Art and Design Commons^™

Storytelling For A Changing World: Comics As Agitprop, Kruttika Susarla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay imagines fictional storytelling and urban practices of maintenance, repair, and care as interrelated to one another. They are both practices engaged in building a better world. Urban scholars like Gautam Bhan, Shannon Mattern, and David Harvey propose the city as a space for envisioning the kind of community we want to be—a space for working towards our collective future. By engaging in fictional storytelling, I argue, we are doing the same thing: the dual work of taking from fact and representing it to an audience while also engaging in imagining and world-building. This is also a practice of …

The Wizard's Alphabet Book: Illustration As Counter-Environment To The Digital World, Stephen Barany

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis essay accompanies a built installation of twenty-six densely drawn illustrations, each consisting of numerous creatures and objects whose names all begin with the same letter. Thus, each illustration represents a different letter of the alphabet. Printed on cloud-shaped substrates and suspended as a group in a 10”x10” ring, the array of illustrations form a small space where viewers can immerse themselves in the act of free and careful looking. This essay elaborates on the ideas that propelled the design and construction of this illustrated installation.

This essay explores the potential for illustration to create a space for looking …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

Home Suite Home: An Analysis Of Comfort In Americana And Motel Culture, Jodi Kolpakov

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay provides a critical look at the motel, investigating it as a souvenir, exploring its nostalgic phenomenon, and questioning its complexity of comfort. We begin by looking at the evolution of the motel and how its strange stereo- type came to be. I dissect the terms “shady” and “sketchy” as both a psychological and illustrated representation of the motel while closely reading how these terms appear in other forms of media, such as Bates Motel and Bad Times at the El Royale. Through exploring nostalgic Americana, I investigate how motels connect us from the past to the pres- …

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

Superficial: An Exploration Of Decoration, Fashion, Taste, Camp, And Trends, Jillian Ohl

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Since the rise of consumer culture in the late 19th century, Americans have had a complicated relationship with decorative objects, the idea of taste, and the cycle of trends within our classist society. This essay examines some of the decorative objects in my childhood home such as patterned wallpaper and an antique chair as well as a contemporary brand name mascara. While these objects do not have major functional properties, their decoration and superficiality bring me joy. To better understand my appreciation of decoration and aesthetics, I assess how an object or fashion is considered in good or bad taste. …

Fictitious Ecology, Paulina Zuckerman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis project, The Mountain Fog, is a children’s picture book pitch that tells a light-hearted story of two dogs who must face an environmental disaster. In this accompanying critical essay, I break down the process of crafting a fictional relationship between author-illustrator, animal characters, and the environment. It begins through the context of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” which identifies seeing the world through two lenses - the Primary world and the Secondary world. From these terms, I navigate the idea of a fictitious ecology, an encapsulated anthropomorphic world governed by the creator’s personal experience with nature. This …

The Precarity Of Images: Sci-Fi Worldbuilding And Its Uses In Agitprop, Noah Jodice

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

“The Precarity of Images” examines how theories of worldbuilding common to the science fiction genre are applied to the making of agitational propaganda for liberation movements. In doing so, it questions how both explicit and implicit political images—posters, games, comics, illustrations, social media posts—either light a pathway for making a more just world or limit our ability to imagine alternate futures.

Following the ethos of Steven Jackson’s essay “Rethinking Repair,” the paper takes the “breakdown, erosion, and decay” of images as a starting point. Images change meaning over time as our cultural connections to them shift. Strategies of decoding and …

Because Potato, Candice Evers

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis project explores the phenomenological qualities of the internet; asking, since the internet is difficult to grasp, what other modes of investigation might we have available? Using an investigative framework set forth by Jack Halberstam, this thesis declines to come to knowledge solely through understanding the formal, the structural, the highly visible and mainstream. The literature that I have gathered provides a range of modes for interrogating the simultaneously central and inconsequential subject of my thesis itself: the potato. Juxtaposing the physical, political and material conditions of the potato the internet’s least academic mode of knowing: the meme. Analyzing …

Twisting Tales: A Guide To Fairytale Adaptation, Tori Forster

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

“Twisting Tales” is a guidebook examining fairytales and the realm of fairytale adaptation. To begin with, I define fairytales by expanding on Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”. By defining fairytales as abstracted tales set in the realm of Faerie, adaptations of fairytales become an avenue in which to explore world building and narrative, which fairytales naturally lend themselves to. The guidebook also explores more troubling tropes and trends in the fairytale, particularly those regarding women. Marcia K. Lieberman’s essay “Someday My Prince Will Come”critiques heroines in fairytales and serves as a dialogue for the role of the female protagonist in …

Necessary Myths, Jessica Ramsey

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis essay was inspired by my search for a belief system that could transform despair over what will be lost through climate change into valuing what we still have. In researching the earliest iterations of belief structures, I came across the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings. These paintings are the oldest known works of art, and by my interpretation the first evidence of religious life. They are a series of representational paintings which tell a story, and I was inspired to emulate this methodology in my own exploration of belief.

My essay investigates the relationship between images and religion. Through W.J.T …

Gumball Astronauts: Establishing A Space-Time Vocabulary For Genre Bending In Picture Stories, Henry Uhrik

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This paper attempts to redefine genre as a set of bodily experiences rather than a collection of thematic objects. Beginning with the western genre as a whole and ending with my own comics work, I pull apart elements within specific narratives and analyze them as mechanical divides that disrupt the reader’s experience of time and space. This paper explores these generic arcs that branch from film to comics to video games. The first section of the paper pulls apart the approach I take when looking at genre, one that is influenced by Bahktin’s idea of the chronotope, a time-space defining …