Printmaking Commons^™

Memory Organs, Coco Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Working across architectural sculpture, sonic works, and monoprints, this thesis explores the body as a site where memory, materiality, and cultural history converge. Drawing from muscle memory, Chinese architectural thresholds, and female narratives, it traces a body that is simultaneously physical and psychological, personal and collective, constant yet always shifting.

Notes On Rhythm, Maya Lee-Parritz

Theses and Dissertations

Line meets impulse, association meets sign. I weave the eye towards the smudge and sublime—a fractal lineage flowing through the brush, my body, space itself. I walk toward reality in serial successions, allowing what is fragmentary to move me, to cohere in shards, murky and strange inside of me. My body is a repository of images, of broken rhythms and dissonant ideologies. All of these flow and stutter onto the surface, dripping and blurring over each other. Through all of this, I always try to make something whole, perfect, and true.

Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

Juan Hinojosa’s thesis explores collage and assemblage through discarded materials, pop culture, and personal history. He transforms found objects into layered works that reflect consumption, memory, and American identity. Moving between sculpture, painting, and installation, his practice examines excess, nostalgia, and the tension between what is consumed and what consumes him.

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.

Sensory Constellations, Madaline K. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates neurodiversity within the field of fine arts by integrating disability studies, institutional critique, and material practices in painting and printmaking. Through visual analysis and studio-based research, the project examines how tactile engagement, color relationships, and repetitive mark-making can articulate embodied experiences of neurodivergence. It challenges dominant institutional frameworks that pathologize neurodivergent behaviors by reframing stimming as a generative and communicative practice. The resulting body of work includes both image-making and the creation of tactile objects designed to facilitate sensory interaction. The thesis proposes alternative ways of understanding artistic practice and accessibility within art institutions.

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.

Coffee Bindings, M. Ermolenko

Theses and Dissertations

Coffee Bindings is a multi-media interactive installation weaving themes of history, memory, death, and spaces that no longer exist through the lens of coffee readings and a mixture of physical and digital media. By navigating ghost spaces (spaces/places that used to exist but don’t anymore), and looking at survival through three time periods, Coffee Bindings jumps through liminal time and space, navigating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh in 2020-2024, while also tying them to personal family history with the death of my father and the loss of the physical space of …

Shapes That Hide Their Shadows, Jennifer Blaine

Theses and Dissertations

shapes that hide their shadows concerns itself with the mutability of memory. The complexities of girlhood to womanhood, and the way we are shaped by place and space, are explored through the artist recounting childhood memories connected to her grandparents' hometowns. Divided into three different sections, the artist discusses drawing as medium, creating a lexicon through using visual symbols, and the logistics of building your own archive.

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

¡Bip Bip!, Diego Pablo Málaga Beckhart

Theses and Dissertations

¡Bip Bip! is a body of work that investigates the car as it exists in the American imagination, a metaphorical and physical object where culture, identity, and power intertwine. This work uses painting, printmaking, collage, video, and installation to explore the car as a space of expression, interiority, and understanding the world through a marginalized lens.

Central to my practice is my personal vehicle, Guadalupe, which functions as both muse and metaphor, the main driver of the framework within ¡Bip Bip! My practice examines the different but congruent contexts intersections of this iconic American symbol, the car. In my paintings, …

Édouard Manet’S Defense Of Modernity: Recontextualizing The Cat In Olympia, Rebecca Schiffman

Theses and Dissertations

The black cat in Édouard Manet’s seminal painting, Olympia, has often been relegated as a crude joke or symbol of reprehensible sexuality. This thesis argues that the cat plays a larger role in Manet’s representation of modernism, and functioned as a defense mechanism by the artist against his critics.

Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan

Theses and Dissertations

Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.

How To Forget, Jesse D. Hoyle

Theses and Dissertations

How To Forget was born from a need to give tangible form to the psychic residue left behind by a life lived. Through the use of silk-screening of red clay mud onto ink-jet photographs, archival textiles, and site-specific installations, I attempt to tie and/or divorce myself from my own and my family's extended history and examine the function of memory within the dynamics of the archive. How To Forget takes a non-linear, non-chronological approach to this examination, compressing decades of time and space through the manipulation of the archive and my own self-portraiture, designed specifically to deny myself from its …

Shinners, Alexis E. Mabry

Theses and Dissertations

Shinners is a project that aims to examine the position of women in subcultures and capture conversations of women in subcultural sports. Within feminism, sociological constructs, campy horror, and personal experience I am manifesting the physical and mental obstacles faced in the subcultural sport of Bicycle Motocross (BMX) through photography, painting, collage, video, and sculpture. I interpret images posted to social media of injuries obtained while riding BMX as forms of empowerment, bodily gore as extreme evidence of participation, performative violence, valorizing the understanding of both the physical and psychological pain of failure, and the use of failure as a …

Bloody Show, Leonie Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Leonie Weber reflects on how reproductive, domestic, and emotional labor is addressed in her artwork, and her experience as an artist-parent in the art world. Moreover, she specifically discusses mothers who are navigating their own artistic paths. Her practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, performance, and installation.

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

For The Love Of Existence, Paul Joseph Vogeler

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, artist Paul Joseph Vogeler discusses his influences and current art practice. He covers topics like Catholicism and mortality, BDSM and erotic art, Tarot, spirits and the afterlife, photography and painting, and bones and relics.

...And Yet The Devil Exists, John Hee Taek Chae

Theses and Dissertations

...And Yet the Devil Exists is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have defined my sense of identity–narratives in which perceptions of reality shatter, mutate, or hybridize when confronted with power, opportunity, or coercion. The installation component of the project consists of three parts. The first is an infrastructure made of wooden beams upon which paintings and images are installed; I call this the lantern. In the center of this is a round table on top of which is a nonsensical …

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

William Bernard Cooke, George Cooke, And J.M.W. Turner: Business Of The Topographical Print Series, Saskia C. Turpijn

Theses and Dissertations

The organization of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British printmaking and publishing was based on economic principles and occurred in the collaborative sphere of the engraver’s studio. Print designers, engravers, printers, and publishers formed a professional network that operated on economic principles, publishing prints that served to generate income for its participants. These ventures faced great challenges in the lengthy and laborious processes of engraving and publishing, and in financing the project for the duration of that time.

This project examines the economic structure of early nineteenth-century prints. Using comprehensive accounting records, it analyzes two well-known topographical print series. The profitable Southern …

A Caprine Carnival: Goats At The Vālaikkāl Vāyil, Madhini Nirmal

Theses and Dissertations

Madhini Nirmal uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival to imagine a goat-led subversion of political and social dogma in the context of the South Indian city of Chennai. She uses the mediums of monotype, painting and collage to create these artworks where the undoing of hierarchies is a result of the natural and bodily.

[You Are With] Kin And [You Can Be At] Ease, Abdul Azim Al Ghussein

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of hospitality, sharing and acclimation within a studio art practice as a means of fostering consideration of others. I employ a practice whereby I disrupt the typical gallery context, and through the production and dissemination of consumable items from the Middle East, I examine how resources can be used, valued, and shared to accommodate various and unspecified others and provide opportunities for crossing thresholds of guest and host relationships.

Between Rock And Breeze, Lena Schmid

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis project consists of a series of works on paper and songs about the collusion of the body and nature. I use a lens that both distorts and makes clearer the ineffable ways our bodies shake their boundaries, moving without us and within us.

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

Recovery From Design, Cassandra J. Ellison

Theses and Dissertations

Through research, inquiry, and an evaluation of Recovery By Design, a ‘design therapy’ program that serves people with mental illness, substance use disorders, and developmental disabilities, it is my assertion that the practice of design has therapeutic potential and can aid in the process of recovery. To the novice, the practices of conception, shaping form, and praxis have empowering benefit especially when guided by Conditional and Transformation Design methods together with an emphasis on materiality and vernacular form.