Art Practice Commons^™

Kavana: Photography, Jewish Storytelling, And Memory, Hannah Altman

Theses and Dissertations

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, …

Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between humans and land, through the lens of the scientific and religious, bridging the physical realm with the spiritual. It acts as accompanying material to the project titled Martian Mother, supplementary information to the visual work, and an extension of the proposal, the center of the work. The proposal exists to send myself, or a like-minded individual, to Mars with artificial insemination equipment to give birth to the first Martian, becoming the first Martian Mother. This work is rooted firmly in speculative fiction, creating a nonlinear future framework for a new society and space exploration.

(Re)Forming And (Re)Fusing The Sub-Divided Self, Laura Boban

Theses and Dissertations

The split between the individual and being part of a social body is addressed in this paper. I begin with my suburban upbringing; applying notions of separate and sub-divided to the construction of one’s aspirations, gender expression(s), and one’s ideological alignment. I contemplate the forces directing individual and shared desires and the persistent messaging of individual pursuits over efforts that benefit many. What does it mean to participate in a collective dreaming of one’s own wealth, happiness, and power? Can one cultivate an integrated art practice and sense of self? In the studio, I layer and abstract figures, stack household …

A Story About A Girl With Snakes For Hair, Kate M. Turner

Theses and Dissertations

My work is autobiographical. I use various art making processes to create a visual archive of my life. By abstracting these memories and experiences, I can examine how culture works surrounding issues of identity. This is my story.

The Program, Aaron Douglas Estrada

Theses and Dissertations

In my work, I explore the engineering of identity and socioeconomics that are programed into Black and Brown communities. I refer to this as “The Program”. The Program validates, breaks, codes, and critiques the system that divided us. The Program is identifying with the struggle of growing up in a system that is programmed to see you fail. So if you get caught up in that system it’s a natural death within the program. But you can break and make your own program. If you stick to the program.

The paper's use of language is coded. Text has been written …

How Many Licks, Ashley Goodwin

Theses and Dissertations

Arts communities are currently reevaluating and restructuring power dynamics within their systems to accommodate a broader range of experience and subjectivity. However, the forces of control are still largely dictated by a broader patriarchal culture. This complicated, tangled dynamic is the focus of my research. Female artists who make work about men or about patriarchy more generally, are consistently subjected to its influence as the dominant cultural experience—the invisible “truth” that everything either is, or acts in reaction to its position. In reality, patriarchy is no longer gender specific. I will be addressing my relationship to it as well as …

Reaching Across Community Lines: How Informal Visual Art Educational Programming Bridges The Gap, Janelle O'Malley

Student Projects

Economic disparity in underserved communities is in large part responsible for a lack of access to quality visual arts education. The communities most in need are often hit first when it comes to funding the arts, and the students suffer these financial consequences. How can we ensure those underserved communities receive a complete education with the visual arts? What other ways can access to the visual arts be provided to schools?

Indominable, Kathleen A. Fox

CGU MFA Theses

INDOMINABLE, Kathleen A Fox

The reformation of the feminine portrait from that of idealistic sexual beauty into a portrait of strength, community, longevity, transformation, and inane human foundational essence of societal value. This collection of portraits illustrates the uniqueness that is often overlooked for the fast, idealistic and instantly read images of women hailed as beautiful. These women contain a space they have earned with their strength of character, spirit, and unwillingness to be moved from their places of significance. Created with an expressive abstractive edge to traditional portraiture, these female portraits refuse to be easily glossed over, for their …

Public School Art Teacher Autonomy In A Segregated City: Affordances And Contradictions, Albert Stabler, Jorge R. Lucero

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Over the past two decades, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a lot of change. First there was the opening of magnet schools, and other gestures at reform, followed by school closures and the flourishing of charter schools. In this essay, two former Chicago art teachers, one who taught in a prominent college prep magnet high school on the north side, and one who taught in an under-resourced neighborhood high school on the south side, examine the commonalities of their otherwise divergent experiences, particularly with regard to the freedom allotted to both them and their students by the administrative affordances …

Economic Provenance: The Financial Analysis Of Art Historical Records, Amy C. Whitaker

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The Leo Castelli Gallery launched pivotal mid-twentieth-century artistic careers, including those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although well-studied for its artistic impact, the Castelli archives—as well as those of other gallery artists such as Frank Stella and early collectors such as Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine—include a curious trove of artists’ financial records and related correspondence. This paper argues that these records form an “economic provenance” that is important both to both art market analysis and art history. This economic context is sometimes overlooked because of the contested relationship between art and markets. In this context, the archive can …

#Riseandgrind: Lessons From A Biased Ai, Conor Mcgarrigle

Conference Papers

#RiseandGrind is a research-based artwork that, through a process of active engagement with the machine-learning tools of what is known as artificial intelligence, sought to make visible the complex relationship between the origins and context of training data and the results that are produced through the training process. The project using textual data extracted from Twitter hashtags that exhibit clear bias to train a recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate text for a Twitter bot, with the process of training and text generation represented in a series of gallery installations. The process demonstrated how original bias is consolidated, amplified, and …

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”^[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Out Of The Box: Hiraeth: The Nostalgia Within Abandoned Homes, Jessica Mcdaniel

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Student researcher Jessica McDaniel explains why abandoned houses obtained a reputation for horror, as well as how this fear is not all that remains in what were once homes.

Thomas Kong Interview, Jon Lovisetto

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist bio: Thomas Kong is an artist working in collage and assemblage, using advertising, packaging and other surplus material from his convenience store, Kim's Corner Food, located in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Kim's Corner Food features an evolving installation of Kong's work, and is open to customers and visitors 7 days a week from 8AM - 8PM at 1371 W. Estes Ave, Chicago, IL 60626.

The Back Room, an experimental project space in the store's former stock room, operated from October 2015 – March 2019, and has now closed. Bio from: https://thomaskong.biz/

Japanese-English Translation: Kitaōji Rosanjin—Why I Became A Potter (1933), Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

A translation of「なぜ作陶を志したか」、北大路魯山人著、1933年

Source, Aozora Bunko (a digital archive of public-domain Japanese-language works):

General website: https://www.aozora.gr.jp

Current text: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001403/files/55082_54782.html

All rights reserved, Christopher Southward, 2019

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Sarah Adcock

Graduate School of Art Theses

I view my creative process as alchemy, the transformation of materials through experimentation. I use wax as a material that transcends its historical use as a sculptural process for casting and instead, use it for its transmutable qualities to inform content. Because of its plasticity and duality as fragile and resilient, wax is symbolically submissive and assertive. By applying heat, wax can be molded and formed into new shapes. Once it cools, wax reverts back to its natural state; solid and impermeable. I use objects to explore desires of origin and life. Transitional objects, the first “me not me” possession …

Kazua Melissa Vang, Justin Beales

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American filmmaker, visual artist, photographer, teaching artists, production manager, and producer based in Minnesota. Melissa is currently a lead artist as well as a teaching artist for In Progress. Her most two most recent photography works were showcased at In Progress under the exhibit, “NEXUS: Honoring the Self-Taught Photographic Artist” (2016), and “Hmong Tattoo,”(2017). Her current photography project is taking portraits of Hmong refrigerators and freezers. From her collection “F R I D G E S,” was featured in the exhibit, “Foodway”(Summer 2018) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is currently …

Sky Cubacub Interview, Spencer Nieto

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Rebirth Garments are designed and made by hand by Sky Cubacub. Sky is a non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx human from Chicago, IL with life long anxiety and panic disorders. Sky first dreamed of this collection while in high school and couldn’t find a place where they could buy a chest binder as a person who was under 18, and who didn't have access to a credit card to buy one online. Sky is especially interested in Rebirth Garments being accessible to queer and disabled youth and is working on creating a program for making free/reduced priced garments …

Heather C. Lou Interview, Katie O’Reilly

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: heather c. lou, m.ed. (she/her/hers) is an angry gemini earth dragon, multiracial, asian, queer, cisgender, disabled, survivor/surviving, depressed, and anxious womxn of color artist based in st. paul, minnesota. her mixed media pieces include watercolor, acrylic, gold paint pen, oil pastel, radical love, & hope. each piece comments on the intersections of her racial, gender, ability, & sexual identities, as they continue to shift and develop in complexity each day. her art is a form of healing, transformation, and liberation, rooted in womxnism and gender equity through a racialized borderland lens. heather works in education as an administrator. …

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

Nicole Sumida And Alex Yu Interview, Laraib Malik

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Nicole Sumida is a co-founder and co-publisher of Riksha Magazine, an online magazine featuring creative work by and about Asian Americans. Alex Yu is a co-publisher of Riksha and both have been involved in community arts organizing since the 1990s in Chicago.

“Riksha provides a space for capturing the Asian American experience through compelling writing, commentary, and artistic expression. We curate an online magazine that presents poetry, fiction, non-fiction, fine arts, and video and audio pieces. We also comment on and curate the bric-a-brac and ephemera of Asian American life.”

Ada Cheng Interview, Zishuo Wang

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Ada Cheng is the host of the storytelling show Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series at Volumes Bookcafe. She is also the producer and host of the show Am I Man Enough? a storytelling/podcasting show, where people tell personal stories to critically examine the culture of toxic masculinity and the construction of masculinity and manhood. In addition, she is the co-producer and co-host of Talk Stories, an Asian American/Asian diaspora storytelling show, along with Randy Kim, a show where they showcase Asian/Asian American storytellers and performing artists.

Chamindika Wanduragala Interview, Vincent To

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American visual artist, cook, DJ ( DJ Chamun), puppeteer and stop motion animation filmmaker based in Minneapolis. Her work deals with personal experience through mythic stories. She is also the founder and Director of Monkeybear's Harmolodic Workshop, which supports Native/POC in developing creative and technical skills in contemporary puppetry.

Bio from: http://chamindika.com/index.html

Udita Upadhyaya Interview, Aneri Madhu

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Udita Upadhyaya is an interdisciplinary artist who uses the details of her medical, cultural, and social biography as her primary art material. Her work spans live art, devised theatre, performative photographs, sculpture, installation, video, writing, text, and fiber arts.

Upadhyaya delves into the privilege of being able to lose a language, to have a language to spare. She wonders which bodies have access to literacy? Which to expression? When? And Where? Upadhyaya writes in English, reconciling and reclaiming that her language of intellectual expression and subsequently of power is inherited from the colonizers of her ancestors. Simultaneously …

All The Small Things, Talia E. Levitt

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with the history of the still life as a marginalized and antiacademic genre. Rather than fool viewers into believing that there are real objects in front of them, as is the historical intention of trompe l’oeil, I use realistic rendering to emphasize the painting and painter.

Artist Statement, Halima Ladbon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Artist Statement

To The Peaches, Jazmine Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on erased histories and the ways these histories are preserved through cultural traditions. I explore histories across the African diaspora with specificity on African American culture and black female subjectivity.

Driving In Circles With Monsters, Melanie Klimjack

MFA Statements

Abstract

Using the novel Frankenstein as a visual mentor and metaphor, I explore methods of creating both paintings and video works through a piecemeal procedure like that of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. In this paper, I discuss the limitations and successes of my artistic practice and how the aesthetics of failure, montage, and the art historical movements of Post-minimalism and Casualism informed my work during my course of study. I seek to outline my journey from my early paintings that relied on image-making and my subsequent transformation to abstract sculptural paintings to achieve an aesthetic that is in line with that …

What Can A Studio Approach To Teaching Tell Us About The Academic And Social Learning Of Middle School Students? An Exploration Of Student Understanding Of How Making Art Supports Their Academic And Social Learning., Maureen Creegan- Quinquis, Maureen A. Creegan-Quinquis

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study explores the types of social and academic learning typically overlooked in public school education. Art-based approaches to academic learning have been labeled as“fluff.” Education policymakers hold a biased view of the arts. When asked to consider art as a viable epistemology, cognition theorists have dismissed art as irrational. These biased views have contributed to the marginalization of the field of art education. The purpose of this study was to question this bias through an art-based studio approach to research. The goal was to explore how middle school students understand the role of visual arts in their own academic …