Art and Design Commons^™

Self-Fashioning In Contemporary Figurative Painting, Hal Hardin

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper positions my painting practice as a form of resistance to historical constructions of gender, identity, and visibility, shaped by my experience as a queer, nonbinary person navigating womanhood in the American South. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I argue that Western figurative painting has long disciplined the feminine body, exploiting it and commodifying it into an easily consumable object.

In response, I appropriate and distort these visual conventions. My figures refuse to behave: they stretch, slouch, and linger in ambiguity, resisting fixed interpretation. Placed in spaces of visibility and …

Rooted Transformations, Ricardo D. Moctezuma

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In my ventures through art I realized that I underwent an experience that was tailored to my process of release. As I struggled to share my emotions, I became distant and dissociated, I felt detached from others and even from myself. This process was something I visualized in my art from, the Tears, to Self Destruction, to the Release and onto the Garden. I’ve always felt myself in a state of Release, partly healed and partly damaged. All I knew was that the garden represented a new beginning for me, I just never knew what that Garden was. Time passes …

Weaving Ideology: Textiles In Florentine And Venetian Painting Of The Cinquecento, Ruben Verità

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Renaissance art historical scholarship has largely ignored the political and cultural significance woven into the representation of textiles, as well as their communicative potential in paintings. In this study, I examine how textiles in their various forms carry the potential to go beyond their normative categorization as decoration. Through a comparative analysis of the paintings produced in two politically distinct polities—Florence and Venice—during the sixteenth century, I integrate Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and Michael Baxandall’s period eye to elucidate how painted fabric was not the representation of a passive decorative ornament. Rather, it was an active and legible proxy …

Under Chiron's Care, Deethya Trivedi

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

This painting depicts young Asclepius under the guidance of Chiron, the wise centaur renowned for his knowledge of healing and medicine. In Greek mythology, Asclepius was entrusted to Chiron after Apollo recognized his potential. Within the nurturing environment of Chiron’s home, Asclepius absorbed lessons on the use of medicinal herbs, wound treatment, and the foundational principles of care, skills that would eventually elevate him to become the Greek God of Medicine. The herbs symbolize hands-on learning and the practical foundation of healing, while the book signifies the accumulation and sharing of knowledge, showing how medical innovation progresses through study, collaboration, …

Foundations Of Art: Materials, Methods, And Meaning, Elizabeth Mellott

Art OERs

This course provides an introduction to the tools, materials, and processes used across a wide range of artistic media. The focus is on understanding how different materials shape the way art is created and experienced. Attention is given not only to what artists make, but also to why particular media are chosen to communicate specific ideas, emotions, or perspectives. The physical qualities of materials, the methods used, and the cultural meanings attached to them all influence artistic decision-making.

The course surveys several major categories of artistic media. Pigment-based practices include painting, drawing, and printmaking, where color and mark-making form the …

Corals, Creation, And Conservation: Evaluating Human-Marine Relations Through Coral Reef Biology And Artistic Practice, Emma Gray Garman

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between humans and marine ecosystems through two complementary lenses: scientific research and artistic practice. The biology chapter proposes a five-year coral reef monitoring study across four Queensland, Australia islands — two heavily visited and inhabited (Fitzroy and Green Islands) and two minimally visited and uninhabited (High and Woody Islands) — to assess whether human activity correlates with bleaching severity over time. Grounded in preliminary survey data from Green Island in 2024, which revealed approximately 54% of coral bleached or dead, the study hypothesizes that reefs adjacent to inhabited islands will exhibit greater bleaching severity, consistent …

Light And Unseen, Daša Kulikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a body of paintings and two poetic fragments. Shaped by distance and displacement, the work finds its ground in the tension between the desire to be free from the past and heal, and longing for home and connection. Painting practice becomes an event of contact with what is lost, or unclear, or in the process of becoming through accumulating layers, marks, erasures, and traces of the process of its making.

The Artistic And Informative Functions Of Facial Painting And Colors In Bridal Attire Across Various Ethnographic Regions, Nexhat Cocaj

International Journal of Business and Technology

The artistic values of figures and colors used in the facial painting of brides and in various parts of women's attire, on one hand, and the informative function of those figures used in facial painting, such as the sun, amulet, and serpent figures, and later their use in certain parts of the clothing, demonstrate the profound understanding of nature by the Albanian people. It shows how deeply they contemplated the future and how they depicted the life they wished for a marital couple through these figures and colors. The figures that were initially used in facial painting, following the onset …

Dwelling / Knowing / Loving: Imaging The Immanent Present, Joel Pasquarelli

All Theses

This thesis serves as an attempt to articulate, understand, and testify to my experiences within the immanent present. Defined as moments where the world impresses itself upon my awareness with such a force that it eclipses all else, the experience of immanence is necessarily undeniable and ephemeral. These moments are accompanied by a combined sense of exultation in the world’s existence and poignant longing for something beyond. I feel as though I am embedded within something great and meaningful, as the material world acts upon me, yet I remain ever unsatiated by this experience as the world inevitably returns once …

Professor Pop-Up Gallery And Printmaker's Pin-Up Exhibition, Donald Keefe

Achieve

2025 Professor Pop-Up Gallery and Printmaker's Pin-Up Exhibition. Hosted and curated by Kai Lin, owner of Kai Lin Art. The gallery is located at 999 Brady Ave NW, Suite 7, Atlante, GA 30324

The exhibition contained artworks from Art Professors in various regional colleges and universities. Donald Keefe's work "Memento Mori" was featured in the show.

Here is the text from the promotional material:

It’s the POP UP PIN UP https://www.kailinart.com/news/professor-pop-25

OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 2025 7:00 - 10:00 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC EXHIBITION RUNS THROUGH AUGUST 30

Professor Pop-Up/Pin-Up

KAI LIN ART is proud to …

Rewilding, Hanna Kaye Sosin

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

Rewilding attempts to bridge the distance between humanity and nature through play and embodied play. To speak to the permeability of humans to their environment, Hanna Sosin references a wide range of inspirations from Biochemistry and population dynamics to poetry and folklore. Each work is an exploration between medium and substrate to make an open ended narrative; they are improvisations based off of the surface of a panel, the expansion and contraction of a tunnel book, or a series of indelible marks made in balsa wood. Characters and symbols such as the match or candle people repeat throughout her work …

Parallel Worlds, Mary J. Connell

Masters Theses

When I start a painting, I’m never sure how the painting process is going to go or how the painting will be resolved. I don’t plan things out or make sketches in preparation for the paintings. Each decision is intuitive. I typically have a question, a response from a prior painting. As a result, all the paintings in the studio become related as they respond to each other.

Doubt and curiosity steady my hand, balancing one another out. Through hard work, time, mistakes and the occasional success, a painting gradually emerges from the surface. Sometimes it is lost again for …

Misidentification In A Digital Age: The Ethical Implications And Challenges Of Ai Integration In Scientific Illustration, Bethanie Dian Clawson

Masters Theses

Scientific illustration is a crucial resource in scientific communication, providing visual educational assistance for fields such as science, medicine, and agriculture. This thesis explores the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on scientific illustration and examines the strengths and weaknesses of AI-generated scientific illustration as compared to human-made illustration. Through the analysis of peer-reviewed sources, this study brings awareness to the common issues presented in AI-generated scientific images, explaining the risks associated with professional, research, and public settings.

To address these challenges, research is presented to explain tactics to mediate potential errors associated with AI-generated images, the importance of human intervention …

The Art Of Dreaming: A Surrealist Approach To Dream Analysis, Shelby Wright

Honors Thesis

Over the past two years, I created a series of paintings to explore the meaning of my nightmares. This study analyzes the themes and symbols in these dreams through the psychological frameworks of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud’s causal approach focuses on repressed desires, while Jung’s method relies on mythological symbols and archetypes in the collective unconscious. Drawing on the ideas of André Breton and the Surrealist movement, I examine how art can bridge dreams and waking life. By painting my dreams, I aim to better understand my unconscious and invite viewers to question their perception of reality. This …

Digital And Physical Spaces: All At Once, Addyson Hoey

MFA in Visual Art

In this thesis, I explore our experience of digital and physical spaces in the ever-increasing presence of technology. By investigating the intersections of these spaces, I focus on how our experiences in the physical world are processed through the digital space, to re-merge in lived spaces. Through digital collage paintings, I explore how assisted chance and machine destruction can be productive in the formation of space that is not possible on the screen. By using the drop shadow as primary content, my work takes on the arrangements of surface and space—rather than the requirements of the physical world. In addition, …

Garden Of Fragments, Justin Muegge

Theses and Dissertations

Justin Muegge's paintings take the aesthetic experience of garden spaces as a vehicle to explore abstraction. Referencing his research in traditional Chinese Scholar's Gardens, Muegge explores the conceptual premises of their design philosophies, raises questions on the history of abstraction and his own work, and expands upon themes in his painting.

All Ego Must Die, Meredith Bakke

Theses and Dissertations

Using plasticity as a central framework, this thesis explores painting as a site for radical transformation of the self. Through symbolic engagement with sadism, ego death, and material play, it investigates how fantasy, fear, and imagination coalesce into a generative force—one that dismantles rigidity and opens space for discovery.

How Much Touch Can The Paper Withstand?, Aldrin Regina Valdez

Theses and Dissertations

Between embodiment and disembodiment, Aldrin Regina Valdez’s works on paper map histories of care, violence, and mourning, both personal and collective. They ask: how much touch can the paper withstand?

The Function Of Art, Magdalen O. M. Pickering

Theses and Dissertations

With the help of machines and the powers of perception, Magdalen Pickering introduces logic to strange and fantastical subjects. The Function of Art explores a hybrid of techniques in painting, screenprinting, and computer generated imagery as Magdalen attempts to use generative printing to obscure art historical consciousness. The installation crosses into virtual reality; reframing textiles, landscapes, and the gallery space through a metaphysical lens.

Works On Paper, Xingyun Wang

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is about my painting practice and artistic influences.

Descent Into The Wild: Nature, Nudity, And The Night, Mary E. Adams

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My work explores the intersection of vulnerability, autonomy, and the female form by placing nude self-portraits within expressive, psychological landscapes. Drawing from historical representations of women in art, I subvert traditional narratives that have romanticized and objectified the female body, instead presenting figures that exist on their own terms. The night, with its inherent intimacy and uncertainty, deepens this exploration, amplifying themes of exposure, solitude, and self-reclamation.

Through large-scale oil paintings, I engage with ecofeminist ideas, paralleling the exploitation of women and nature while resisting their passive idealization. These figures are not objects of consumption but active presences navigating the …

Faculty Creative Work Review Collusions, Mackenzie Dybvik, Chantay Herrera

The Agora

This faculty project review is an interview with Craig Cully, Professor of Painting and Drawing at NMSU, about his newest collaborative set of paintings with his wife, Kelly Leslie, titled Collusions. Their work highlights the challenges of a relationship, of love, and building your life with another person.

The Art Of Travel, Colleen Bergmann, Joshua Fackler, Natalie Heiland, Sarah Louise Huebschen, Charlotte Ji, Grace Jurchak, Lizzy Kramer, Mathea Linden, Jake Neff, West Rathbun, Daniela Rodriguez, Alice L. Van Etten, Dalila E. Weismantle, Annie Witham, Yan Sun

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Under the direction of Professor Yan Sun, student curators examine the theme of travel in both Eastern and Western works of art. Exploring topics such as artists’ trips, the imagined landscape, pilgrimages, tourism, and modes of travel, the exhibition features prints, paintings, carvings, photography and material culture.

Painting Stories And Filming Change, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Contributions to Books

Mithila Art has helped illuminate various aspects of the relationship between gendered Maithil social roles and Maithil women’s narratives in connection with a feminist participatory action research project conducted primarily in 2016-2017 in and around the northern Bihari town of Madhubani. While participatory action research philosophically and methodologically attends to process as much as product, Mithila Art played a role in the process and product of making a documentary film and in our capacity to understand and communicate with varied audiences about shifting Maithil gender norms. The research and filmic project provided insight into the complex relationship among the stories …

In The Thick Of It, Mark T. Leavens

LSU Master's Theses

In this exhibition, In The Thick Of It, my paintings and sculptures serve as a visual diary of my experience moving to and navigating life in Louisiana. Through art, I document this new landscape and atmosphere, capturing my evolving emotional state, shifting focus, and emerging ideas. As an outsider, the process of discovery introduces layers of tension, curiosity, and fragmentations in my paintings. The spaces within my paintings reflect a constant flux, mirroring the ongoing adjustments to Louisiana’s cultural cues, history, and environment. The complexity of this rich yet challenging place permeates my art, creating dynamic, layered compositions that echo …

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.

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.