American Material Culture Commons^™

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

A Part From You, Kenneth Rick Briggenhorst Jr.

MSU Graduate Theses

I invite empathy through art that is technologically assisted to find alternative interpretations for nontheologically informed faith. The sudden passing of my dearest friend, Jimmy, encouraged me to dig through my archives of data, to cherish all the bytes that remain of him. In this endeavor, I find that death is not the end, but a post-physical state of being. I express this sentiment in a part from you, where the work utilizes inanimate constructs to place your faith in, to make sense of the complexities of grief in a digitally tethered way of life. This life that allows many …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Being In The Place Of Possibility, Laura Domencic

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper explores my art practice as a phenomenological search for understanding how to be in the world. It begins with a description of my practice as a way to access the place of possibility that exists between faith and doubt. I examine materiality in art making to encourage consideration of both the physical and temporal nature of experience and to find balance with the increasingly incorporeal experience of the digital world. I discuss the materials and processes of drawing, sewing, and printmaking within their historical contexts. This paper connects my practice with artists who consider the act of perception …

Sanguine Salvation: Pilgrimage And Penance At The Sanctuary Of Chimayo, Isabella J. Spann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

We Were There, We Are Here: Queer Collections And Their Repositories And Legacies, Alexandria Deters

MA Theses

Art history and history has gaps within it that are just now starting to be filled and the absences rectified. Those gaps are caused by erasure of queer art history. The way it has been rectified is through queer institutions and queer collections. This study explores how queer institutions and collections are innately political through saving queer objects and art. It is through their efforts that queer art history is finally being recognized in major institutions, collections, and exhibitions. I interview scholars and collectors to understand why they collect, which reveals the political nature and uniqueness of queer art as …

Art Aids America: Expressions From An Epidemic, Rebecca Holbrook, Lu Freitas, April Lammers, Rebecca Acree, Jamie Hollis, Holly Martin

P-12 Lesson Plans

This series of lessons for K-12 Art classrooms emerged from the spring 2016 ZMA exhibition, Art AIDS America. This groundbreaking exhibition underscored the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in American art. It introduced and explored a wide spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present. Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and co-curated by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, Director, Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo (The State University of …

The Artist, The Workhorse: Labor In The Sculpture Of Anna Hyatt Huntington, Brooke Baerman

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) was an American sculptor of animals who founded the nation’s first sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens, in 1932. Hyatt Huntington, whose personal papers are housed at Syracuse University, is an important yet understudied artist. Focusing on Hyatt Huntington’s sculptures in Brookgreen Gardens and on the gardens themselves, which also included a zoo, this paper will examine themes of labor in the artist’s oeuvre.

Hyatt Huntington placed an emphasis on hard work as she fought to distinguish herself as a sculptor in a male-dominated field. The products of her labor often venerate the work of animals, from bulls …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Salvaging Print: Letterhead In Post-Industrial Urban America, Nancy Sharon Collins

The Mid-America Print Council Conference

This panel will explore the link between today’s small press movement and the formal aspects of commercial printing during the American 20th century. Panelists include Christine Medley , Philip Gattuso, and Nancy Bernardo.

Using as its primary example letterhead from defunct companies in Detroit, and secondarily, specimens of business and legal letterhead from other urban centers of the industrial United States, this panel will examine and discuss: What did letterhead represent to 20th century printers in local markets such as Detroit? What is the significance of printed letterhead, and stationery, to the art of small press printing in post-industrial cities …

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …

November 15, Usm Special Collections

Batchelder-Haley Letters

In this letter, dated to approximately 1916, Abbie writes to Mrs. Tibbets about several topics, including her teaching job, attending an exhibition, seeing the Emperor pass on the street, tea services, and describes in detail her accommodations. She says that she is very happy in Japan now that she is more used to the climate.

July 23, 1907, Usm Special Collections

Batchelder-Haley Letters

Cora writes to Mrs. Tibbets about her vacation trip from where she was staying in Tokyo to several different places around Japan. She writes of her stay in a Japanese style hotel. She also writes about the scenery around her, and about how long it takes her by rail to get to her travel destinations. She also writes of a traveling companion named George, and how she has invited Abbie to come and visit her and meet George.

April 11, 1907, Usm Special Collections

Batchelder-Haley Letters

In this letter, Cora writes to Mrs. Tibbets about life in Japan. She writes about the climate, and how she finds she cannot do as much due to the "enervating" nature of the climate there. She describes a "sword walking" ceremony, in which one climbs a ladder made of swords. She then writes of the beginnings of spring in Japan and how there is a fair coming to Japan, "the largest ever held in Japan."

January 18, 1907, Usm Special Collections

Batchelder-Haley Letters

In this letter, Abbie writes to Mrs. Tibbets about the "glorious" scenery where she is staying. She writes of the mountains, streams, tall oak trees, and blossoms as the season changes from winter to spring.

December 26, 1906, Usm Special Collections

Batchelder-Haley Letters

In this letter, Cora writes to Mrs. Tibbets to thank her for the Christmas gifts. She describes the table that they set for a traditional western-style Christmas. They invited a Japanese couple, who were described by Cora to be very fascinated with the Christmas decor. She also tells Mrs. Tibetts about her coming vacation with George to Oshima, as there is a volcano there that they are intending to climb.