Art and Design Commons^™

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 …

Hauntings Of Transnational Art Learning And Teaching: A Duo-Ethnography Of Two Asian Art Educators’ Transformative Experiences, Hayon Park, Sohee Koo

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Reflecting on lived experiences as art learners in South Korea and professional practices in the United States as art educators, the authors draw from Derrida’s (1994) “hauntology” and present how their transnational experiences continue to conjure up and affect the everyday lives of Asian women junior faculty today in the US through duoethnographic approaches. Posing the question “how might personal lived experiences of an educator foster art pedagogy and research?” and interviewing each other on aesthetics, education, and identity, this article seeks to: 1) inform others about how Korean art educators navigate matters of transnational education experience and colonization and …

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.

Glossed Over, Rebecca Oh

Theses and Dissertations

Glossed Over is a collection of interdisciplinary artworks exploring my Korean-American diasporic identity and how gender, queerness, religion, neurodivergence, and internet culture intersect within that experience. Through a blend of painting, woodworking, and sculpture, this installation carries the various elements of undefinable 한 (pronounced: han), a concept I attempt to define and contextualize in the Introduction and throughout this thesis. Each artwork operates through coded language, metaphor, and partial disclosure, offering space for the othered to find recognition through subtle cues and signifiers. Through Glossed Over and this thesis, I scratch the surface of my journey in reconciling generational trauma …

Theopoetics Prothesis: An Exploration In Faith And Form, Elise Aleman, Elise Aleman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is rooted in the biblical definition of faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Like the Bible’s layered complexity—its patterns, metaphors, and cultural references—faith is not merely intellectual but an active trust in what is unseen. It transcends knowledge, anchoring itself in conviction and hope. This intersection of theology and lived experience is at the core of my practice.

Theopoetics—a framework that fuses theology and artistic expression—shapes my approach, allowing faith to be embodied through form rather than merely explained. Two seemingly distinct bodies of work—one centered …

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Doing History With The Saints, Marcus O’Donnell Prof

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

The portfolio and practice reflection presents four pieces from, Queer Saints (2025), an evolving new series of photogravure prints. The series plays with the covering and uncovering of the saint’s body and the collision of the erotic and ecstatic in Christian iconography. Each print takes a particular saint and layers a coupling of images together, creating condensed narratives of desire. The layered images haunt one another ghosting both spirit and flesh. This reflection draws on Elizabeth Freeman’s idea of “erotohistoriography” to explore ways of doing history with the body in visual arts practice.

Mark & Gesture, William E. Pugh

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores the development of my painting and printmaking practice through the lens of process, artistic influence, and creative community. At the heart of my work is a dedication to mark-making in printmaking and painting as gesture and authorship and as a visual language shaped by process, scale, layering, and texture. My work is influenced by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Wayne Thiebaud, and Peter Max, as well as by my personal history with music. The paper reflects on how process, interdisciplinary influence, and artistic dialogue shape a practice rooted in both personal exploration and discovery.

Guanacos De Corazón, Ana Marcela Sinnett

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the intersections of indigeneity, mestizaje, and decolonial aesthetics through a mixed-media art practice rooted in Salvadoran history and identity. Drawing on ancestral traditions such as indigo dyeing and backstrap weaving, Guanacos de Corazón investigates how materiality, folklore, and handcraft function as forms of visual resistance, meaning art that disrupts dominant narratives, critiques systems of power, and reclaims erased cultural memory.

Through formal analysis, historical context, and interviews with Salvadoran artists, this thesis challenges ideas of mestizaje that promote cultural and ethnic superiority and contribute to the erasure of ancestral beliefs.

How do we rescue ancestral traditions that …

The Creative Front, Aleksandr O. Barrett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss my thesis exhibition, The Creative Front, focusing on my materials, content, and context as they relate to each piece or body of work. This exhibition is the culmination of my work, which centers on my experience with the Russo-Ukrainian war. My work can be interpreted metaphorically, poetically, and directly through sculpture, installation, sound, and film. I am portraying very human stories and experiences from a full-scale war raging in Europe. My work is immersive, placing the viewer in an atmosphere of war, and conveying a sense of urgency and compassion for those who …

Caring For Public Art On Campus: A Case Study In Archives, Conservation And Curation For Public Art At The City University Of New York At York College In South Jamaica, Queens (2025 Cuny Research In The Classroom Grant Project), Emily Verla Bovino

Open Educational Resources

The City University of New York (CUNY) hosts public art at many of its colleges. The practice of funding public art through the CUNY Construction Fund and the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (DASNY) began after a 1966 New York State Law created a financing and construction partnership between the two entities.

As these collections of museum-quality contemporary art on CUNY campuses age and increase in value, how can care and conservation be ensured? Conceived in response to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the projected 11% growth of employment for archivists, curators, museum technicians, …

From Ink To Code, From Binary To Boundless Reality—Until All Returns To Emptiness, Weitong Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.

Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.

Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, …

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.

All Alone, Rachel Sisley

EMET Projects

This artwork depicts a child all alone while she is being cared for in a pediatric hospital.

The Body Is On, Kitty F. Davies

Theses and Dissertations

THE BODY IS ON is a visual art exhibition that considers queer embodiment, pervert as political identity, the arriving climate catastrophe, and difficulty in artmaking. I make use of various concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to interconnect my own with the primary goal to ask: what does futurity look like or mean in these climates (in both a literal, warming sense and an increasingly fascistic, political one), and how do we actualize that future?

Bad News, Rachel Sisley

EMET Projects

This is a representation of a patient sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. It is based on a memory I have from a clinical rotation, in which someone was diagnosed with cancer with a very poor prognosis. The dark green coating the room and his body represents the overwhelming fear he possibly feels. The blue represents sadness, while the red represents anger.

A Comparison Of The Strategies And Methods Influencing Success Among Formally Trained Artists V. Outsider, Naive, Or Self-Taught Artists, Anna Stolina

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis examines the contrasting strategies and methods formally trained artists, self- taught artists, naive artists, and outsider artists used to influence their success in their chosen field. The study explored each of their educational backgrounds, available resources, and unique expertises that allowed them to achieve a successful art career. Every pathway has unique advantages and challenges (Langley, 2024). Formally trained artists and exhibiting artists typically have degrees in art from a university or post-secondary art school. My research highlighted the benefits of having a formal art education, a structured learning environment, access to resources, networking opportunities, and professional mentorship. …

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Front Matter, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

An Interview With Sharon Lee Hart, Mysoon Rizk, Sharon Lee Hart

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Spirit And Invention: Drawings By Giambattista And Domenico Tiepolo, Roberto G. Peredo

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Speculations On Brunelleschi’S Pazzi Chapel, Howard A. Risatti Professor Emeritus, Donald Schrader

Art Inquiries

Why speculate on Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel? As Giorgio Vasari wrote, many of Brunelleschi’s projects were not finished in his lifetime and not as he wished. The lesson to be drawn, says Vasari, who was writing a century after Brunelleschi’s death, is that “anyone who wishes to leave a memorial of his existence should complete it in his own lifetime and not put faith in anyone else.” Since Brunelleschi died well before the chapel was completed, issues have been raised for over a century about its inconsistencies regarding the open loggia, the barrel-vaulted portico, and the façade. This paper addresses …

Corsets Off. Camille Claudel And Polish Women Sculptors Of The 19th Century, Beata Niedzialkowska

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, And Self-Determination Since 1969, Shannon Bewley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Full Issue, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Black Artists In America: From Civil Rights To The Bicentennial, Mallory Sharp

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Shape Of Time: Korean Art After 1989, Saehim Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Conservation Through Art: Saving Alabama Hemlocks, Kelly A. Wacker

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Napoleon’S Corpse And The Subversion Of Historical And Political Authority, Alissa Rachel Adams

Art Inquiries

This article examines printed depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exhumed corpse in conjunction with Romantic historical practice in nineteenth-century France. Current studies on history in the Romantic age emphasize Romantic historicism’s link to a widespread and frustrated yearning for direct access to the past that will settle the upheavals of the revolutionary period. This study considers how the corpse and its representations fulfill the desire for direct access to the past but, in doing so, also contributes to a proliferation of individual understandings of the past—and future. Through an analysis of representations of the corpse, their sources, and their connection to …

Costume Design And Social Status Visualization In Javanese Dance At Pura Mangkunegaran, Sriyadi -. Sriyadi, R.M. Pramutomo, Yoni Wulan Sari, Luh Elvina

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

The design of costumes holds a crucial role in visualizing the social status of characters in Javanese dance. By employing symbolic systems, costume design conveys this status to the audience. This study investigates the relationship between costume design and the depiction of social status in Javanese dance at Pura Mangkunegaran. Utilizing a qualitative methodology with an ethnocoreological approach, the research draws on a literature review as its primary data source. This review involves analyzing various documents, photographs, and videos. The findings indicate that accessories and attributes within costume design are integral to the symbolic system that represents social status. As …