Art and Design Commons^™

Unveiling Identity: Exploring Afrofuturism In Ekow Nimako’S Contemporary African Diasporic Sculptural Art, Kandra James

Theses

Identity expressed within African diasporic arts has historically been connected to traditional genres such as portraiture. Over time, contemporary artists have explored identity through genres beyond portraiture and through the use of non-traditional materials. The sculptural practice of Ghanaian Canadian artist Ekow Nimako, a fine arts sculptor based in Toronto, Canada, employs the unconventional material of LEGO® to offer a multi-generational perspective into deep diasporic memory. Examining Nimako’s sculptures through the perspective of colonialism and de-colonialism, materiality, and Afrofuturism, this thesis investigates the artist’s exploration of Black historical pasts to shape identities and construct narratives of Black futures. The monumental …

Home And Beyond: Third Culture Kids Navigating Between Their Cultural Identity For An Answer Of Where Is Home?, Gamila Eid

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

Third Culture kids are as a person who have spent a significant part of their development years outside their parent's culture. This research paper tackles different perspectives of Third Culture Kids' life and the challenges that they face. Including a deeper understanding of the main cause of these challenges and their relation to personal and cultural identity by searching for an answer to the most confusing question for a Third Culture Kid which is Where is home?

This paper can be considered as a guide for Third Culture Kids to understand their identity and how to accept their confusion around …

Contributions Of Slow Design To The Valorization Of Local Identities In Sustainable Processes, Danielle Comitre Thomaz, Ana Beatriz Avelino Barbosa, Polyanna Astrath Costa

IASDR Conference Series

Design research has been increasingly concerned with behavioural changes for emerging sustainable processes. This article, which has as a research question "How can Slow Design contribute to the valorization of local identities in sustainable processes?", presents Slow Design as a contributor to Social Innovation, in order to valorize the local identity of the communities, which are involved with authorial production. A Narrative Bibliographical Review methodology was carried out, combined with the ResearchGate, CAPES Periodical and Google Scholar databases, related to the strings "Slow Design" AND "Design for Sustainability" and also with the strings "Slow Design" AND "Design and Territory". Such …

Textile Autobiographies: Crafting Shifting Identities With Refugee Communities, Francesco Mazzarella, Seher Mirza

IASDR Conference Series

With the rising mass displacement of people, rethinking and addressing the needs and aspirations of refugee communities and honouring their diverse cultures is needed. Historically, the textile heritage of minorities has often been subjected to cultural appropriation practices or systematically undervalued and ‘othered’ as ‘non-fashion’. Designers are often ‘parachuted’ into marginalised or disadvantaged communities premised on bringing their own knowledge and expertise to solve other people’s problems. However, there is growing recognition of the need to ‘decolonise’ such dominant approaches in collaborative design practice. Instead of re-enacting dominant power narratives, London-based refugees and asylum seekers were engaged in storytelling sessions …

The Brand As A Place. For A Model Interpreting Identity In The Digital Age., Francesco E. Guida, Elisa Finesso

IASDR Conference Series

What if the brand is a place? In specialist literature, the brand interacts through a series of tangible and intangible touchpoints with its interlocutors. When we buy items, use services, or come into contact with any expression of a brand, we come into contact with its being. Whether these are points of sale, events, websites, packaging and products, touchpoints help the interlocutor enter the world of the brand and experience it. These elements play an essential role in building a long-term engagement with it. However, in an ever-changing environment where brands must be flexible and agile to remain market relevant, …

Designing Collective Racial Healing Spaces, Angelica Sibrian, Nekita Thomas, Terresa Moses, Lisa Elzey Mercer

IASDR Conference Series

Spaces for collective racial healing within predominantly White institutions are meant to support the path to collective liberation for Black, Indigenous, and students of color. It is imperative that we intentionally create racial healing spaces that support the identities and experiences of students of color on a predominantly White institution. We assert that physical spaces support empowerment and create access to opportunities for students of color through protection, healing, and community. The question that guides this work is, how might people with an agency within institutions of higher learning build sustainable, inclusive, and supportive spaces for and with Black, Indigenous, …

Invisible Systems, Mina Kim

Masters Theses

We are immersed in an efficiency-and-profit-obsessed world where products are advancing for the sake of updates without meaningful outcomes. The products’ seemingly simple and seamless interfaces bear the marks of deception and promote the world’s obsessions as a norm. My work defines the visual language and methods that hide complex truth within invisible systems. I aim to strike through invisibility for greater transparency and visibility.

I employ techniques that dis-organize the guidelines and components of invisible systems, reframing expectations and opening up new ways of understanding our surroundings. I intend whimsical reconfigurations to act as a mirror, providing a moment …

Luminous Eating, Ayesha Mohyuddin

Masters Theses

My work strives to reorient my gaze away from outward definitions of identity toward the complexities and nuances of experiencing the intersections of identity that comprise me and the space of home where I felt most extended. I do not want to essentialize the identifiers of Muslim, Bengali, and Tennessean, nor do I want to neglect the role memory and nostalgia play in shaping home as a place of expansion and ease. Food, cooking, and eating ground both nostalgia and identity in something physical. Through the sense of taste, I reorient myself to the inseparability of experience that cannot be …

Exploring The Motivations And Therapeutic Benefits Of Fandom And Fanart Online Communities: A Literature Review, Miriam Kilian

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Participation in Online Fandom culture has become a highly valued aspect of many individuals' self-expression and how they seek to build social connections with others. Furthermore, within the Fandom community, the phenomenon of creating and sharing fan-based work also plays a significant role in the interactions between group members. These factors are important to acknowledge in a therapeutic context as future practitioners can choose to utilize a client's pre-established fandom involvement to explore their identity and social connections with other fans. This thesis is a literature review that examines the academic journals and individual interviews of Fanart Creators. The topics …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

Exploring The Influence Of Globalization And Self-Expression In Shaping The Vietnamese Lgbtq+ Community In Urban Vietnam, Minh-Thy Tyler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The LGBTQ+ community is estimated to make up around 9% to 11% of Vietnam’s total population. Over the past few decades, Vietnam has undergone significant changes, marked by its increasing interconnectedness with the global community. These changes have also brought about a shift in perceptions and advocacy toward the LGBTQ+ community. Also bringing along a change in attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community in Vietnam is self-expression and fashion. Through drag or wearing gender-nonconforming attire, queer individuals are able to challenge the restrictive gender binary prevalent in Vietnamese society. Self-expression and fashion are also critical in helping queer individuals form and …

Interface: Technology & Portraiture, Mullins Sydney

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

In Interface, five Kentucky-area artists explore a new language of representation with the aid of digital tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automatic Facial Recognition Software (AFR). Some artists use algorithms to alter celebrity faces beyond recognition, others feed data sets of existing art to AI models in an attempt to generate portraits of no one in particular. Others still create tools for understanding the very act of facial recognition or obfuscation. All have one thing in common: they wish to stretch the limits of and critique the genre of portraiture, as well as to cause viewers to question …

Mascs: Masculinity Reimagined, Josh Porter

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

MASCS: Masculinity Reimagined explores how performances of contemporary masculinities can counteract traditional binary understandings of gender. Justin Korver, John Paul Morabito, Betsy Odom, Moises Salazar, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell expose, question, and subvert the ways that we culturally define masculinity by focusing on gender as performance. These artists not only critique cisgender, heteronormative binary understandings of masculinity, but also embrace the performative nature of gender and celebrate non-normative, alternative, and queer masculinities. By encompassing a range of gender and sexual identifications, these artists share their own personal experiences, interpretations, performances, rejections, and embodiments of masculinity. Breaking down the barrier created …

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun): Exploring Memory And Language Through Animation, Elaine Yang

Scripps Senior Theses

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun) explores the themes of reconstruction, evocation, and memory through my childhood in Taiwan. Inspired by other Asian American animators, I aim to tell a simple story of connection through my grandfather and I's daily swimming ritual. The film is a 3-minute animated short film following our language barrier and how we engage with each other's differing backgrounds.