Art and Design Commons^™

Ink (2026)

Rabble, 2014-

The student-run features magazine covering the fashion, art, music and culture worlds at VCU and in Richmond. Published annually in print and updated regularly online.

Pwatem: An Anthology Of Literature And Art (2026)

Pwatem (Poictesme), 2006-

Pwatem is an anthology of literature and art from undergraduate students at Virginia Commonwealth University. Pwatem publishes poetry, prose and art of all kinds from talented undergraduate students of all majors.

Film For Jeanette, Brice Goldberg

Theses and Dissertations

Film for Jeanette is an experimental documentary concerning grief, memory, and what remains of those who have left this physical plane. The film paints the portrait of my late sister, Jeanette Lee Goldberg, who died in a car accident when she was 19. What begins as a memorial becomes a celebration of her life and an exploration into the complexities of her character that led to her death. Jeanette’s story is told through interviews with family members, while the visuals, created with various alternative 16mm film techniques, depict my own journey through the filmmaking process. I was only 3 when …

Emanata Presents: Hunger (2026)

Emanata, 2014-

Started by illustrator and comics artist Chris Kindred in 2014 with Weird, Vol. 1, Emanata is VCU’s first-ever comics anthology.

Amendment: Literary And Art Journal (2026)

Amendment, 2004-

Amendment is a VCU student-produced progressive literature and art journal that provides a platform for students to promote equality, tolerance, and social progression through artistic expression.

Re-Sense, Nneoma Njoku

Theses and Dissertations

Re-Sense examines artist’s books as perceptual tools capable of reshaping how readers encounter history, memory, and archival absence. Beginning with the idea that books teach us how to know and how to see, the text argues that conventional book structures often reinforce Western knowledge systems through overemphasis of linearity, coherence, and containment. In contrast, artist’s books' experimental structures support novel modes of knowing and relation to ourselves and the world of humans and non-humans. The author describes this process of exhuming perception from Western constraints as re-sensing.

Through re-sensing, the historical past becomes less like a fixed record and more …

In Search Of The Soul Of Creativity: Authorship, Agency, And Meaning In Refractive Collaboration With Generative Ai, Fatima Nazir

Theses and Dissertations

When images can be generated in seconds, what remains uniquely human in the act of creation? In Search of the Soul of Creativity: Authorship, Agency, and Meaning in Refractive Collaboration with Generative AI investigates where authorship, agency, and meaning reside within design practices mediated by generative AI. Rather than using AI to produce predictable results, this research deliberately relinquishes control to observe how generative systems interpret language through their own learned associations. Through a practice-led investigation across four generative models within the Higgsfield platform, user prompts were progressively shortened from full sentences to single words, revealing recurring patterns and cultural …

The Ethereal Being That Is Me, And Maybe You, Hwiy Chang

Theses and Dissertations

The Ethereal Being That Is Me, and Maybe You is a 23-minute video collection of short stories accompanied by an installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. This thesis explores the work’s creation as a visual and narrative meditation on self-transformation, drawing from personal experiences in therapy and philosophical texts including Carl Jung’s concept of the unconscious. The paper examines how each story represents a distinct stage of transformation—from recognizing patterns to confronting setbacks to reshaping internal dialogue—and how watercolor’s fluid, unpredictable nature serves as a visual metaphor for the process of change. The installation component …

Walking And Wondering, Helen T. Tran

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis approaches walking as a form of inquiry and the Flood Wall as a site open to reinterpretation. I believe that the way we walk changes the way we observe and experience the world around us. This contrast between purposeful and leisurely walking reveals how time and intention shape our awareness of space. When walking is no longer dictated by urgency, it invites observations and questions. Slowing our pace allows curiosity to emerge, which aligns with my design ethos of asking questions as a foundation for understanding and creating meaningful experiences.

The Flood Wall’s emphasis on uninterrupted movement prioritizes …

My Mouth Is A Glutton, My Mouth Is A Lover., Cole Kamerick Eller

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a reflection on my relationship with jewelry. I discuss the impact of jewelry

and its materials. What are the ramifications of these objects? Politically, socially, and

spiritually. I reflect on material agency, cultural unconscious, and value systems, and

how I relate to jewelry, my love for it, and my grief for it. This work is the result of ritual

and impulse. The writing is my reflection on the results of that ritual.

Light And Unseen, Daša Kulikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a body of paintings and two poetic fragments. Shaped by distance and displacement, the work finds its ground in the tension between the desire to be free from the past and heal, and longing for home and connection. Painting practice becomes an event of contact with what is lost, or unclear, or in the process of becoming through accumulating layers, marks, erasures, and traces of the process of its making.

There Is A Puddle In Stonehenge, Nathaniel Newcomb

Theses and Dissertations

I began by making what I called "furniture": finding discarded logs and using a chainsaw, I milled out slabs of wood far larger than any normal board or beam, and gave them the function of chair, table, shelf. Sometimes it was a "shelf" in name only, and was commentary on furniture. In my practice, using discarded wood is necessary for the sake of the earth; making original pieces is necessary for the sake of my soul. I am reminded of megaliths when I erect these enormous forms in wood. I make intuitively, and like the meaning of megaliths, obscured by …

Sensory Constellations, Madaline K. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates neurodiversity within the field of fine arts by integrating disability studies, institutional critique, and material practices in painting and printmaking. Through visual analysis and studio-based research, the project examines how tactile engagement, color relationships, and repetitive mark-making can articulate embodied experiences of neurodivergence. It challenges dominant institutional frameworks that pathologize neurodivergent behaviors by reframing stimming as a generative and communicative practice. The resulting body of work includes both image-making and the creation of tactile objects designed to facilitate sensory interaction. The thesis proposes alternative ways of understanding artistic practice and accessibility within art institutions.

Between The Veins: Materializing Memory In The Age Of Digital Storage, Alice Mohammed Aslem

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a childhood stored behind a password? This thesis began with a simple moment of scrolling through my son’s photographs on my phone. As the images multiplied, they began to lose clarity, turning into an overwhelming digital archive. This made me ask: What kind of memories am I preserving for him?

Having grown up between analog and digital worlds, Between the Veins explores how I navigate memory through material objects and digital archives. Using weaving, images are transferred onto screw pine and palm leaves. In this process, digital files of his childhood are translated into organic fibers of …

Munajat: Design As A Dialogue With The Divine, Shawky Abdalla

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary design discourse remains grounded in functional, seemingly user-centered paradigms, often neglecting what lies beyond the tangible within a human experience. This research challenges such frameworks by positioning design as a dialogue with what exceeds the physical, moving toward the experiential, where meaning precedes and informs form. Drawing on Islamic philosophy, particularly the relationship between zahir and batin (outward form and inward meaning), the study repositions design as a medium for remembrance (dhikr) rather than mere utility.

Through a critique of modernist and postmodernist principles, the research proposes a series of objects that engage with memory, introspection, and transcendence in …

Algorhythm: Commodification Of Hobbies On Social Media Platforms, Fariha Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Forcing the world online, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to turn social-media-based hobbies into income-generating cash cows. Digital creative spaces became sites of capitalist logic where hobbyists came to operate as both laborers and commodities. Profit-focused algorithms operate imperceptibly, shaping creative behavior and decision-making in ways that are difficult to recognize, and even harder to resist. This thesis asks how algorithmic participation on platforms such as Instagram conditions a hobbyist, and how that conditioning can be made legible to audiences who inhabit such platforms without always seeing them. Using autoethnography, I position myself as both researcher and subject to document the …

The Weight, Hammet Reavis

Theses and Dissertations

What follows drifts between out to under, argument to object, learned to unlearned, and then back again, for now. What remains is not erased, but held in tension - pressed forward by an unspoken weight. However, let's go on record and retrace this gesture, not by means of crossthru, but as underline.

Will You Let Me In?, Irene Piazza

Theses and Dissertations

Imposed borders are everywhere: The borders created by stanchions during bureaucratic lines, the borders of a country, the borders of a page. Humans are forced to follow them. Borders are imposed structures that dictate a way to move, a way to write, a way to be confined. But what happens when those borders aren’t followed? What happens when someone decides to walk through the stanchion belt by crouching under it or sliding its buckle open? What happens if a person decides to walk outside of the paved pathway? What happens if someone crosses a border or writes beyond the page …

Contours Of Duration: Movement Authored Through Form—A Behavior Archive, Jood Senussi Elbeshti

Theses and Dissertations

Insect anatomy offers an elegant example of motion derived from structure. Inspired by insect movement, Contours of Duration employs a cam-and-follower system consisting of moving, leg-like parts, designed to engage a series of rotating cams, such that the shape of each cam’s surface activates the legs in unique ways, generating repetitive movement, and demonstrating how geometry produces distinct motion behaviors over time. Through iterative experimentation and controlled variation, trace emerges as a central methodology, whereby movement, over time, creates a distinct pattern of marks, making motion legible and reflecting how subtle changes to surface and form generate different behavioral outcomes. …

Spell Of Forty Small Failings, Erin B. Ehren

Theses and Dissertations

Spell of Forty Small Failings is a collection of images and writings that draws from an unruly range of literary forms, academic disciplines, and religious cannons in order to address the Divine—all that which exists on account of the phenomena of what it is to see and be seen: to hear and be heard: to touch and be touched: to know and be known, and through that knowing proceed beyond mediation. I wrote this thesis for me in the hopes that all along I was writing for you.

Mediator: Ornament As A Visual Language Of The Transcendent, Selma Fejzullaj

Theses and Dissertations

Adolf Loos’s declaration that “ornament is a crime” defined modernist design, establishing a legacy that dismisses ornamentation as wasteful and regressive. This research questions that legacy by repositioning aesthetics as a divinely grounded value, inspired by the Qur’anic vision of Paradise. In this celestial realm, beauty is not wasteful but a manifestation of divine perfection. Conceptually, the project reclaims ornament as a vital tool for contemplating metaphysical themes. Materially, it reimagines glass, shifting it from modernist "radical honesty" to a medium of layered depth. Recombining traditional Islamic ornamentation practices such as Girih and Chaharbagh, the project evokes the Qur’anic vision …

Waxing And Waning: Hidden Interiors Of Grassroots Expression, Asmita Baskar

Theses and Dissertations

Concealed interiors historically emerged from necessity in response to dominant systems around surveillance, control, and visibility. These hidden spaces carefully regulated access, cultivated intimacy, and enabled self-expression within grassroots groups and marginalized communities. Operating free from surveillance and in contrast to surrounding architectural and urban systems, these concealed spaces were not formally “interior designed”, yet they reveal how communities activate the interiors they encounter to retain agency.

Scholarship on grassroots resistance is largely examined through sociology, anthropology, psychology, or political science, with limited literature directly linking interiority, interior design, and resistance within covert spaces. This thesis addresses the gap in …

The Mundo I Imagine, Angeliky Castrellon

Theses and Dissertations

My work investigates the human experience of belonging and how the force of displacement alters the perception of one's present and enables dissociation. After leaving my home and starting a new life overseas, coming back never felt the same; I couldn’t find peace and comfort anywhere. This made me create an imaginary world called “Mundo.” Shelters for the souls of the displaced, looking for comfort. As I became a graduate student in the Craft/Materials Studies department, my perspective widened, and my work itself answered a question for me: I want to be comfortable everywhere; how can my home be everywhere …

Infrared Simulation, Sophia Zhou, Ashton Hoo, Tyler Ricks, Sebastian Fox, Kathy Phu

UROP Posters

Infrared image recognition is more difficult than visible-spectrum recognition due to limited high-quality training data. This project addresses that challenge by generating simulated infrared images using temperature-driven rendering in Unreal Engine and other 3D software. These simulations can support applications such as health monitoring, heat detection in mechanical and structural systems, thermal regulation, and engineering process control.

Ink (2025)

Rabble, 2014-

The student-run features magazine covering the fashion, art, music and culture worlds at VCU and in Richmond. Published annually in print and updated regularly online.

Unmasking Injustice In Tumultuous Times: Protest Art And Student Agency In A Summer Program, Indira Bailey

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

In today’s political climate, academic freedom is increasingly threatened, and topics that challenge dominant narratives are often censored. Art education faces growing pressure to thoughtfully integrate these critical issues into its curriculum. This paper explores a five-day summer social justice art workshop at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Using a social justice art education framework, the workshop engaged undergraduate students, including non-art majors, in social justice research through creative expression and protest art making. The author argues that non-visual art students can create impactful visual counter-narratives that confront oppression while engaging deeply with both creative processes and social …

Bridging Generations Through Art: Community, Creativity, And Wellbeing, Eva V. Coker Phd, Johnson K. Wor

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Bridging Generations Through Art: Community, Creativity, and Wellbeing

Abstract

This article documents an intergenerational Art Day event that brought together participants of all ages to engage in a shared community art experience. Hosted in a community setting and facilitated by graduate students, the event emphasized intergenerational artmaking as a way to foster connection, creativity, mutual leaning, and wellbeing across generations. Through activities such as mindful pattern-making, montage, linoleum block printing, and weaving, participants collaborated, exchanged skills, and created artworks. Each art station was designed to support personal reflection, exploration, and participants across ages and abilities, and was informed by research …

Red Thread, Unknotted: A Visual Self-Inquiry Into Becoming Artist /Educator, Jennifer Jervis

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

This arts-based self-inquiry presents a counternarrative of one woman artist/educator navigating identity formation, agency, and resistance within the gendered structures of the contemporary art world. Informed by posthuman feminist theory and guided by a/r/tography, the study uses artmaking as both inquiry and data to challenge the persistent divide between artist and art educator—particularly as experienced by women. Through reflexive writing and textile-based creation, the author offers a material and embodied critique of the systemic expectations that diminish women’s artistic authority and invisibilize their creative labor. The resulting work becomes a site of resistance, reclaiming artist identity through the layered intersections …

Art As Relational Freedom: Lifelong Learning Through Creativity, Community, And Critical Hope, Linda J. Helmick

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.