Sculpture Commons^™

Arts On The Point: Boston's First Public Sculpture Park, Isabella Slonka

Honors College Theses

Led by the conviction that “a public campus needs public art,” Professor Paul Tucker founded UMass Boston’s Arts on the Point (AoP) sculpture park in 1997. Large-scale works by world-class contemporary artists including Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, Luis Jiménez, Sheila Pepe, and Mark di Suvero were made accessible to students, served as teaching aids and attracted those outside of UMB to Columbia Point. AoP’s use of long term loans made the landscape itself a rotating gallery.

Consideration of the “personality” of the campus was essential in the selection of works. Site visits with artists were conducted to ensure that their …

Grit, Nikita Nenashev

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Grit is the pursuit of intuition and sustained attention in the search for expression. My work aims to create a sense of both familiarity and mystery by operating between the framework of utility and abstraction. I investigate the liminal space between what is known and unknown, creating surfaces and forms that challenge our perceptions of beauty.

Working gesturally and swiftly invites the clay to reveal indicators of its character, leaving evidence of the forces involved in the creation of each form. Textured and scorched surfaces, produced through the firing process, reflect the transformation of malleable material into a state of …

Promethean, Jordan B. Snow

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

The ancient Greek myth speaks of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. I engaged this body of work without the use of maquette, drawings or markings. What emerges from this method is archetypal in nature. I leave the tool marks as my fingerprints laid bare.

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.

Running Around, Kian T. Mckeown

Theses and Dissertations

Running around reflects on how living in a large city can shape one’s art practice. Daydreaming, impulse, and the frustration of daily life are explored through drawing and sculpture. Divided into 10 sections, the artist creates an index of thoughts relating to his work and the world around him.

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

Lovepilled, Zhiliang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

"Lovepilled" is a collection of essays and stories about love, the longing for it, and where it takes place.

Science, Fiction, James Nick Peelor

Theses and Dissertations

Science, Fiction is about death, mental health, UFOs, and having a mutifaceted art practice rooted in a DIY ethos.

Echoes Of Becoming - K. Morrell, Kole K. Morrell

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I work sculpturally, exploring presence, transformation, and emotional weight that is not inherently visible. My forms are recognizable yet unsettled, existing between familiarity and distortion. Meaning is not fixed or declared, it reveals itself slowly through texture, material, and time spent in observation.

I approach making as a form of therapeutic ritual. Through touch, I shape and alter the material, imbuing it with the story of emotions I want to convey to the viewer. I am most connected to the work in its “in-between” states, when the form is still shifting and unresolved. In these moments, it mirrors my own …

Imagining The Inuit: Myth, Market, And The Making Of The Contemporary Inuit Sculpture Canon, Kristen Sara Davidson-Schwartz

MA Theses

This thesis explores how qallunaat institutions used sculpture to shape and define Inuit life. I argue that contemporary Inuit sculpture, as conceived of by outsiders to support Inuit economic enfranchisement and modernization, became a vessel through which qallunaat institutions circulated ideas about Inuit culture and Arctic lands. Although purported to reflect the voice of Inuit, the meanings attached to Inuit sculpture rarely reflected Inuit intention and consistently aligned to qallunaat priorities: a performance of primitive, ancient, and authentic Inuit life; a gesture of indigenous gratitude and cheerful participation in state-designed development programs; or a masterful expression of the formal concerns …

Fragments & Formations, Charles D. Schluckebier

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

My work begins with an idea, but is driven by curiosity as it develops, often arriving somewhere different than initially planned. I maintain control over the direction while allowing decisions to shift in response to what emerges. Creating artwork becomes a space where ideas are not illustrated by worked through – physically and mentally at the same time. I approach making as problem-solving, where each sculpture functions as a puzzle resolved through construction. I push materials beyond their intended function, forcing them into new conditions where form emerges through resistance, constraint, and play. Material behavior informs the outcome but does …

Among The Remnants, Jade-Lynn B. Lewis Vance

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis serves as supporting documentation and research for my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Among the Remnants, at West Virginia University. This dissertation will explain how my artistic vision, influences, research, and thesis exhibition fits into larger art and cultural contexts. Drawing from art history and theory, my work explores memory, touch, and fragmentation. My fascination with artifacts and the stories they hold inspires my research and drives me to create personal connections within my own art. The figurative sculptures serve as a vessel for recalling impactful experiences and embodying personal perception and these interactions. The …

Signs & Symptoms, Bridget Mara-Williams

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

My body of work centers on verbal and nonverbal communication, and how meaning can be conveyed, distorted, or withheld. Since living in Kansas, I’ve struggled to understand the layers of Midwestern niceness, as I am more accustomed to the directness of the East Coast. Both ways of communication are valid, but often go past each other when put together. In Kansas, East Coast bluntness can appear callous. I've felt more like a Nor’easter, than merely a Northeasterner– disruptive and maybe a little difficult.

The difference has me tuned in to the colloquialisms around me, to phrases that slip by relatively …

Exploring Design Tools, Naomi Torgler

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my Honors Research Project, I developed skills to 3D model and render using Rhino 8, Tinkercad and Adobe Illustrator. In the process of developing these skills, I created six digital renderings and one model. The works produced using these software programs are to be used in a developing portfolio to seek future opportunities in the field of architecture.

Throughout this project, I explored connections between different programs when designing and building each piece. This project also reflects my focus in the Sculpture program at the Myers School of Art by considering elements of design in a three-dimensional form. In …

Corpus Meum, Mea Electio, Kara L. Coonrod

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The right to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom is something I hold very close to my heart. Women who did not wish to embrace motherhood, or who grew beyond the walls of the hearth and home, have been far more often persecuted than praised. Over the past two years, I have created artwork borrowing the visual and material language of the Catholic church (along with personally relevant folklore) to elevate my freedom of choice and bodily autonomy in the face of religiously driven political oppression. Using a less frequently referenced organ from my reproductive system to represent my struggle against …

There Is A Puddle In Stonehenge, Nathaniel Newcomb

Theses and Dissertations

I began by making what I called "furniture": finding discarded logs and using a chainsaw, I milled out slabs of wood far larger than any normal board or beam, and gave them the function of chair, table, shelf. Sometimes it was a "shelf" in name only, and was commentary on furniture. In my practice, using discarded wood is necessary for the sake of the earth; making original pieces is necessary for the sake of my soul. I am reminded of megaliths when I erect these enormous forms in wood. I make intuitively, and like the meaning of megaliths, obscured by …

The Weight, Hammet Reavis

Theses and Dissertations

What follows drifts between out to under, argument to object, learned to unlearned, and then back again, for now. What remains is not erased, but held in tension - pressed forward by an unspoken weight. However, let's go on record and retrace this gesture, not by means of crossthru, but as underline.

Spell Of Forty Small Failings, Erin B. Ehren

Theses and Dissertations

Spell of Forty Small Failings is a collection of images and writings that draws from an unruly range of literary forms, academic disciplines, and religious cannons in order to address the Divine—all that which exists on account of the phenomena of what it is to see and be seen: to hear and be heard: to touch and be touched: to know and be known, and through that knowing proceed beyond mediation. I wrote this thesis for me in the hopes that all along I was writing for you.

Subculture And Identity As An Escape From The Societal Norms Of Power Imbalance And Authoritative Abuse, Sarah Goldberg

Bachelor of Fine Arts Theses

No abstract provided.

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

Juntos, Tori N. Saenz

Honors Theses

Juntos is a sculptural exploration of interconnectedness and dependence between people. Throughout my life and travels around the world as a solo backpacker, I have seen firsthand how the human desire for connection transcends language barriers, personality differences, and various belief systems. This natural tendency to form relationships and depend on each other is integral to our society and our lives. In juntos, which means “together” in Spanish, I explore these human connections through figurative sculptures using abstraction, repetition, diversity, and balance.

The simple, abstract figures that make up juntos capture the internal composition of a person rather than …

Weep No More, My Lady (Oh! Weep No More Today): Love, Violence, Printmaking, And Kentuckian Futurity, Madison Brown, Marshall Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Situated within a regressive political climate, this essay considers the writer’s thesis artwork Weep No More, My Lady as a simultaneous account of Southern gendered violence and a desire for healing. Through personal and historical connections to Kentucky’s material culture, the work navigates binaries of class, race, and gender that have dictated the dominant contemporary conception of the region. Placing the competing forces of care and brutality in dialogue, Weep No More, My Lady translates these theoretical challenges into formal attributes. The work suggests modes of making — stitching, unraveling, tearing — can act against the construction and naturalization of …

Cuentos De Barro, Daniel Anthony Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations

Cuentos de Barros addresses the complexities of creating art and processing indigenous heritage and personal history as a Salvadoran immigrant within a neo-colonial society. Centering ritual, care, and healing, the artist imbues sculptures with tenderness using abstract forms and the tactile manipulation of unfired clay and graphite.

My Head Is This Animal, Paula De Martino

Theses and Dissertations

De Martino’s paper explores the dynamics of control in human interaction by discussing her relationship with animals. The author's life experiences serve to construct a narrative, but she lies. She becomes an unreliable narrator who aims to blur the threshold between art and real life throughout the performative gesture of appropriating identities. She steals from the ancient myth of Medusa through her stone sculptures (her offspring), in an egoistic attempt to excuse her fear and longing for motherhood.

A Limit That Recedes, Chloe Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

In "A Limit that Recedes", I discuss my art practice in terms of accumulation and techniques of reproduction, such as casting, printing, and repetitive actions. I contextualize my work among artists such as H.C. Westermann, Isa Genzken, and Paul Thek. The work featured in this thesis explores ideas of aspiration, longing, and failure, and explores themes of the fraught relationship of the human and nature.

Untitled: Study., Annabela Cockrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Untitled: Study is an exploration into “The Work”, which is a constant evolution of the idea of the same piece. Every new work is an evolution of the one before. Previous works are often reworked and self-cannibalized into the next generation. The Work will never be presented the same way twice. There is a temporality in making and installing the work this way, what with the form, the space, the ness of it never being the same. All the while conflicting by being viewed as being the same in the same breath.

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.

Xxx, Samuel Tucker Claxton

Theses and Dissertations

In XXX Tucker correlates the rise in online hookup apps and the fall of queer nightlife spaces to show how the internet has affected gay cruising spaces. They relate their installation-based work to the ideas of liminal spaces and Jean Baudrillard's

hyperreal. Further, they contextualize their practice within the scope of Robert Grober's work.

How To Remain A Stranger / Encountering, In A Basement, Hannah Rotwein

Theses and Dissertations

How to Remain a Stranger / Encountering, in a Basement consists of two parallel essays. On the lefthand side of the page, How to Remain a Stranger explores the ways that the legend of the Wandering Jew, the Tradescantia genus of plants, peddlers, and exile relate to my practice of collecting, sorting, and combining found objects. On the righthand side, Encountering, in a Basement describes my thesis exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Focusing on the idea of the encounter, I detail the materials, considerations, and processes behind four of the ten sculptures in the …