Art and Design Commons^™

Familiar Corners, Lilia Gonzalez-Baldwin

Art and Art History Honors Projects

The mundane is defined as lacking interest; dull, unimportant. My honors project aims to find the beauty in the mundane moments that linger in the domestic spaces that hold meaning to me. My desire to amplify the figures, spaces, and belongings that formed my childhood home and current apartment inspired me to create numerous highly detailed, overlapping works that act as portals into rooms in these spaces. In Shaving Cream, 2008, my 6-year-old self is shaving my older sister’s legs in the bathtub. In Down in their Nest, posters, trinkets, and stuffed animals act as easter eggs for my childhood.

Delirious Pink, Reuben Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

How to enliven a tradition as accomplished as painting? With the spirit of New York City and the techniques of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting as my backbone, I look to my friends, lovers, and fellow artists to form a thesis defined by love, color, feeling, and individuality.

Viewing Machines, Janos Cseh

Theses and Dissertations

By sifting through personal memories, the contemporary media landscape, and seeing the world through the lens of painting, Cseh asks what it means to understand information through images.  The artist unpacks the interwoven relationships between images and memory, feeling and seeing, and the difficulty of seeking truth through an analysis of his paintings.

Radiance After Exile: Visionism And The Art Of M, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This essay introduces and critically examines Visionism, the artistic philosophy developed by contemporary Australian painter M. Emerging from a practice shaped by early success, prolonged creative exile, and eventual return, Visionism is presented not as a stylistic movement but as a visual philosophy concerned with atmosphere, symbolism, transcendence, and the persistence of intensity after critique. Situating Visionism within contemporary debates surrounding postmodernism and metamodernism, the essay argues that M's work occupies a distinctive position within a broader cultural shift toward renewed engagements with meaning, affect, and sincerity.

Drawing on the artist’s own reflections, alongside theoretical perspectives from David Sudnow, Timotheus …

Darkness Seen By Candlelight: Painting To Discover Feeling, Shelby Feltoon

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

This thesis discusses the ways that a phenomenological experience can translate itself through the medium of painting. This translation evokes deep feelings through physical considerations of materiality, light, context, distance, and time. Through a series of intimate and abstracted oil paintings created in thin layers, the work conveys an interdependent relationship between light and darkness. This project draws from research on art movements like Suprematism, Minimalism, and Expressionism, as well as larger practices and philosophies about photography and the sublime. The body of work draws direct reference to Junichiro Tanazaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows. Ultimately, the work described …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

Post Desire, Lucy E. Luckovich

Masters Theses

Post-Desire comes from my personal take on and continuation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire (2016)[1]. There, Fisher imagines an alternative to the capitalist consumption machine, one where desire is redirected back towards ourselves rather than to profit-driven, accelerationist motives. Fisher had a vision of a future both through and beyond the chains of capitalism. He pointed out in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism that “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”[2] This perspective is realistic—we are in the midst of a crisis of material reality and of imagination—but it is …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Where Forms Dream, Siran Liu

Masters Theses

What does it mean to dream?

There is a passages from Daoist classic ‘Zhuangzi’, attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou: The “Butterfly Dream”:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou

In this story, the dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. …

[De/Re]Construct: On The Communion Of Nature And The Divine, Rhiannon E. Kuns

Honors Projects

Closely intertwined with my personal journey of faith and spirituality, [De/Re]construct has been a place to consider questions that repeat over and over. Each time I ask, I get a different answer. These questions are not new, but the idea that I can change my answer is. This project has been the place to map my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs using the familiar. The trees, the colors and the places are known to me; so is my creative process, the planning, sketching, and painting. I am using the regular to grapple with the unanswerable.

[De/Re]construct has evolved drastically since I …

Temporal Ubiquity, Brittni Mosby

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis examines looking as a sacred and relational practice rooted in familial memory, storytelling, and the photographic archive. Drawing from early experiences of engaging family photographs alongside my mother and great-grandmother, I conceptualize these encounters as the formation of “temporal altars”: living vessels that activate space, memory, and multiplicity. These intimate acts of looking and listening position the home as a critical site where Black subjectivity is held with care and complexity.

By casting these modes of perception into domestic spaces, my thesis not only resists reductive external gazes but interrogates the archive as a colonial apparatus structured by …

Weathered, Haylee A. Dyess

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Weathered focuses on themes of change, accumulation, time, and acceptance. Each artwork holds layers of information and experiences that form a unique narrative for all its viewers. The construction of each piece is a symbol of the physical ability it takes to create each painting. After my mobility was hindered due to my medical conditions, a new appreciation for physical health and the world I live in was gained. Striving to pack this sense of appreciation into my work, my method became a way for me to cope with my illness and to enjoy being creative, freely.

My art is …

Made From My Rules, Samaira Snow '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Samaira Snow is a senior at DePauw University where she will graduate in May 2026 with double majors in Studio Art and Art History and a minor in Education Studies. Her work is often inspired by procedural efforts and plays with the relationship of layering and texture. She has started to participate in exhibitions.

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #3, The Year 1591, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This tour guide is the third in Victoria Weston's An Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys. To access the full book, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining sections, visit:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #2, The Year 1230, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the second of three tour guides connected to Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art. For the full guidebook, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

The remaining sections can be found at these links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally …

An Introduction To East Asian Art In Three Journeys, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the full version of this record. For individual tour guides, visit the following links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/ Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. Students learn methods of visual analysis while also exploring …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #1, The Year 748, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This book is chapter one of Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys, which can be found in full at https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining chapters, visit:

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. …

Fields Of Green, Samaira Snow '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Samaira Snow is a senior at DePauw University where she will graduate in May 2026 with double majors in Studio Art and Art History and a minor in Education Studies. Her work is often inspired by procedural efforts and plays with the relationship of layering and texture. She has started to participate in exhibitions.

City, Janina Butz

Theses and Dissertations

Janina Butz observes the improvised support structures holding New York City together at its edges. Looking at the found, cheap materials, spray painted, rusty, drilled, sawed, and haphazardly welded together on the sidewalk. The hard clashes of cheap material and expensive real estate lead Butz to draw a bigger picture of the fraud seams our society is tied together with.

Tracings, Masie Sophia Love

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, the artist wonders what it means to remember a time and place that she has not experienced- what would this look like visualized in a painting? Love studies the histories and similarities between cartography and quilting using the two as a kind of channel to understand, record, and remember land. She explores inherited memory and the clues left behind in the form of quilts made by ancestors to create abstracted landscapes and maps of Tennessee where they lived for generations.

The Earth Holds What I Cannot, Satabdi Tripathy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores memory, landscape, identity, and gendered silence through painting, video and film. Inspired by glaciers, volcanoes, and Arctic landscapes, my work transforms personal memory into environmental memory and investigates silence, trauma, and renewal.

The Space In Between, Cailyn Dawson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper asks the question: is it possible for our bodies to hold contradicting identities at the same time?  Through monochromatic self- portraits, the artist creates a link between quantum mechanics and painting, using the principle of superposition to depict these multiple unformed states of being.

Grass As Green As Money, Andrew Dominguez

Theses and Dissertations

Grass as Green as Money looks at golf and painting, making comparisons based on class privilege and barriers to entry to examine the audience’s role in determining meaning in an artwork. It establishes historical research into the artist’s paintings’ aims to produce self-awareness within a contemporary art context.

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite, Lauren Cline

Theses and Dissertations

In “Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite,” artist Lauren Cline uses her process-based approach to painting as a metaphor for the relationship between mundanity and eternity. Utilizing various frameworks, including the autobiographical writings of Hélène Cixous and the theology of Simone Weil, as well as examples from her own artworks,  the artist suggests that there is a universal human need for the dissipation of the singular, isolated self, and explores various ways that this can be achieved.

Into Dust, Olivia Lutz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines charcoal as both material and metaphor, tracing its relationship to grief, memory, light, and transformation.

Voyager, Ben K. Voss

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores painting as a site of meditation, time and (un)knowability.

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

Mondays At Moore's, Jane Duffy '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Jane Duffy is an English Writing and Studio Art double major at DePauw University. She is a painter, a creative writer, and the Editor-in-chief of A Midwestern Review for her fourth year of involvement. She enjoys hiking, drinking coffee, travelling, and creating things inspired by observation of the world around her.

River House, Jane Duffy '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Jane Duffy is an English Writing and Studio Art double major at DePauw University. She is a painter, a creative writer, and the Editor-in-chief of A Midwestern Review for her fourth year of involvement. She enjoys hiking, drinking coffee, travelling, and creating things inspired by observation of the world around her.

Unknowing Connections, Samaira Snow '26

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

Samaira Snow is a senior at DePauw University where she will graduate in May 2026 with double majors in Studio Art and Art History and a minor in Education Studies. Her work is often inspired by procedural efforts and plays with the relationship of layering and texture. She has started to participate in exhibitions.