Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Again Black Again, Muthi Reed

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

AGAIN BLACK AGAIN

by muthi reed, M.F.A

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Program Director: Stephen Vitiello

Committee: Semi Ryu, Orla McHardy, MK Abadoo, Cara Benedetto

AGAIN BLACK AGAIN. ABA-BBABB is documentation of a reparations practice and articulations for a reparations manifesto devised by the artist. Reparations begins with the self. Singing truth to the self. Talking with the self. The thesis organizes around the problems of surveillance and myth making about Black people and the subsequent source of self-regard, conjure and social dreaming …

Less Water, More Holy: Tools For Sustainable Ablution, Faheem Khan

Theses and Dissertations

Prayer is an important part of life for many people, whether it takes the form of meditation or talking to God. Muslims pray five times a day, and before each prayer, they first clean themselves by performing ritual ablution (wudu). The eight-step purification process of wudu cleanses the body from head to toe. The Hadiths of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim tell us the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ needed just one mudd of water (650ml) to complete wudu, but most people consume many times that amount—four-to-seven liters is more common today.

To visualize and better understand the nature …

Roots And Webs And Nets And Branches And Bulletin Boards And Banners And Newsletters And Mutual Aid Text Threads And Kin And Caretakers And Porches And Poems Of Today And Spaces Of Survival, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

Theses and Dissertations

As I welcome Richmond, VA into my family, I find myself needing to make roots and webs and nets and branches that ground me, that place myself as a Black, queer, mixed race, artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and cultural worker in this city. I am called to the streets before I am called to my studio. I question what it means to be a part of an institution that is slowly eating this city up. I become a story collector. I need to know where I am and whose land I now call home.

Metamosque – Envisioning The Mosque As A Virtual Public Space, Alaa Albarazy

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the mosque was not only a space for a communal prayer but also a place for building a community. Today, however, with conflicts and diseases fragmenting society, people are less able to gather physically in large spaces. Out of necessity, people rely on technology to get together and interact virtually. In this context, my research challenges the notion of the mosque as a physical space, proposing, instead, its extension into virtual space. Recent global events pose the question: Can the metaverse offer an opportunity for the mosque to reassert itself as a public space. I propose that a MetaMosque …

Reclaiming The Appropriated Space Through Care, William P. Glaser

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis navigates the complex and (at times) frustrating experience of balancing caregiving and art making while attempting to converge both practices into one. The collaboration of caregiving and art making serves as a potential solution for those that struggle with the seemingly unreconcilable stratification of both activities.

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Cadent Diffusion: Permeating The Membrane, Isabella M. Kubo

Theses and Dissertations

cadent diffusion: permeating the membrane explores and documents KUBO's journey of cultivating a sustainable and curious artistic practice during their Master’s program in Richmond, Virginia (Powhatan Land) from the Fall of 2020 to the Spring of 2022.

KUBO's practice is the affirmation between life and change in an attempt to work along the forces of singularity; to free lines, scores, concepts, and events from structures that otherwise bind them.The cadent diffusion is the rhythm in this force. Or perhaps, it is the force itself.

Spirituality Countering Dehumanization: A Cypher On Asian American Hip Hop Flow, Brett J. Esaki

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Flow—an artistic connection to the beat—is essential to the experience and cultural mix of Hip Hop. “Flow” is also a term from positive psychology that describes a special out-of-body state of consciousness, first articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When Hip Hop performers get into artistic flow, they sometimes become immersed in psychological flow, and this article examines the combination for Asian American Hip Hop. Based on my national survey of Asian Americans in Hip Hop, I argue that dual flow inspires spiritual transformation and mitigates the dehumanization of social marginalization. However, the combination of terms presents problematic possibilities, given that Hip …

Give Me Body! Race, Gender, And Corpulence Identity In The Artistry And Activism Of Queen Latifah, Shannon Cochran

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Celebrity Queen Latifah’s body is one of the most observable Black female bodies in contemporary United States culture. Using Black feminist theory, textual analysis, and Hip Hop theory, I examine Queen Latifah’s Hip Hop corpulence bodily and narrative performativity. That is, I identify her usage of her body in different and varied spaces. Even though Queen Latifah’s weight has fluctuated throughout her career, she has centered her body in spaces that have previously been hostile to corpulent, defined here as simply meaning larger and nonconforming, bodies; particularly, corpulent Black female bodies. I build on the work of Black feminist scholars, …

Covid Edition, Journal Of Hip Hop Studies

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

No abstract provided.

Clan In Da Front - Wu-Tang: An American Saga Review, Marcus Smalls

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

@MarcusSmalls is a Teaching Artist and writer who uses his lifelong love of Hip Hop to moderate creative environments around spirituality and identity. He has been a writer in residence at Teachers & Writers Collaborative and a WritersCorps fellow at Bronx Council on the Arts and is the recipient of the 2021 St. Luke’s Alumni Artistic Achievement Award. Marcus has workshopped with award winning authors, M. Evelina Galang at VONA/Voices in 2015 and A. Naomi Jackson in Catapult’s Master Class in 2017. Marcus is currently featured on The MixTape Museum website. Marcus is a Teaching Artist for the Brooklyn Academy …

Foreword, Travis Harris

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Foreword to volume 8 issue 1.

“A Different Type Of Time”: Hip Hop, Fugitivity, And Fractured Temporality, Pedro Lebrón Ortiz

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

In this article, I seek to explore Hip Hop as an expression of marronage. I identify marronage as an existential mode of being which restitutes human temporality. Slavery and flight from slavery constituted two inextricable historical processes, therefore logics of marronage must also constitute contemporary human experience. I argue that Hip Hop offers a distinct way of affirming and expressing one’s existence through what has been called a “maroon consciousness.” In the same way that maroons created new worlds free from the tyranny of slavery, Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics.

A Critical Interpretive Synthesis Of Research Linking Hip Hop And Wellbeing In Schools, Alexander Crooke, Cristina Almeida, Rachael Comte

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Hip Hop is recognized as an agent for youth development in both educational and well-being spaces, yet literature exploring the intersection of the two areas is comparatively underdeveloped. This article presents a critical interpretive synthesis of twenty-two articles investigating school-based well-being interventions which used Hip Hop. The critical stance taken aimed to identify or expose assumptions underpinning this area of scholarship and practice. Our analysis suggested several assumptions operate in this space, including the idea rap represents a default for Hip Hop culture, and the default beneficiaries of Hip Hop-informed interventions are students of color living in underprivileged, inner-city US …

Revenge Of The Lawn, Jason James Wallin

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

A great irony of the present moment involves the return of objects long thought rallied to the will of man. As growing consensus in climate change research submits, the world presumably given to the mastery of man today returns as an alien force of material and conceptual upheaval. It is against this backdrop of rapid ecological transformation and its cultural impacts that Revenge of the Lawn is situated. As a work of speculative philo-fiction, Revenge of the Lawn surveys the horror of being “read” from the vantage of the non-human as it exists astride and yet withdraws from human melodrama …

Critical Hermeneutics And The Counter Narrative Of Ledger Art, Katie Fuller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Too often historical artworks in schools, textbooks, cultural institutions, and public spaces share a narrative that bolsters white-centered histories, but when an historical artwork is studied as text it creates room for multiple perspectives (Newfield, 2011) expanding the narrative to include subjugated histories. Looking at art through the philosophy of hermeneutics opens up questions and conflicts that arise within texts based on interpretations of those texts (Leonardo, 2003). This paper will apply the philosophy of hermeneutics to critique historical memory, and it will present ledger art as a visual text and counter narrative to dominant white narratives. Ledger art emerged …

Typographic Interventions: Disruptive Letterforms In Public Space, Clark A. Goldsberry

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

We are surrounded by typography—on billboards, aluminum cans, pill bottles, and pixelated screens—but artists and art teachers, seeking out the materiality of their lived environments, should be able to look at text in different ways. Many artists utilize letterforms as a medium of juxtaposition and recontextualization (Gude, 2004) by placing text in places we don’t expect to see it, or they subvert the messages we expect to read. Typographic interventions can be seen everywhere, by all types of artists, makers, activists, and dissidents. These interruptions could be framed as forms of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011; Mueller, 2020) that “suspend …

Humanizing Architecture: A Polymorphic Space, Nada Abbara

Theses and Dissertations

The built environments in which our communities thrive constitute an integral part of human experience and evolution. Yet, many places are detached from the way we experience them due to mass-production, which often produces standardized environments, and due to the tendency of modern architecture to delineate spaces as static objects rather than dynamic interactions. Thus, there is an emerging need to humanize architecture through an interdisciplinary approach that engages nature’s behavioral patterns. The project proposes a transformable polyhedral structure that interacts with human emotion through a three-dimensional morphing space that contracts and expands. This spatial interaction is achieved through a …

The Default: The Paradox Of Play And Productivity, Yeon Geong Hwang

Theses and Dissertations

Society takes a dim view of idleness, regarding downtime as wasted time, but what if society’s view is wrong? This thesis champions daydreaming; it advocates for quirky, playful experiences that improve quality-of-life by avoiding burnout and mitigating tedium. Borrowing language from the Theatre of the Absurd, The Default challenges society’s attitudes toward productivity, striking a new relationship between a cubicle worker and a set of seemingly-familiar but surprising objects. Reflecting on the absurdity of contemporary work-life imbalance, the objects and narratives depicted in The Default invite playful interactions, when objects that appear to be normal behave unexpectedly. The Default is …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

An Escapist Utopia, Sara Eh Denney

Theses and Dissertations

As an active pursuit of avoiding excellence, my work acts as a space for failure, play, experimentation and imperfection. This document and final installation acts as a pause along a lifelong journey of object-making, creation, and spirituality. My work, specifically my working practice, rather than any one object or moment, is an escapist utopia for myself. My work is the process, the journey, not the ending or the completion of any one thing. The repetition, distortion, and production that I engage throughout my working practice acts as a spiritual exercise of meaning—making through creation. I fall deeply in love with …

Anywhere I Stand, Hanaa Safwat

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I will trace the effects of colonialism and the nationalism, conceptions of deserts as empty spaces form a sense of place and create a subjecthood and orientation that is unable to freely move through the landscape. I relate these structures to the thesis installation titled Anywhere I Stand I Block the Flow of the Wind that was installed at theVCU Anderson Gallery on April 9 2021.

Form Follows Culture, Nada Raafat Elkharashi

Theses and Dissertations

We all use everyday objects as part of our daily routines, but the way we use them varies from one culture to another. Using George Herbert Mead’s study of human conduct and Louis H. Sullivan’s credo, “Form follows function,” this thesis examines the cultural meanings and implications surrounding the fundamental act of drinking water. Using a methodology of iterative, exploratory making, a collection of glass vessels explores philosophical and physical manifestations of Islamic cultural principles derived from the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. With the goal of restoring cultural integrity to our daily activities, the work highlights …

Reanimator/Reflection: 
Creating Mirrors Through Time 
With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin

Theses and Dissertations

For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …

Sweet Fruit, Daa Guy-Vasson

Theses and Dissertations

The writing and images in Sweet Fruit are an exploration of my creative works. In the first section, memory, making, and poetics come together to help the reader feel the nuances of my experience. In the exhibition works section, images allow an extended look at the work. Accompanying text describes the relevance of my childhood and my parent's Caribbean upbringing to my creative practice.

Shape Shifting: Bodies, Sound, And Queerness, Cordylia B. Vann

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual and sonic thesis, Performing Ourselves. The paper examines the relationship between the labor of creating a queer body in how it moves and feels to the creation of choreography, sound, and graphic scores

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

Reclamancipation: A Story Of Brilliance, Resilience, And Transilience, Nia A. Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

The experiences of African American women are composed of more than the maltreatment that often exclusively defines them. Oppression and celebration intermingle to define the identities of African American women, and this thesis proposes a method to understand this reality through an exchange of stories in the form of a customizable board game. The game educates those inside and outside the African American women’s community by encouraging the emancipation of self, decolonization of society, and formation of empathy. This thesis embraces intersectional feminism, womanism, and linguistic descriptivism. The research is informed by personal narratives of African American women ages 23-71 …

The Algorithmic Mashrabiya: Reimagining The Traditional Islamic Screen, Ahmed Nour

Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, a mashrabiya was an ornate wooden structure attached to the side of an Arabian building or house, with small, intricately patterned openings to provide both ventilation and privacy for the people inside. The patterns, following the geometric rules of Islamic ornament, lent a distinctive appearance to buildings in the region. A mashrabiya converted the house into a safe, private sanctuary, providing a magical scene inside, characterized by linear sun rays, filtered points of light and shadow. Over time, as building technology changed and the number of skilled craftsmen dwindled, the traditional mashrabiya has all but vanished. The aim of …