Art Practice Commons^™

In Praise Of The Artist Researcher, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

I will start by defining the terms artist, researcher and artist researcher and then give some examples of artist researchers: Leonardo da Vinci, Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and Lee Strasberg. Finally, I will address the issue of artist researcher from my own perspective, as an actor and director in particular. I will thus demonstrate the benefits of linking the practice of art with a more theoretical research of this practice, and how these two aspects – art and research – are mutually reinforcing and help creativity to flourish.

01:04:30:08:34:25 Retrospectively, Jo Anna Rose Zelano

CGU MFA Theses

To regenerate. Things break down, get destroyed. We rebuild. We rebuild our mental worlds and our material worlds. I make remnants, collect remnants, of performances and sculptures, and of process. The remnants become the work, the physical and the video, the scars and the tattoo; the evidence is subjected to understanding. What lives through us is not what happens to us, but what remnants we hold on to. What remnants we hold on to in our physical world, what remnants we hold on to in our mental world.

Work For '10 Squared: 100 Artists Celebrate Utep's Centennial', Anne Giangiulio

Selected Works Temporary Series

I was invited as one of 100 artists to create a 10" x 10" work to commemorate the Centennial of the University of Texas at El Paso as part of the exhibition "10 Squared" by the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. I created an original design proclaiming "Go Miners!" in reverse backstitch embroidered on stretched burlap. All proceeds from the sale supported the Rubin Center's education and outreach programming, bringing the experience of contemporary art to a diverse and growing audience of all ages.

Dark Inventory, Abdul Mazid

CGU MFA Theses

Using a conceptual framework to explore the presence of conflicting ideologies, power structures, and paradigms; Mazid transforms well-known materials and imagery into unexpected and charged artistic declarations, working across a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, video, installation, and sculpture. Pulling freely from a range of sources—personal, historical, social, economic and political—his visual language is simultaneously layered, sensitive, controversial, radical, and banal. His art addresses the underlying cause and effects of globalized society on the individual, often using his own personal circumstances as a point of departure.

All The Things Left Unsaid, Philip Kim

CGU MFA Theses

I search in my paintings a state of constant glide; meditational state by flooding my senses as my eyes wander from scene to scene onto a daze of perpetual visual stimuli.

They are the frozen amalgamation of its transient state – A crosscut of fog condensing into honey. And the burning shadows of a golden hour vaporizing into electric haze. I try to keep the image in perpetual limbo, confused by their nature, wondering if they will be pickled in the vinegar of the web as digital ghosts or finally disintegrate from being a substance. I want to capture in …

Spragga, Johnny Guerrero

CGU MFA Theses

I produce experience generators: mystifying, quirky entities capable of creating their own atmosphere, making subtle but implacable demands for recognition and interaction. In order to cultivate work as evocative as it is provocative, I hybridize, bastardize and stylize any and everything I find interesting with special attention given to objects that have been discarded, forgotten or broken. These become hybrid creatures--not quite paintings, not quite sculptures--that teeter between form and formlessness, between coming together and falling apart, between blind hubris and aching vulnerability.

Rope-A-Dope, Gabriel L. Perez

CGU MFA Theses

I create from everyday items, coming from everyday people. I do not think that what I create is too difficult for anyone to understand but I know that although I created it, it eludes me. Plastic containers, disposables, and clothing reach out to eyes that see them differently. I’m not trying to make people see things differently; I’m just trying to make you look. Call it theatrics but with a history of various performance experiences, I am not above pulling a cheap trick to get your attention. Nor will I shun the lingo and logic of decoration since I am …

The White Room Disruption, Jamaal Hasef Tolbert

CGU MFA Theses

My artistic practices range from sculpture, video art, performance, and painting. Streaming most of my ideas from the African Diaspora and the American Social Structure, I introduce my viewers to a world of topics that are not often discussed in society. I invite viewers to think about how they have been trained to stereotype and label skin tones. This opens up conversation on everyone’s unconscious minds and socially structured beliefs, which often touch up on the topic of race issues. I also use the media whether it is the internet or social media to reach viewers globally and to engage …

Borders, Anwar I. Alzeer

CGU MFA Theses

Abstraction provides me with great freedom. Mixing abstraction and imagery introduces emotions and feelings. Color plays a vitally important role in my paintings. It can sway your thinking, change your actions, and cause reactions. It can irritate or soothe your eyes, raise your blood pressure or suppress your appetite, when used in the right ways.

The Effect Of Periodicity On Temporal Attention, Mickeal Nelay Key

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Currently, there is a gap in the literature in terms of the relationship between implicit learning and temporal attention. This study set out to discover whether implicit learning could influence the modulation of temporal attention. Employing the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task, 42 volunteers from Indiana State University participated in the 45-minute experiment. The RSVP stream consisted of 11 uppercase letters, with a stimulus duration of 17ms and a presentation rate of 10Hz. Participants were asked to identify one blue target among 10 white distractors for 10 practice trials and 462 experimental trials. There were three independent variables. The …

The Artist In The Library: Research Services For Creators, Kristina Keogh, John Glover

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

At Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries we serve a variety of disciplines. This poster session focuses on outreach initiatives by the Visual Arts Research Librarian and the Humanities Research Librarian to provide research services to a unique group: students and faculty who create new and unique objects and texts. The needs of artistic researchers in such diverse areas as interior design, painting, and creative writing overlap in many ways, both expected and unexpected.

Our efforts to reach out to creators and offer support for their distinctive research needs have included such activities as taking classes within particular programs and embedding ourselves …

Abstracts And Presenter Biographies From 14th Biennial

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Coast Salish Spinning: Looking For Twist, Finding Change, Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Coast Salish textiles from the Pacific Northwest (northwest Washington state and southwest British Columbia) are relatively rare and unknown yet are masterpieces of sophisticated weaving and spinning techniques. Coast Salish blankets and robes, and the tools used to make them, have been the subjects of a few seminal works (Gustafson 1980; Loughran-Delahunt 1996; Marr 1979; Vanderburg 1953), but other than the occasional recording of the direction of twist, the spinning characteristics of the yarn itself have not been the focus of research. This gap is curious, given the uniqueness of Coast Salish spinning tools, the corresponding techniques, and the fibres …

Needle Lace To Valley Walking: İğne Oyası As Landscape Ornamentation, Olivia Valentine

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In 2012-13, I lived and worked in Turkey, researching the traditional needle lace edging of İğne Oyası and creating relationships between this textile edge, the contemporary urban fabric, and the rural landscape of Turkey. In this paper, I will speak about my time in Turkey, presenting my research into the traditional needle lace edge of oya and my studio production, where I used my research to create this needle lace edge at new scales and in new materials and contexts.

Dressing The Leader, Dressing The Ancestor: The Longue Durée In The South Central Andes, Ann H. Peters

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The preservation and adornment of the dead in the South Central Andes can be traced over some twelve thousand years. The potential for preservation of human bodies and fine textiles in desert sands and high altitude caves contributed to a continuing social and political role of the dead in the lives of the living. Colonial period documents describe well-dressed mortuary bundles that participated in public ritual and could be cited as proof of heritage and validation of social leadership. However, the nature of social and political ancestry and its relationship to power change over time with the development of large-scale …

An American Textile Company To The Trade: The Corporate History And Textile Collection Highlights Of Kravet Inc., Deborah E. Kraak

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Historic textiles “live” in museums and private collections, carefully stored for research and exhibition. Those in the archives of furnishing fabric companies live in a different way: reinterpreted for the consumer, either in exact reproductions or more loosely in fabrics that adapt historic motifs or are inspired by them.1 One of the largest and most important collections of historic American and European printed fabrics belongs to Kravet Inc., an American textile company to the trade based in Bethpage, New York. More than 52,000 historic textile documents belong to Kravet through its own holdings and the archives of the textile firms …

The Secrets Of Alorese ‘Silk’ Yarn: Kolon Susu, Triangle Trade And Underwater Women In Eastern Indonesia1, Emilie Wellfelt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Eastern Indonesia is known for a great variety of textiles. One part of the region that has been largely overlooked in the literature is textiles of the Alor archipelago. However, the literature does recognise and speculate about the unusual silky character of some Alorese cloths that have entered Western museum collections. Based on fieldwork among weavers in the village Uma Pura, situated on a small island in the Pantar strait, this paper reveals the secret behind the characteristic shiny finish of the ‘silk’ sarongs from Alor. Ruled by necessity rather than choice weavers used to mix cotton with fibres from …

Conversationa And Encounter, Belinda Von Mengrsen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textile artists often use items of traditional textile material culture as sites for primary research or encounter within their conceptual and physical practice. This research practice is, however, far more than aesthetic or visual analysis: rather, it allows for the observation of that border territory in which a new work of art begins and ends—the very place from which the ideas come—and also of how influences are layered, and evolve within our psyche. Ruth Hadlow, has described the use of traditional West-Timorese woven textiles as “a ‘tool’ with which to think?” (Hadlow, 2013). Through such tools, primary research may operate …

A Fragmented Treasure On Display: The Turfan Textile Collection And The Humboldt Forum, Mariachiara Gasparini

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the summer 2012, thanks to the Department of Central Asian Art of the museum and the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library in London, UK, the so-called Turfan textile collection--gathered during the last century Prussian Turfan Royal Expeditions in the Tarim Basin--held in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, Germany, was finally microscopically analyzed and digitized. Except for a couple of pieces taken into account in previous studies as examples of comparison, the collection as a whole (ca. 350 pieces) has not enjoyed particular attention from scholars in the fields of Chinese or Central Asian art …

Threads Of Feeling: Embroidering Craftivism To Protest The Disappearances And Deaths In The “War On Drugs” In Mexico, Maureen Daly Goggin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Since 2006, at least 130,000 men, women, and children have been killed and another 27,000 have disappeared in the “War on Drugs” in Mexico. This violence affects all “socio-economic levels [who are being] plagued by kidnapping, extortion and murder.” Many connected to those who have gone missing or died have been demanding that authorities locate their loved ones. Frustrated with the lack of action, a Mexican activist group of artists called Fuentes Rojas Red Fountains came together in January 2011 to “raise the visibility for the victims of the US-Mexico Drug War” by, among other things, dying fountains red. Later …

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …

Blanket Statements, Issue 118, Winter 2014–2015

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 118, Winter 2014–2015

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 35 (2014), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Nancy C. Bavor, Joyce D. Hammond, Marin F. Hanson, Laurel Horton, Christine E. Humphrey

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Lynne Zacek Bassett

Knockers, Pickers, Movers, and Shakers: Quilt Dealers in America, 1970-2000 by Nancy C. Bavor

Tlfaifai in Tahiti: Embracing Change by Joyce D. Hammond

"One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts": Expressions of Cross-Cultural Communication by Marin F. Hanson

Weft-Loop Woven Counterpanes in the New Republic: The Rediscovery of a Textile Legacy by Laurel Horton

Quilt Documentation Projects, 1980-1989: Exploring the Roots of an National Phenomenon by Christine E. Humphrey

Contributors

Index

A Heart-Based Sufi Mindfulness Spiritual Practice Employing Self-Journeying, Faruk Arslan

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Spiritual Psychology is the study and practice of the art and science of the human evolution of consciousness. The heart occupies an important place in Sufism and is considered to contain the divine spark that leads to spiritual realization. Fethullah Gülen’s action-oriented Sufi methods described in his book series “The Emerald Hills of the Heart” provides the basis for a heart-based therapeutic intervention through self-journeying, which is the objective of this thesis. These self-purification and mindfulness-related transpersonal methods generate a form of treatment that is culturally sensitive. Through my reflections in this research, I transformed my personal experiences into …

Inscribed Cotton Ikat From Yemen In The Tenth Century Ce, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

More than a thousand years ago, Baghdad was capital of the Islamic empire under the Abbasid caliphs, and Yemen was a flourishing center of agriculture and trade. Among its famous products were dyestuffs, and cotton cloth with warp stripes, patterned using techniques of compression resist. As the strength of the Abbasid caliphate declined and claims to power gained hold in the provinces, regional artistic styles began to emerge. The rulers of Yemen adopted one of the prerogatives of the Abbasid caliphs, bestowing honor by rewarding their subjects with inscribed textiles called tiraz. From burial sites in Egypt, many such textiles …

Robert Hillestad, Professor And Fiber Artist, Marilyn Delong

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Department Information

Dr. Hillestad has been a member of the Costume Society of America since 1978 and has participated in many annual Symposia. Dr. Hillestad has multi-faceted abilities—he is a superb design educator as well as an active fiber and apparel artist—and he integrates the two roles of educator and artist expressively, superbly, and elegantly. Dr. Hillestad is professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. In 1997, The Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery on the Lincoln Campus of the University of Nebraska was named in his honor upon recommendation of the faculty in the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design and the …

Sinan’S Screens: Networks Of Intersecting Polygons In Ottoman Architecture, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

An often overlooked characteristic of Sinan’s architectural production of the 16th century is the use of low screening walls and windows carved of marble with pierced openwork or tracery to let in light and allow for air circulation. Typically these screens display polygonal networks often with intersecting polygons. This paper explores aspects of these carved patterns, which have antecedents in earlier Islamic architecture, attributing particular significance to this architectural feature in the works of Sinan and three successors whom he had trained. These slabs (and their counterparts in forged iron) may be considered études, serving as opportunities for the training …

Rematerializing: Interviews With Emerging Artists About Physicality, Pattern And Textile Techniques, Caroline Hayes Charuk

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will be a presentation of emerging Bay Area artists who draw upon textile materials, forms, and processes, but who refuse the label of ‘textile artist’ in favor of a more ambiguous relationship. References to textiles may be foundational for the work, or brought in as a means to an end. The conceptual basis of their work is contained within its physicality, and they acknowledge (or knowingly set aside) histories of handwork. Each artist has a practice that necessarily slides on a line between the dematerialization of conceptual art and a rematerialization that recognizes haptic experience as indispensable and …

Maguey Hammock: A Weaving Of Resistance And Persistence In Puerto Rico, Soraya Serra Collazo

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles are primary technology to almost all societies. Puerto Rico and the Caribbean are no exceptions. There is an object that has been weaved in the region since pre-Columbian times and it is still passing through the fingers of local artisans. Hamaca, an invention of the American inhabitants,² is an indigenous voice incorporated into many languages. It was in the Caribbean, where Europeans saw its utility, and it was quickly incorporated as the best way of sleeping in their transatlantic voyages. Its production has spread throughout the world and today it is made in many countries. In Puerto Rico …

Learning To Retell Stories Through Comparative Teaching: Writing And Drawing, Rachel L. Lindle

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

Students who are emergent readers and writers are often difficult to assess, as they are unable to communicate understanding in writing. From my observations, these students communicate ideas best through concrete forms of expression, rather than the abstract formation of letters and writing that is unfamiliar to them. Drawing provides an alternate form of expression from writing. Based on information found in literature review and personal experiences from working with students who are emergent readers and writers, pictures and drawings are a bridge to communicate ideas with these students. This form of expression and communication may be a useful assessment …