were extracted in November 2025. I put it off for 5 years. In 2019, my first wisdom tooth emerged as a blood blister. It grew through a vein. I attempted to pop the blister, but instead pulled on the vein, which was so viscerally disturbing that I almost fainted. Every night that followed, I stood at the mirror over the bathroom sink and poked at it. Eventually, enough of the tooth showed that I needed to scrape stuff out of the crevices. It resulted in about a year of having a hole in my mouth that I …

The Porous Auto Body, Banshee Maria

Masters Theses

Balances within the human body and auto mechanical structures share a staggering amount in common. The two are intrinsically linked through their shared reliance on intricate internal and external systems to be in balance in order to function. Our biological makeup consists of electrical, fluid and chemical systems which mirror the machines we have chosen to forge. I am plagued by the human need to see ourselves mirrored in metal form, or perhaps we are just unable to create too far outside ourselves, resulting in the leeching of human structures into all technology we construct.

The Old Testament of the …

The Root Over My Eyes, Shiyeon Monk

Masters Theses

What does it mean to have a body? To touch, to breathe, to taste, and perceive all the things that make up a person, how does it feel to recognize the physical bounds your mind is enclosed in? To me—a woman, a bisexual woman, a biracial bisexual woman, an immigrant biracial bisexual woman, a Black and East Asian immigrant biracial bisexual woman—each of these markers feels heavy with its own context of history, location, and interpretation. Too many times have I wondered what it is like to be within a body accepted as a midpoint.

I make work out of …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Huh? Wow!, Lieyah Dagan

Masters Theses

I view design as a series of gestures: actions through which ideas are processed, refined, and communicated. Barbara Tversky, an American psychologist, describes gesture as a way of thinking through action, where movement becomes part of how understanding is formed (Tversky). In this sense, gesture is not only a means of communication between people, but a way of understanding and responding to the world through action.

My process begins with noticing—observing things in the world and returning to moments that hold a particular quality or possibility. Many of the things that draw my attention carry traces of movement or manipulation: …

Sous-Bois, Spencer G. Peterson

Masters Theses

This thesis explores furniture as a dynamic site of belief production.  Compressed theatrical ecosystems where image, object, and body collapse into one another.  These objects will not offer clarity and they will not restore order.

But they also mask nothing.

Compress, layer, stage, repeat.

Oscillate between seen, felt, and believed.

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

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 …