Art Practice Commons^™

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 …

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

Roses & Thorns, Stephanie Alaniz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis has been created alongside the thesis exhibition shown in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (displayed March 18th to March 22nd). The work presented consisted of drawings, bookmaking, and various forms of printmaking and collage. This body of work is meant to create an analysis of insecurities and body positivity we associate with our physical selves. This work is a collective experience that has been a collaboration with over 80 participants. The number of participants help to create a larger overall collective voice. By creating this collective voice, we can experience these feelings together and …

Ownership And Violence Against Women Of Color Reflected Through The Lens Of Anglo Saxon Theology, Jennifer Herring, Luraine Kimmerle

Violence Against Women conference

In the American cultural mind, white bodies have been upheld as ideal. In addition, the male body has received praise, greater access, and safety on the streets, in business, education, and the wider world. In the arena of higher education students tend to discover how their personal sociocultural perspective informs ownership of the lack thereof. It is through this reality that the idea of ownership is seen when it comes to violence inflicted on/received by women. When race is included in the violence against women dialogue we uncover the branches of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, planted by the theologies and worldviews of …

A Field Guide For Weathering: Embodied Tactics For Collectives Of Two Or More Humans, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis

The Goose

In our inherited meteorological practices and frameworks, weather conditions are managed for us in a range of ways (for example, through architecture, technology, commodity culture, infrastructure, economic rationale). This field guide brings the weather back to the body. A traditional field guide provides tools for the individual sovereign human subject to observe and document nature “over there”. In contrast, through a range of different activities, our field guide not only invites investigation and cataloguing of the field that we also comprise, but also challenges what counts as a noteworthy observation regarding the weather and also climate.

Radical Joy Performed Into Action: A Study Of Feminist Performance Art, Kaylee Simonson

Honors College Theses

Although traditionally excluded from the art world as from all major institutions, women artists staked their claim by revolutionizing performance art as a medium in the 1960s and 70s. By integrating life and art, feminist artists developed the powerful ideology that “the personal is political,” especially in art. From this foundation of radical assertion, feminist artists explored, resisted, and deconstructed their struggles. Contemporary feminist artists not only have different battles to fight, they fight them in a different format: digital media. In this project, I seek to explore the ways performance artists before me have used the medium of performance …

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Strange Woods, Song Park

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations, Lynda Bostrom

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations is a written document accompanying the culmination of my three years painting at a graduate level. The result of which is an autobiographical body of work navigating the tension of being a human with an invisible disease, while straining to understand Western societal constructs of women. I simultaneously reject these fairy tales as a standard recipe for happiness, yet identify with its visual language that is rooted in the vernacular of my generation. Redefining the elements I reject or embrace helps me to look beyond the boundaries of these constructs, and adopt an attitude of curiosity …

Representations Of Mainstream And Marginalized Subjects In The Work Of Diane Arbus, Grace Short

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis considers the photographs of the twentieth-century photographer, Diane Arbus. In America during the 1950s and 60s, Arbus photographed both marginalized and mainstream subjects including dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, debutants, socialites, and celebrities. At one point in her career, she expressed an interest in family portraiture and, indeed, a number of her images depict families.

Scholars who have written about Arbus, such as Susan Sontag, Carol Armstrong, Anthony W. Lee, and John Pultz, have formulated theories about Arbus’s motivations, although their findings focus on individual features of her work. Sontag argued that Arbus exploited her unorthodox sitters whereas Armstrong …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Making Visible: More Of The Picture, Sarah Slavick

Lesley University Community of Scholars Day

In Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, “ she demonstrates how, for centuries, institutional and societal structures had made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius.” As the Guerilla Girls noted, only 1 woman had a solo museum show in NY in 1985, and, in 2015, 30 years later, it wasn’t much better with 1 at the Guggenheim, Met and Whitney, and 2 at MOMA. On International Women’s Day, March 1, 2017, I began a …

The Classical Versus The Grotesque Body In Edith Wharton's Fiction, Joshua T. Temples

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In her landmark works The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton responds to earlier depictions of the classical, pure Victorian and Edwardian woman. Wharton's "inconvenient" women overturn popular stereotypes. Subsequently, they are barred from their social groups, but they are independent, unlike the complicit and obedient women of the classical body, most of whom ascribe to the trope of the "Angel in the House." The grotesque seeks to undercut the unrealistic expectations enforced by the classical through its embodiment of progression and humanity, and Wharton is drawn to …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 39 (2018), Janice E. Frisch, Kathryn Berenson, Ronda Harrell Mcallen, Joyce Fullerton Smith, Xenia E. Cord, Marla R. Miller

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Janice E. Frisch

Political Partisanship in the Tristan Furnishings by Kathryn Berenson

The Chintz Gardens of Achsah Goodwin Wilkins, a Baltimore Quilter by Ronda Harrell McAllen

Family, Friends, Merchants, and Religion in the Early 1840s by Joyce Fullerton Smith

Ohio, the Border State: A Regional Study of Vessel, Vine, and Floral Quilt Borders by Xenia E. Cord

Invited Paper

Embedding: Putting Hadassah Chapin Ely’s Wholecloth Quilt in Context by Marla R. Miller

Contributors

Index

Embedded In These Walls, Trish J. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Embedded In These Walls uses photographic imagery, archival ephemera, and written text to examine a specific history of generational trauma through the lens of a singular family of a southern tradition to point to a larger systemic breakdown of accountability and truthfulness regarding abuse

Identifying Problems And Solutions In Changing State Legislation Regarding Licensed Clinical Social Workers Providing Private Independent Mental Health Services, Dianna Cooper-Bolinskey

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

State regulated social work practice began in the 1960s; by the mid-1990s, all of the states within the United States regulated the profession through licensure. The purpose of licensure was ostensibly to protect the public and the profession; however, legislation defining social work practice varied vastly from state to state. The variation existed not only between states, but also within licensure categories with regard to the scope of practice of the social work profession. Licensed clinical social workers in some states could practice relatively independently, as they had the ability to diagnose, provide psychotherapy, and bill Medicaid, Medicare, and third …

Graphic Activism: Lesbian Archival Library Display, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This chapter outlines the implementation of Graphic Activism, an exhibition of archival material from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest lesbian archive in the world, located inside the display cases of the Graduate Center library of the City University of New York. The two-semester-long display stems from an institutional need to showcase material inside of the main library display cases, and the interest of including visual representations of Women's Studies material from the collection as well as those which represent the collection. The chapter discusses collaborative relationships outside of the academic institution, pointing to select challenges when …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

F-Word Fun Home, Kim Cosier

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Growing up fundamentalist can be challenging for any child, but when you do not fit within the confines of traditional gender norms, when you are masculine, female-bodied or feminine, male-bodied, navigating identity can make you feel like a foreigner within your own family. Certain forms of feminism, too, can feel alienating. In this article, I share personal experiences with both social constructions of feminism and fundamentalism. Borrowing from queer theories, I wrestle with ways of doing, undoing, and redoing religion and gender that may have implications for teaching in a more inclusive and expansive manner.

Prevail: In The Moment..., Nicole Stahl

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This body of work is composed of sculptural mixed media objects and scenes that heavily utilize cast glass. These pieces are physical representations of my quest to seek mental balance by focusing on what brings me happiness and comfort while still honoring mortality.

Moldmaking and repetition of process innate within casting and other aspects of this work makes me focus and revisit an idea, repetitively, like a meditation or a prayer. The intense focus required helps combat my anxiety and translates anxious energy into more positive, productive, balanced way of living.

Part of this balance requires the acknowledgment of the …

Tipping Point, Pang Z. Vang

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a woman at the tipping point under oppression in a patriarchal society? How does she behave? Pulling from the vagina dentata mythologies, and personal and collective experiences of rape culture, I formed a body of work which problematize the stereotypical narrative of victim/perpetrator. As a visual and conceptual exploration, my work explores the themes of desire, agency/non-agency, and violence [as it manifests within and outside of the body]. Utilizing visual and conceptual quotations from film, pornography and sex toys, these works subvert the exoticized stereotype of the Asian woman as sexual plaything.

The Blue That Blew Bloo, Daniel Ray Martinez

Art Theses and Dissertations

My work is a combination of videos, objects, and performances with a multidisciplinary practice that engages with the formal language of sculpture, photography, video/cinema, and drawing while being in dialogue with concepts and concerns about the image, the surface, and the space of representation. I am interested in the poetics and phenomenology of life; and the way one interacts in an environment; and the way digital/virtual media has shifted our experiences in life. Rethinking the way one finds boredom to get away from virtual capitalist spaces is a concern for me. I find inspiration in the wandering through spaces. I …

My City Limits, Maggie Tarr

Graduate School of Art Theses

Many have taken part in the act of flanerie,[1] however, many have fallen victim to the flaneur; “the flaneur is the man who indulges in flanerie…”[2]. I am perpetually followed by the male gaze. I am a flaneuse, a surveyor of my surroundings at all times. “Outsider/insider is a border the flaneuse must skirmish on constantly, if only with herself.”[3]

This thesis is a first hand account of my negative experiences that are generated by the many flaneurs of sexualized culture and lustful society. It is an analysis of the paintings I have created as …

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Renluka Maharaj Interview, Steven Zych

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Renluka Maharaj grew up in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and moved to New York as a child where spent most of her life. Her Eastern and Western background wrapped with modern sensibilities is evident in her bodies of work. Her interests are centered on gender roles, sexuality, colonialism, mythology, iconography and fetishism. Some of the artists that have influenced her work are Yinka Shonibare and Yasumasa Morimura.

Ms. Maharaj completed her BFA at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the …

Raeleen Kao Interview, Beena Patel

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Raeleen Kao is a drawer, printmaker, and amateur competitive eater aka glutton residing in Chicago with a Charles Brand etching press, a red tabby, and forty plants.

Her prints and drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country most notably at the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Monmouth Museum of Art, Bert Green Fine Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, Tory Folliard Gallery, Firecat Projects, and Normal Editions Workshop. Her work has been represented at SELECT Fair New York, the Editions and Artist Books Fair in New York, the Cleveland Fine Print Fair, the …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 38 (2017), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Dana Fobes Bowne, Deborah Cooney, Dale Drake, Anita B. Loscalzo, Rachel May, Ronda Harrell Mcallen, Kathy Moore, Linda Welters

Uncoverings Journal

Foreword by Lynne Zacek Bassett

"Old Quilt Brought to America" by Dana Fobes Bowne

The Cushman Quilt Tops: A Tale of North and South by Rachel May and Linda Welters

Louisiana Acadian Cotonnade Quilts: Preserving the Weaving Heritage of a People by Dale Drake

Baltimore Album Quilts: New Research by Deborah Cooney and Ronda Harrell McAllen

Whence Garlands, Swags, Bowknots, and Baskets? Four Neoclassical Design Motifs Found in American Quilts by Anita Loscalzo

The Mystery of the Harlequin Star Quilts: Finding and Naming a Previously Unidentified Regional Design by Kathleen L. Moore

Contributors

Index

Restoration, Shannon M. Slaight-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The marks I make in clay have different characteristics, and the physical mark of one’s fingertips or visual record of the hand is personal and intimate. This visible activity is the evidence of my constant presence and control within each object. Its repetitive meditation produces a private relief from my persistent anxieties. This exploration for me is not only visual, but also physical. This is the start of my infatuation with the idea of pattern. It has its own discrete visual language and modes of communication; and through my research I am developing a method of intercommunication.

Radical Dissonance And Haunted Gestures: Rupture And Reverence In The Artwork Of Aja Mujinga Sherrard, Aja M. Sherrard

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper serves to establish the studio practice of Aja Mujinga Sherrard within the framework of conceptual art, touching on the flexible use of media, the subversive or political nature of the work, and its relationship to movements and disciplines such as Feminism and Poststructuralism.

The section entitled “Race and Incoherence” addresses the practice of Radical Dissonance—or the creation of ruptures within commonly accepted concepts and social constructions—through the Costuming Kinship Series, 13≠12≠12.2 (Genetics Project), and Body Double. The section entitled ”Art, Loss, and the Unspeakable” traces an emotional shift in her work and speaks directly to the pieces …