Art and Design Commons^™

[W]Hole: Journey To Fullness, Joni P. Gordon

MFA in Visual Art

My work raises critical questions about Black history, race, gender, beauty, and privilege. My practice also highlights the intersectionality of colorism and racism. I use materials such as cardboard rectangles with handwritten words, brown paper, doors defaced by scratches, fire, printed images, newspaper, and projected photographs to ask and answer those questions. I also use Work and Travel documents, broom and brush bristle, mop fiber, towels, and audio recordings of oral histories to exhibit invisible scars wrought by racist actions as physical and material manifestations.

My practice began after experiencing racial discrimination for the first time on a US work …

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 …

Warp/Weft/Word: Inscriptive Materiality, Epistemological Violence, And The Inka Khipu, Travis Sharp

Criticism

Many competing theories of the Indigenous inscription practice known as the khipu have been offered, from L. Leland Locke’s long-standing postulation that khipus are accounting devices, to Walter Ong’s description of them as aide-mémoire, to Gary Urton’s more experimental theory that they constituted an early form of binary composition. Just as fraught is the history of the khipu, which were utilized by the Inka, intermediated by Spanish and Catholic authorities in their legal and religious systems, and, finally, banned and burned as seditious and sacrilegious. Contemporary khipus are primarily limited to those used by herders, but Chilean American poet-artist Cecilia …

Perkembangan Aspek Ilmu Pengetahuan Dalam Industri Perkebunan Di Sumatra Timur 1863–1942, Devi Itawan

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This study aims to reveal the relationship between science and the plantation industry on colonial expansion in East Sumatra. In this study, science is regarded as a colonial construction, which in the context of East Sumatra was used as a tool for colonial expansion, supporting the process of surplus accumulation through the plantation industry. This research applied the historical method, in which analysis was carried out on primary sources such as colonial scientific publications, travelogues, newspapers, and magazines. An examination of these primary sources was conducted by analyzing the text and the context. The decolonial perspective provides an analytical framework …

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

Imperialist Tourism, Aubrey Ball

Fall Student Research Symposium 2021

My three pieces of art explore how Imperialistic advertising works to create a positive view of Empire and colonialism. Throughout history imperialism has spread as societies have sought to expand their borders through force and more subtly through manipulation of the public mindset. Tourism posters are just one example of how positive publicity can gently influence general opinion towards support for Empire.

The Adobe Frontier, Christopher J. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

The Adobe Frontier is a documentary film about Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello—together known as “Studio Rael San Fratello” —and their work connecting contemporary technology with the legacy of pottery making and adobe architecture in the Southwest United States.

Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores and conceptualizes the idea of a world where my people were never colonized, a world where we are still existing with our culture, our powers and the idea of voodoo. I place myself, friends, and family in positions of power, in spaces the world took away from us due to the color our skin. This is the world my practice aims to create.

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

Shifting Sands., Rachid Tagoulla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shifting Sands is a re-exploration of the presentation of North Africans in colonial postcards, an examination of identity, and a critique of the modern Western museum. Since the inception of photography, colonizers used this medium- especially in the form of postcards- to categorize and exoticize Eastern peoples in order to more easily subjugate them. Shifting Sands is a series of reconstructed colonial postcards which challenges colonial-era stereotypes of North African peoples. The colonial gaze, represented by the camera lens, is subverted through a lensless image-making process in which sand is used to remove the subject from the colonial gaze and …

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

One Country, Two Systems, Faith S. Pang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

As Hong Kong approaches 2047—the year that China will formally commandeer the government—fear looms over our city. Since 2014—the emergence of the Umbrella Revolution—thousands of protests occur every year, as citizens continue to fight against the policy changes that China has imposed upon the city. Our freedom and our future hangs in a delicate balance; no one know what China will do next as the Communist government is too unpredictable. I left Hong Kong eight years ago but since these riots began, I have felt an urgency to understand the exact nature of Hong Kong’s identity, to tell our story …

Artistic Syncretism In Latin America: From Olmec To Spanish Colonialism, Nicole Timm

Honors Theses

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historic and systematic review of colonial Latin American art. The first half will focus on the ancient arts created by the ancient civilizations that sculpted culture in Latin America centuries before the Spanish were aware another continent existed. The latter portion of the paper will look to the post-colonial period. It will begin by delving into the influence of European artistic styles blending with Latin American culture and style of painting and vice versa. The final goal of this paper is to uncover the syncretism that took place across Latin America …

Provocations From The Field - Derangement And Resistance: Reflections From Under The Glare Of An Angry Emu, Pattrice Jones

Animal Studies Journal

The situations of emus may illuminate the maladies of human societies. From the colonialism that led Europeans to tamper with Australian ecosystems through the militarism that mandated the Great Emu War of 1932 to the consumer capitalism that sparked a global market for ‘exotic’ emus and their products, habits of belief and behaviour that hurt humans have wreaked havoc on emus. Literally de-ranged, emus abroad today endure all of the estrangements of émigrés in addition to the frustrations and sorrows of captivity. In Australia, free emus struggle to survive as climate change parches already diminished and polluted habitats. We have …

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, And The ‘Alt-Right’, Vasile Stănescu

Animal Studies Journal

This article analyzes why milk has been chosen as a symbol of racial purity by the ‘alt-right’. Specifically, this article argues the alt-right's current use of claims about milk, lactose tolerance, race, and masculinity can be connected to similar arguments originally made during the19th century against colonialized populations and immigration groups. In the 19th century, colonizing populations classified colonized populations as ‘effeminate corn and rice eaters’ because of their supposed lack of consumption of meat and dairy. This article argues that a similar practice continues today. It also argues that there is a relationship between the dietary racism ideas popularized …

Other-Ing: Creating A Three-Dimensional Asian American Perspective, Caroline Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Through my thesis body of work “Other-ing,” my goal is to create a three-dimensional Asian American perspective. As a result of Western standards implemented as the norm, where colonialism is still prevalent and white still reigns supreme, the media has created an onslaught of fictional Asian characters to control this group. Representations, tropes, stereotypes have long shaped the Asian American community, so much so that it is often easier to understand these one-dimensional depictions rather than the complex reality of how an Asian American defines themselves. Not shying away from implicating myself in this systematic structure of racism, I become …

Toothsome Termites And Grilled Grasshoppers: A Cultural History Of Invertebrate Gastronomy, Deirdre P. Coleman

Animal Studies Journal

This article examines the recent turn to entomophagy (insect eating) as a new source of nutrition in a world confronted by increasing population, degraded soils, and food insecurity. Although many regard entomophagy with disgust, there is a case to be made that many insects are much more nutritious, as well as greener and cleaner¹, than many of the foods we regularly eat without thinking. Also, there is nothing new about insect eating or the belief in entomophagy as a sustainable and sensible practice. There is a long cultural history in countries such as Africa and Australia, for instance.

Shirin Neshat: A Contemporary Orientalist, Mojgan Khosravi

Art and Design Theses

This thesis analyzes Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah photographs by exploring key socio-political events that have shaped Iranian history since the reign of Cyrus the Great, ca. 600 B.C. Since Neshat’s photographs have been largely intended for a Western audience, it is important to explore the concept of colonialism that has created East/West polarities and so greatly influenced our modern era. This paper intends to demonstrate that Neshat’s images perpetuate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which allocates the Oriental to an inferior position vis-à-vis his Occidental counterpart. For a Western audience, Neshat’s consistent use of the Muslim veil, illegible Persian …

Colonialism Game, Nicole Margaretten

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Risd Press January 11, 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 issue of January 11, 1974 included an article about a fire at the Farnum House dorm and the fact that the fire extinguishers were useless. It was a small fire and no-one was injured. Wintsersession began with many students taking travel courses. The Carr House coffee house was established. Comics, classifieds, and events for RISD students were also mentioned.