Art and Design Commons^™

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Megan Brandow-Faller. The Female Secession: Art And The Decorative At The Viennese Women’S Academy. Penn State Up, 2020., Christa Spreizer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Megan Brandow-Faller. The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy. Penn State UP, 2020. 304 pp.

The Project Of Hope: Middle Eastern Feminism In Controversy, Alla Myzelev

Art History

No abstract provided.

Introverse Arrangements: Rediscovering The Typewritings Of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Savannah M. Champion

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.”

Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers …

Contemporary Textiles: Unraveling White Feminist Discourse, Meredith Friedman

MA Theses

In recent decades, attention to textile art has flourished. The growth of contemporary studies committed to revising fiber’s hierarchical categorization represents a discursive turn heavily weighted within feminist inquiry. The interrelation between textile techniques and constructs of femininity and domesticity was at the base of a robust interdisciplinary field of feminist theory developing around the 1970s in the US. Often referred to as the second wave of feminism, this era experienced scholars and artists proposing the medium’s capacity to counter the elusive genre’s marginalization and, by extension, presenting textile’s ability to subvert notions of gender difference. This analysis aims to …

Femagogical Strategies In The Art School: Navigating The Institution, Barbara Knezevic, Amy Walsh

Articles

This writing aims to define and examine ‘femagogy’ and the transformative potential for an inclusive intersectional feminist teaching practice in Fine Art education in the context of the contemporary Irish art school. This writing will trace the influence of linguistic power structures and the influence of broader institutional patriarchy in an educational setting and outline the inspirations and genealogies of femagogy. This writing provides situated embodied examples of femagogy in practice. It proposes the femagogical model of teaching as one that situates itself outside prevailing patriarchal models and proposes strategies to reimagine knowledge production and navigate the prevailing structural patriarchy …

Nalini Malani's Medea Project: Gender And Nationhood In Postcolonial India, Maya Varma

Art and Art History Honors Projects

In 1996, renowned contemporary Indian artist Nalini Malani embarked on what would become a decades-long project exploring the Greek myth of Medea as an embodiment of postcolonialism. Considering Medea’s historical interpretations as a mistreated wife and a villainous mother, this thesis examines how Malani transforms Medea into a metaphor of resistance to British colonialism and anticolonial nationalism in post-Partition India. Against the backdrop of the 1947 Partition and subsequent political events relating nationhood with the female body, Malani negotiates Medea as an emancipatory figure who shifts essentialized notions of womanhood into more complex narratives of violence, subjectivity, and liberation.

The Fearsome Femme: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Lorenzo Sabatini's Giuditta Con La Testa Di Oloferne, Brant J. Bellatti

Art and Art History Theses

Lorenzo Sabatini (c. 1530-1576), an Italian artist working in the Mannerist period of art, created a revolutionary bloody rendering of the biblical story of Judith decapitating Holofernes. The Bolognese artist, and his painting Giuditta con la testa di Oloferne (Judith with the head of Holofernes), has not been extensively written on by scholars, therefore, this study suggests an original interpretation of the artwork. Lorenzo Sabatini would likely have borne witness to a number of decapitations in Bologna, because they were typically executed in public urban courtyards. Maturing in this sort of environment can impact an artist’s life. Through Lorenzo Sabatini’s …

Trace., Kcj Szwedzinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trace utilizes autoethnography to investigate aspects of Judaism to discover how one decides what to embrace, embody, or deny from inherited legacies. Autoethnography attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to systematically analyze and describe personal experience. The artist acting as Ba’alei Kushiah, or question bearer, uses Talmudic philosophy as a methodology and approach to art making. This research is self-referential; using Jewish thought to ask questions about Judaism. Judaism, often existing in an in between place with outward characteristics that reflect regional influences, facilitates a dialogue about whether there are relative or absolute delineations within and between …

Subversive Stitch, Kimberly Reinagel

MA Projects

WhiteBox Harlem is thrilled to present Subversive Stitch, a group exhibition featuring female contemporary artists that work in textiles, curated by Kimberly Reinagel. Presented at this show will be works by Eozen Agopian, Alexandria Deters, Zhen Guo, Lisa Kellner, Mariana Garibay Raeke, Kimberly Reinagel, Leila Seyedzadeh, Victoria Udondian and Christina Whitney Wong. This exhibition will look at the societal reassignment of the textile in the art market. Textiles throughout history have been primarily considered a "feminine" medium. Fabrics, fashion, embroidery and tapestry all connote a feminine background, and have thus notoriously not been received with much gravity. This exhibition is …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

All Is Fair In Love And War: An Exploration Of The History, Tactics, And Current Status Of The Guerrilla Girls, Elise Blankenship

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Founded as a response to a lack of female artists in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guerrilla Girls have been an active voice in the art world for over thirty years. The Guerrilla Girls have a history that is filled with both internal and external power struggles and issues of having one’s voice heard on a variety of platforms. When successful in having their voices heard, the Guerrilla Girls use several tactics. The Gorilla masks, the overtly feminine clothing, and the use of the names of dead female artists and juxtaposed with the use of verified …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Silhouettes Of A Silent Female’S Authority: A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Perspective On The Art Of Kara Walker, Angelica E. Perez

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998.

In a …

Niki De Saint Phalle: The Female Figure And Her Ambiguous Place In Art History, Lucy Kay Riley

Student Publications

Niki de Saint Phalle had a fearless approach in her representation of women and her invitation of audience interaction. Born in 1930, she lived through the years of very male dominated areas of art: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Dada. Niki de Saint Phalle provided a unique treatment of the female figure through drawing, painting, writing, found object sculpture, large public sculpture, and installation. One of the pieces I will primarily focus on embodies her fascination with audience interaction and the portrayal of the female figure: her controversial and temporary installation of 1966, ‘SHE – a cathedral.' In comparison to …

Wack! Art And The Feminist Revolution At Moca, Micol Hebron

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This article focuses on an art exhibit featuring works of feminist art throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Warm Journal: Special Issue On Competition Volume 1 Issue 3, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

WARM’s focus in this issue is on competition and its impacts on personal and professional life. Within this issue is a conversation between the women on the WARM Journal Committee entitled “Dividing the Pie” which discusses women and societal images. There were compositions on competition, artwork, and poems followed by a calendar of events. Also found is information on WARM Exhibitions and a piece about Jaci Schacht’s work authored by Fran Addington. This issue concludes with reviews of local displays, an open letter to Sam Sachs, and details about WARM members and membership.

Warm Journal Volume 1 Issue 2, 1972-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

This issue contains two interviews, one with Pat Olson about her graphic design work and life as an artist, and one with B.J. Shigaki about her life and being the director of the Rochester Art Center. There is a collection of poetry by Jill Breckenridge-Haldeman, and a review of Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer, a book on women’s “fine art” from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century. Also included in the issue were submissions of artistry with descriptions from members of WARM.

Warm Journal Volume 1 Issue 1, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

The main articles of this issue concern Julia Barkley’s trip to China, Taiwan, and Japan, an interview with Sally Brown, an art instructor in the Twin Cities, and a review of the Women’s Art Weekend by Roseanne Sullivan. Barkley’s travelogue, although it contains language dated by modern standards, is an insightful exposé of what life was like for female artists in East Asia at the start of the 1980s. Brown’s interview provides a window into the development of women’s artistry in the 1960s. The Women’s Art Weekend documented women speaking about their struggles against racism and sexism at MCAD, and …

Warm Newsletter 1978 January-March, 1973-2021 Women's Art Registry Of Minnesota

WARM Journal

WARM provides a newsletter for January-March of 1978. Its contents include meetings, announcements, openings, and membership information. The coordinator provides congratulations to grant winners, grants given for Women Invite Women and Visiting Artist Program, and thanks for work on grant proposals. Readers are given information about membership fees, the annual meeting, and an invitation to the open discussion during the annual meeting. Article 1: Membership amendment (includes levels of membership) to the by-laws of WARM has been revised and clarified within this newsletter. The letter concludes with upcoming events of Joan Snyder and Marcia Tucker, a Wild Rice television date, …

Risd Press March 15, 1974, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

RISD press was a student newspaper published weekly in the early 1970s, a self-described attempt at consolidating all the information outlets of the school, including the previous student newspaper, Montage. The March 15, 1974 issue had an article about sports at RISD, a letter to the RISD building committee from RISD architecture students, and an article about a quilt lecture with Jonathan Holstein. There also was an article about the Women in Wintersession class in New York City. Poems, comics, ads, classifieds, and events for RISD students were also included.

Risd Press October 12, 1973, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

RISD press was a student newspaper published weekly in the early 1970s, a self-described attempt at consolidating all the information outlets of the school, including the previous student newspaper, Montage. Beginning in September 1973, RISD press included the Brown Daily Herald’s weekly issue of Fresh Fruit as an insert. The issue of October 12, 1973 has an interview with Dr. Ostrow of the RISD Museum. Also there is an article about the Photography Department and the Photo Education Society. A recipe, a poem , comics and events for RISD student also are included.

Montage November 17, 1972, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Montage was a student-published, bi-weekly newspaper written in the early 1970s. The issue of November 17, 1972 included an article about the Miter Boxing Club. There was a contest for changing the name of the students newspaper and a students won for the name change to Expose. There was an article about the recent Figure Sculpture exhibit at the RISD Museum. Also there was another article about the changes to the professional exam for students seeking architectural licenses at some New England colleges, including RISD. Events for RISD students were also listed.

Montage October 18, 1972, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Montage was a student-published, bi-weekly newspaper written in the early 1970s. The issue of October 18, 1972 had an article about an open house at the RISD Campus Assistance Center on October 26, 1972. A women's lib multiple choice quiz, RISD Museum news and a game were also in this issue. Events of interest to RISD students and classifieds were also included.

Free Risd! Newspaper April 15, 1970, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

The Free RISD! Newspaper was a community-created newspaper meant to take the place of the RISD Extra, a newspaper that itself was published sometime in the late '60s or early '70s, no issues of which exist today. A single issue of the Free RISD! Newspaper is held by the archives; it covers the end of Extra, issues of separation between the RISD museum and its student body, issues of feminism, letters to the editor, a calendar of events, and some advertisements. Higher resolution scans and the physical documents can be requested at the archives.