Not So Cavalier: Technical Study And Conservation Treatment Of A Potential 17th Century Anglo-Dutch Military Portrait Painting, Josephine Ren

Art Conservation Master's Projects

A potential 17^th century Anglo-Dutch military portrait painting from the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York arrived at the Garman Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State University for conservation research and treatment in 2022. The painting’s title, date, and artist were unknown and the subject was initially referred to as a “17^th Century Dutch Cavalier.” Little information existed on the provenance and history of the artwork. The painting was in a state of structural instability and aesthetic disfigurement and showed evidence of a past restoration campaign. This master’s project attempted to broadly …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Art Of Aging – A Portraiture Study, Alaina Mann

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The process of aging can be viewed through different lenses within our society. In the past, scientists and medical professionals performed various studies to better understand and analyze different facets of aging, medicine, and health in general. Historically the arts have reflected multiple aspects of medicine and treatments while more recently, the arts have been used in a research capacity to provide different ways to represent illness, suffering, and care. This study used art-based research methods and portraiture to gather qualitative observations on the older populations within our community. Data collected included drawings, a field journal, and interviews. This study …

Women's Work: The Sublime Is Now, Michelle Blackstone

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

What influences the lens through which we view art and the value we ascribe to it? This paper investigates the ways in which the historically gendered philosophy of “The Sublime,” a lack of institutional access, and traditionally gendered materials have acted as impediments for women in the arts. Discussion is given to the ways that masculine rhetoric in terms of “The Sublime” prevented women from attaining what was once considered the highest level of artistic achievement. Further attention is given to obstructions female artists face(d) in terms of gaining intuitional access within the art world. Finally, I examine the ways …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

The Artistry Of Mediation: A Look At Mediation’S Effectiveness For Resolving Cross-Cultural Disputes Through The Leonardo Da Vinci Conflict Between France’S Louvre Museum And Italy’S Uffizi Gallery, Sophia D. Casetta

Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research

Art is powerful, as it symbolizes the history and identity of the country that claims it. However, through timely transitions, such as trade and wars, the ownership of meaningful artworks blurs, with museums fighting to claim their heritage to put on honorable display for their people. Mediation can be a peaceful means to resolve art ownership disputes, as it accounts for respecting the individual cultures of the countries represented in the dispute. Using the key medication traits described within this essay, a prepared mediator involved in such a cross-cultural conflict should be able to help resolve the issue at hand. …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Elsewhere: In Defense Of Daydreaming, Alex Braden

MFA in Visual Art

Much like music, organic life is an absurd, improbable, and serendipitous instance. I set circular, electric, acoustic, and magnetic forces in motion and allow them to coalesce freely in the hopes of synthesizing unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and harmony.

A Poor Third? A Reexamination Of Manuscript And Print Markets In Fifteenth And Sixteenth-Century Rouen, Kate Hodgson

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

Manuscript and print scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have deemed Rouen a ‘poor third’ to the workshops in Paris and Lyon. Lacking the cultural status and political influence of these two major centers of book production, Rouen’s manuscript tradition has been coined an “eclectic” group of illuminators who were limited to a local, discontinuous demand for books and whose regional role hardly even bears examination. However, Between 1419 and 1449, Rouen was an epicenter of political and economic exchange between Normandy and England. The city’s manuscript ateliers experienced a period of unparalleled patronage from an international, elite clientele, …

Here And Now, Samaira 2023, Samaira G. Wilson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Consider my work as a thread weaving through time. Illustrations of grappling with the present and its illusive constant nature. Questioning permanence. The temporary. This show, these walls, not forever, not for lease. Just a point in time. Can we hold time? Keep it? Is it ours? No. Time is something that is eaten, driven through, falling, perpetual, casual, necessary, fought against, spent, and healing.

Here and Now plays with what time feels like and is contrasted by an active voyage to another world.

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Cultural Formation Of Place: Making Yourself At Home, Olivia Arratia

Art Theses and Dissertations

The environment you grow up in can become a pivotal part of your existence. The sights, smells, people, and places you experience every day can transform the way you see the world. Growing up in a Mexican-American household has brought its own set of experiences that have made me the artist I am today. I am one of many contemporary artists building on the foundations of their heritage and the Chicano movement. I am also a Mexican-American artist expanding the identity and extending the legacy in the 21st century. This paper will investigate how Mexican-American heritage has influenced my artistic …

Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

The Met Costume Institute: Evolution, Metamorphosis, And Cultural Phenomenon, Shelby Kanski

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Echoes Of Home, Hanna Traynham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Echoes of Home, held at the Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee on display March 15 through April 8, 2022. The author provides insight into concepts and influences relating to the creation of the exhibition with perspective on her intimate connection with place and memory.

The exhibit features five installations addressing home, elusive memory, and the change and continuity of cultural traditions over time. The works consist of a series of large-scale wild clay vessels, gestural clay bookends, a wall installation of cups with a line drawing, suspended porcelain slabs, …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

The Passing Show, Kathryn Fanelli

Masters Theses

The Passing Show, examines the interface between contemplative practices and the destabilizing effect of the carnivalesque. A repurposed early 20th century merry-go- round is reconfigured as a conceptual vehicle for renewing our attention to removing hindrances. The site-specific installation, titled Vimoksha, is viewed through the lens of the radical imaginary, investigating notions of karmic inheritance through a heuristic approach to material processes, personal history, kinetics and sound.

The Last Prisoners Of War: How Nazi-Looted Art Is Displayed In U.S. Museums, Monica May Thompson

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

How art museums approach NLA is important today because much of the public relies on museums for their education. NLA cases are especially controversial because they are not only legal battles, but ethical ones so museums have to be extra careful approaching them. Even if the museum has won the legal battle the public may not see them as winning the ethical one therefore they might want to avoid displaying this information to the public. However, as we can see with the previous websites, it actually looks worse for museums not to be open and honest about their NLA pieces …

Beside| |Between, Brooke J. Armstrong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Beauty and the grotesque both induce physical sensations in the body. Pleasure and displeasure are two points on the same line. They are not mutually exclusive. Like the body and the vessel, like the self and the other all things exist in reciprocity. The capability of holding brings agency, breaking down perceptions of of subject-object relationships. The works presented in this paper represent a merging and a transformation of perceived separate entities. Craft history and processes inform the work present in the thesis exhibition, Beside| |Between.

Combat Artist, Delvin Goode

Master's Theses

The integral bond that unites the American citizen with the selfless men and women of the Armed Forces will be strengthened through my juxtaposition of uncommonly complementary crafts. “Combat Artist”, featuring high-quality ceramic mugs, unique packaging, pristine painted panels, and kindred graphics will bridge a gap that enhances relationships between these two worlds through a shared love of country and shared culture. The resultant works create fantastic windows into my military life communicating messages full of humor, patriotism, and love. I aspire to masterfully unite ceramic techniques with proven principles of design distributed across all mediums within my work, culminating …

Self && Self, Shuang Cai

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Seldom before the COVID-19 pandemic have so many people simultaneously had their lifestyle drastically changed in the same way. The forced physical isolation is, ironically, a communal experience. The sickening quarantine left everyone nothing but time to confront and reconnect with themselves. Another inevitable result of corporal isolation is the predominant awakening awareness of digital existences and connections. Evoking the shared sensitivity and delicacy, studying the tectonic activity of the digital world, the project documents the endured contemplation in the upcoming resurgence.

Cumulative Grief, Xuan Pham

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Cumulative Grief, in which the artist's personal and familial narrative explores the complexity and nuances of racial grief.

Prejudiced Commodities: Understanding Knowledge Transfer From India To Britain Through Printed And Painted Calicoes, 1720-1780, Aditi Khare

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The eighteenth-century trade in calico between Europe and India was a function of global textile manufacture, exchange, and consumption on multiple levels. This trade had several political, cultural, and economic consequences— the most important of which, I suggest, was the transfer of useful knowledge from artisanal oral textile traditions in India to the receptive, commercial, and nascent cotton printing industry in Europe.

This paper explores the contribution of Indian cotton printing knowledge towards the development of Europe’s cotton industry and, consequently, its dissemination through European knowledge networks. In particular, the largely overlooked chemical knowledge pertaining to dyes and mordants responsible …

Colcha Circle: A Stitch In Northern New Mexico Culture, Olimpia Newman, Rebecca Abrams

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Colcha embroidery is folk art, characteristic of northern New Mexico history, traditions, and a form of cultural expression that has not been researched and documented sufficiently. It has been practiced in private homes and small circles as a result of commissions or economic development programs, as has also been the case in the San Luis Valley, Colorado. Despite the exposure offered by local markets and demonstrations during events in New Mexico, the embroidery is in many ways an unknown technique, even to the next generation.

This video captures a candid discussion among eleven colcha artists, some of whom are entering …

Hidden Stories/Human Lives: Proceedings Of The Textile Society Of America 17th Biennial Symposium, October 15-17, 2020--Full Program With Abstracts & Bios

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The theme Hidden Stories/Human Lives presents opportunities to reveal complex and hidden stories of global textile making and coincides with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet, just as the voices of women of color, marginalized by the suffrage movement, are only now being recognized, the stories of the many human lives that have contributed—directly and indirectly—to textile making, including enslaved people, immigrant entrepreneurs, and industrial laborers, remain untold. With this symposium, we hope to get “behind the curtain” to explore the wider human network engaged in textile production, bringing to light hidden stories …

Freedom Quilt: Collective Patchwork In Post-Communist Hungary, Christalena Hughmanick

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The paper investigates the democratic and social values of patchwork quilting through its culture of open-source pattern sharing and communal group work – using The Freedom Quilt Hungary project as a primary example. I facilitated a social engagement artwork, developed in 2019 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the end of Socialist rule in Hungary in 1989. This change resulted in new laws, allowing for the formation of the Hungarian Patchwork Guild (HPG), with whom I worked closely to create the work. It provided members of this group and the public with a platform to define individual notions …

Glitched Metaphors: Dysfunction In Hand-Woven Digital Jacquard, Gabe Duggan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This presentation demonstrates various ways in which the TC1 has supported my work’s exploration of tension, balance, and precarity. By embracing and pushing expectations of traditional fiber work, these weavings question inequalities within contemporary performances of gender and exhibitions of power. My work on the TC1/TC2 digital jacquard loom has been primarily tethered to one specific machine with which I have shared a personal past and future for just over a decade. Through this technology I have built and negated tension, challenging a broad range of power dynamics. My work with this TC1 seeks to exploit and balance this technology …

Schoolgirl Embroideries & Black Girlhood In Antebellum Philadelphia, Kelli Racine Coles

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Embroideries stitched by girls at schools for Black children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare finds in the antiques world. The few embroideries likely stitched by Black schoolgirls that do survive often offer historical evidence in the form of the names of their makers’ schools stitched onto their embroideries. Yet there is little scholarship on these embroideries or the education these schoolgirls were pursuing while creating their samplers. In scholarship using material culture as primary evidence, these embroideries provide valuable clues about the lives of Black girls in northern cities during the antebellum period. My work examines the …