Art and Design Commons^™

4 In 10 Tiktok Users Find Their ‘For You’ Page Extremely Or Very Interesting, Aashish Gadani

Theses and Dissertations

Using video supercuts, sculptural forms, and digital prints on textiles in my work, I explore how images/videos can be used to reflect on cultural and personal trends. In this paper, I discuss how the structure of software recommendation systems combines with ideas of the post-internet image and creates unintended cultural consequences.

Fountain, Sadaf Azadehfar

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the intersections of water, power, identity, and architecture through the lens of colonial and postcolonial landscapes, focusing particularly on Persian gardens and fountain sculptures. Drawing on historical, cultural, and symbolic frameworks, the study explores how water systems embody both practical and spiritual roles, positioning water as a force of control, resistance, and regeneration. Central to this work are analyses of arches and garden designs, which serve as architectural metaphors for cosmic harmony, community gathering, and contested space. Through a combination of visual analysis, historical research, and personal artistic practice—including ceramic sculptures and multimedia installations—this thesis traces the …

An Archeology Of Looking, Marco G. Dasilva

Theses and Dissertations

Marco DaSilva’s mosaics explore camouflage and syncretism, blending symbols from American culture, Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian deities and queer spaces. His work examines objects as relics, where identity is hidden and revealed. By integrating simple materials and transforming them into unique compositions, DaSilva creates hybrid objects where all of his worlds intersect, crafting his own mythology.

The Hand Reaches Out, Martin John Miller Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Through a combination of narrative description and in-depth explication, I will detail the physical experience of navigating the thesis work while tying those motions directly to personal writing. My hope is that, through this installation, I can establish a framework for relating to these systems through the felt and physical, through the suggested and implied, through the appearance of the ordinary, and on through to the interruption of the absurd.

Raised Spirits The Visceral Journey Of Black Generational Female Trauma And The Transcendent Healing Power Of Spiritual Dance, Wendy Ann Powell

Theses and Dissertations

Black female bodies have endured sustained trauma globally since the transatlantic slave trade, and it continues into 2025. The collective consciousness has carried the generational burden and mobilized it within the womb. Powell uses this intergenerational knowledge to frame the basis for spiritual dance practices as a healing praxis.

Modernism Unwoven: Art Deco, Brasilidade, And The Erasure Of Regina Gomide Graz, Antonia Machado Oliver

Theses and Dissertations

“Modernism Unwoven: Art Deco, Brasilidade, and the Erasure of Regina Gomide Graz” explores the life and practice of the Brazilian artist Regina Gomide Graz, whose textile works contributed to introducing Art Deco to Brazil. Regina is associated with many of the events that marked Brazilian modernism in the 1920s and 1930s and was engaged with the concerns of her milieu, for instance, the synthesis of European artistic developments with themes regional to Brazil and the development of a national aesthetic identity. Despite this, her work has scarcely been studied. This thesis examines the sociocultural, economic, and personal conditions that …

Island Child: Sound, Memory, And The Diasporic Imagination, Rachel J. Oh

Theses and Dissertations

Island Child is an immersive audiovisual installation that explores how sound-based memory sustains personal and cultural identity. At its core, the piece reflects on the quiet yet shared emotion among those who have left home—the inevitability of departure, and the complex act of holding both loss and love. For many, leaving is not a choice, but a necessity. Yet the act of leaving leaves a permanent mark, etched in memory, time, and body.

This project creates a contemplative space for those silent truths, using sound and image to express the tension between separation and continuity. Traditional Korean lullabies, my grandmother’s …

One Can Only Dream, Sophia V. Yacca

Theses and Dissertations

One Can Only Dream is an interactive installation in which players are invited to navigate a liminal, dream-like game, engage with a branching series of questions, and introspect upon the relationships between unconscious expression, conscious self-perception, and the inherent difficulty of depicting, sharing, and understanding subconscious thought.

Rooted in both my personal experience with a rare neurophysiological condition and in my desire to create, this project examines dreams not only as a medical and cultural phenomenon, but also as a means to form identity, reflect trauma, and inspire creativity. Drawing from modern interactive storytelling and my lived experiences, this work …

Hemispheres Of Faith: Mapping The Global Journey Of An Ivory Rosary Bead At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Mary M. Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

Hemispheres of Faith reattributes a carved ivory rosary bead in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Quito School in 18th-century Ecuador. Through examining the trade history of the Manila Galleons, material analysis, and iconographic study, Hemispheres of Faith challenges the bead's European origins and reveals the object as a product of global exchange, devotional practice, and colonial artistic collaboration within the Spanish Empire.

Piecemeal, Max J. Eisenberg

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring the history of photographic manipulation both inside and outside of the camera from the late 19th century until today. My work plucks out cultural and local signifiers from the state of Florida, and the American South as a whole, and disseminates them using a constructed symbolic vernacular in the form of in-camera collaging on large format film.

The Dinner Table, Eric Juhola

Theses and Dissertations

The Dinner Table is a dual-projection installation exploring familial ritual, memory, and selfhood. Viewers sit at a circular table while projections unfold across the table and a suspended window, prompting reflection on how ritual functions as performance—and what remains of the self when those rituals fade or disappear.

Out From Under: Stories Of Endometriosis, Prisca Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

Six individuals. One diagnosis. In Out From Under, people living with endometriosis gather for an art-centered workshop. Through collage and conversation, they transform isolating medical experiences into paths of connection and collective healing.

Endometriosis affects approximately one in ten women of reproductive age, yet diagnosis is often delayed by nearly a decade. During this time, many suffer from debilitating symptoms without adequate care or accessible treatment. Out From Under explores the lived experience of endometriosis through the lens of socially engaged documentary filmmaking. Participants share their medical histories, emotions, and frustrations in a structured yet open environment designed for intimacy, …

Coffee Bindings, M. Ermolenko

Theses and Dissertations

Coffee Bindings is a multi-media interactive installation weaving themes of history, memory, death, and spaces that no longer exist through the lens of coffee readings and a mixture of physical and digital media. By navigating ghost spaces (spaces/places that used to exist but don’t anymore), and looking at survival through three time periods, Coffee Bindings jumps through liminal time and space, navigating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh in 2020-2024, while also tying them to personal family history with the death of my father and the loss of the physical space of …

Geraldo De Barros’S Fotoformas: Towards The Construction Of New Forms Of Legibility, Jay Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the legibility and reception of Geraldo de Barros’s Fotoformas within Western art institutions, using MoMA’s 2021 Fotoclubismo exhibition as a case study. It argues that the integration of Brazilian modernist photography into canonical narratives often hinges on strategic affinities with Euro-American frameworks. Drawing on institutional critique, postcolonial theory, and the concept of Anthropophagy, the study explores how Fotoformas challenges conventional photographic discourse and reveals broader dynamics of artistic legitimacy and representation.

What Is Art Hungry For? Food And The Collective Performance Of Life, Sophie Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines FOOD, the artist-run restaurant founded in 1971 SoHo, as a feminist, collective artwork. Centering overlooked figures like Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard, it explores how FOOD reimagined authorship, labor, and space, linking artistic, economic, and social experimentation through archival research, spatial theory, and feminist art history.

All You Can Eat, Kelly Schiesswohl

Theses and Dissertations

All You Can Eat is a 2D-animated horror short following the patrons and inhabitants of a bakery as they prepare for its annual pie-eating contest. As the contest nears, tensions rise after the discovery of a dark secret amongst the staff inspires rebellion. Through the visual metaphor of pie and the pie-eating contest, this film explores how sexual violence functions on a systemic level. It explores our collective conditioning to a range of behaviors that contribute to patriarchal oppression and the social cycles that reinforce them across generations. Through design and surreal storytelling, this film captures the urgent threat of …

Unplug: Psychological Impact Of Nature In The Age Of Media Technology, Haisi Hu

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the psychological, cultural, and societal consequences of humanity's growing disconnection from the natural world, intensified by dependence on artificial environments such as media, technology, and generative AI.

Body Of Light, Lucy C. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Body of Light is a two channel video installation, incorporating a combination of archival material and present day footage to explore and speculate upon the traces of Audrey Munson’s life that remain, a ghostly presence creeping into our current world.

Spills & Layers, Anastasya Peña

Theses and Dissertations

Spills & Layers explores how process can give a painting meaning. My work uses acrylic and oil paint to create compositions that are both visible (spilling across the canvas freely) and hidden (caught under layers of paint).

A Limit That Recedes, Chloe Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

In "A Limit that Recedes", I discuss my art practice in terms of accumulation and techniques of reproduction, such as casting, printing, and repetitive actions. I contextualize my work among artists such as H.C. Westermann, Isa Genzken, and Paul Thek. The work featured in this thesis explores ideas of aspiration, longing, and failure, and explores themes of the fraught relationship of the human and nature.

Fugitive Colors, Natalie Rose Eddings

Theses and Dissertations

My objects are meditations on intertwining themes of labor, rest, and interiority and their shadow sides—power, subjugation and the gaze. I couple materials that have millenia-long histories such as metals, glass, paper and clay with found objects and plat materials to illustrate narratives and exhume memories. Drawn from nature and technologies of land, plant stewardship and the domestic realm, I imagine my sculptures as life supporting vessels or magical enclosures.

Through sculpture, photography and printmaking, I build structures that are space of quiet to be filled with thought, healing and development. Like incubators and seed pods, my work is protective …

It Is Not Her Fault She Didn’T Know Mary Had A Lamb, Samer Ridikkuluz

Theses and Dissertations

“It is not her fault she didn’t know Mary had a lamb” is not an Arab Queer conflict. It is the genocide of everything they told me art was and the decolonial clarity of what art can be. Whether it be bridging the gap between the East and the West, the straights and the gays, or me and the world—I investigate the human condition, the parts we play, and how identity evolves and hides.

How Eye See, Now I See, Michael Anthony Simon

Theses and Dissertations

Michael Anthony Simon’s paper addresses ideas surrounding the fluid nature of perception, time, and ideas of control, or lack there-of. Creating a symbolic relationship between paintings and sculpture. Simon both embraces and confuses the notion that understanding is never truly stable or secure.

Ultraviolent, Jin Mateo Kim

Theses and Dissertations

How do you reconceive yourself in a society that has failed you? Jin Mateo Kim's works examine the reckoning of self-conception in postwar youth subculture of the 1960s.

To Swallow The Stars, Catie Dillon

Theses and Dissertations

Through abstract paintings of illuminated voids, Catie Dillon explores ideas of interconnectedness. In "To Swallow the Stars", she traces the layers of her process, examining the function of gesture, color, light, and space as a means to capture the ineffable.

List Of No's, Hwi Hahm

Theses and Dissertations

Through abstract paintings with an emphasis on the absence of the human form, Hwi Hahm creates an esoteric, veiled expression, prompting the question: when do swaths of paint become something? In this paper he discusses the dissociation of identity, and how it offers a balance between material properties and the illusionistic possibilities of painting.

Victim/Perpetrator, David D. Moy

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout this text, David Moy will discuss the inner working of his investigation on image overload and materialization. Through tactics of blurring, erasure, and layering he achieves obfuscation in his printed media. In doing so, he questions the compounding nature of image/text that negate themselves in the larger context of time in the digital age.

Shapes That Hide Their Shadows, Jennifer Blaine

Theses and Dissertations

shapes that hide their shadows concerns itself with the mutability of memory. The complexities of girlhood to womanhood, and the way we are shaped by place and space, are explored through the artist recounting childhood memories connected to her grandparents' hometowns. Divided into three different sections, the artist discusses drawing as medium, creating a lexicon through using visual symbols, and the logistics of building your own archive.

Xxx, Samuel Tucker Claxton

Theses and Dissertations

In XXX Tucker correlates the rise in online hookup apps and the fall of queer nightlife spaces to show how the internet has affected gay cruising spaces. They relate their installation-based work to the ideas of liminal spaces and Jean Baudrillard's

hyperreal. Further, they contextualize their practice within the scope of Robert Grober's work.

Serious Music With Bea Witkin: An Upper West Side Audio Walk, Megan Hattie Stahl

Theses and Dissertations

Serious Music with Bea Witkin is a site-specific audio walk on New York City’s Upper West Side produced by Megan Hattie Stahl. This immersive, musical documentary explores and extends the life and work of composer Beatrice Witkin (1916-1990). Across four stationary chapters and three walking interludes, participants follow a one-mile route from Riverside Park to Straus Park by way of Witkin’s longtime residence on West End Avenue. Through guided narration, archival music, interviews and recordings of contemporary musicians sight-reading a 1985 string quartet piece by Witkin, Serious Music invites listeners to consider where music begins and ends.

Witkin, who graduated …