Art Practice Commons^™

Whitework: The Cloth And Call To Action, Sonja Dahl

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the newly independent colonies of the American Northeast, styles of white-on-white quilting and embroidery became popular among women coming of age. Considered the epitome of their needleworking skills, whitework required patience, time, focus, precision, and a steady hand. Such detailed stitchwork on pure white cotton-then a booming industry in the American South-prepared these young women to make homes that were meaningful, full of symbolism and care. Drawing analogy between these historic textiles and current movements for decolonization and anti-racism, this talk expands the term Whitework to function as a call to action, for both myself and other white-identified scholars …

The Techniques Of Samitum. Based On A Reconstruction Of A Silk From The Oseberg Burial, Åse Eriksen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A collection of samitum was found in the Norwegian Viking burial Osebert (834 CE) in 2014. I got the opportunity to study some of the fragments and could reconstruct a nearly full pattern unit from six narrow bands, once cut from the same fabric. I wove a small piece of this fabric in my ordinary flatloom, using both modern dyestuff and fabric spun silk material. Fragments found in Egypt from 400 AD show that both tapestry and taquete were woven in the same fabric. When searching for the loom used for the original samitum fabric, I made a vertical warp …

Indian Basketry In Yosemite Valley, 19th-20th Century: Gertrude “Cosie” Hutchings Mills, Tourists And The National Park Service, Catherine K. Hunter

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Basketry is the highest art form of Native Americans in California. I will focus on Yosemite Valley starting in the 1850s when Native Americans adapted progressively to contact with miners, settlers, and tourists. As a Research Associate at the Peabody Museum, Andover, Massachusetts, I inventoried the Native American Basket Collection. The unpublished Hutchings Mills Collection, acquired by Gertrude ‘Cosie’ Hutchings in Yosemite prior to 1900, caught my attention. In 1986, the Department of the Interior requested the collection be loaned, exchanged, or purchased as “the single most important assemblage from that period.” The collection did not leave Andover; however, one …

Shepherds And Shawls: Making Place In The Western Himalayas, Jennifer Hoover

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Cars weave through the flocks of the Gaddi shepherds as they travel from the plains to high altitude deserts, winding along roads lined with shops selling Kullu shawls. In these ways and more, textiles are the face of the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Yet dominant discourses position both the shepherds and weavers of the region as the last hold-outs of endangered traditions. These discourses continue colonial-era assumptions of rural artisans as “primitives” in need of either protection from encroaching industrialization or motivation to modernize. Academic writings, popular visual representations, and government policies also reinforce monolithic identities of herders …

Threads, Twist And Fibre: Looking At Coast Salish Textiles, Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Coast Salish textiles are: remarkable for their quality; unusual in the fibres used; notable in their designs; singular in the innovative processes used to manufacture them. Salish textiles were determined by geography, shaped by trade, and influenced by colonization. That the textile tradition has survived is a reflection of the prestige they hold and the importance of the textiles in the Coast Salish culture. Relatively unknown and underappreciated, the older textiles deserve to be looked at with fresh eyes and modern methods that bring to light the outstanding abilities of the Coast Salish women in the creation of these important …

Ancient, Indigenous And Iconic Textile Motifs In Contemporary Fashion Case Study: Defining Concepts Through Textile Designs: Appropriation, Collaboration, Provenance And Identity, Kristin Scheel Lunde

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper investigates the material and visual characteristics of certain ancient and historical textile motifs with roots in Chinese and African culture, and their sudden appearance in new geographical and cultural context. Appropriated into western contemporary textile and fashion trends, this paper examines the new roles of these designs in context of foreigness, identity, and hybridity. Their consumption and reception both within and beyond their original cultures is a central theme, and it is evident that their reception in both locations, although different, exhibits some similarities. Exploring the transcultural consumption and reception that occurs in various cultural locations this paper …

Copyright For Creators: Bridging Law And Practice, Carla-Mae Crookendale, Hillary Miller, Sue Robinson

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Everyone is a publisher, a maker, or a creator in the digital age, and understanding copyright is a foundational skill. Artists, designers, and arts scholars need acute awareness of the legal landscape and fair use. To help meet this need, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries, in concert with the VCU School of the Arts, created a series of programs on the nuances of copyright for artists, designers, and art scholars.

Nd’Awakananawal Babijigwezijik Wd’Elasawawôganôl: “We Wear The Clothing Of Our Ancestors”, Vera Longtoe Sheehan

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When thinking of Native American people, a typical image is of tanned people with long dark hair wearing leather and furs in the distant past, but that is not an accurate depiction of the Abenaki people or their textiles. As an Abenaki scholar, artist, and educator, my research into the textile traditions of the Abenaki people includes archaeological evidence, primary resources, and oral history interviews. Abenakis themselves have different ideas of what it traditional because textile and fiber arts evolved over many millennia throughout N’dakinna, the Abenaki homeland which once encompassed Vermont, New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, and parts of New …

Manipulating The Threads Of Culture: Contemporary Shibori Artist Yvonne Wakabayashi, Eileen Wheeler

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Deeply anchored in her practice of shaping and manipulating fibre are both the aesthetic integral to Yvonne Wakabayashi’s Japanese heritage and the inspiration of the natural environment she finds along the shores of her own birth place, Canada’s west coast. Wakabayashi’s journey to find her authentic voice in her varied textile works, engaged both historical craft practices of Japan and printmaking processes of the West. Most importantly, it led to the discovery of shibori with its ancestral links and innovative contemporary possibilities. This paper explores how an individual artist embraces her artistic cultural identity that also negotiates the upheaval wrought …

Mindful Escapism, Kench Weathers

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the art work included in Kench Weathers’ MFA thesis exhibition. This work explores major themes such as the sacred, contemplation, optical illusion and paradox. The installations involve multiple three-dimensional geometric shapes that are formed with steel tubing (welded together). These works have various inspiration; both contemporary secular and sacred and are influenced by sacred paradox, both visual and ideological. The mixture of the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional creates multistable perception within the viewer. The work introduces visual and perceptual distortions of depth and dimensionality. These forms are nonrepresentational but act as a catalyst for the viewer. I …

Resilience, Glenda Militano

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

My objective for creating this body of work is to explore the complexity and beauty of the human brain. What inspired these works is my research on cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Cognitive psychology involves the study of internal mental processes, while neuroscience deals with nerves and nervous tissue that relate to behavior and learning. Neuroscience is where psychology meets biology. The series of paintings in Resilience, were created with the intent to connect these two fields of study, while charting my exploration and discoveries found linked with science and psychology. The brain and its components are portrayed in …

From Practice To Performance: The Importance Of Ballet In Degas’S Dancer Painting Process, Whitney Leeann Hill

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

The context in which any artist creates an artwork is integral to understanding its significance, and one crucial aspect of context is how a work was created. When first looking at how Edgar Degas created his dancer paintings, his process seems simple- he watched the dancers and then painted what he saw. However, that is only a surface examination of a much more complicated system of observation, practice, repetition, mastery, and reproduction. This thesis investigates how Degas bridged the gap between observation and understanding of balletic technique; how deep his knowledge of balletic technique was; and if Degas did have …

Considering Perspectives, Cynthia Epps

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, Considering Perspectives, explores the ideas of perspective, not only in terms of spatial perspective in art, but also regarding how our vantage point and presumptions affect how we feel about certain subjects. The subjects of my work are spaces or objects often overlooked or considered mundane. When we approach a work of art, we typically do so with a multitude of presuppositions that influence our response. Often, we are not even aware of this. By splicing together multiple perspectives I use my work to create awareness that there may be more than one way not …

In Search Of Communication, Usman O. Oladeinde

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the work included in Usman Oladeinde’s MFA thesis exhibition. The goal of this thesis paper is to explore major themes such as communication, identity, change, centeredness, landscapes, and language. These paintings present Arabic letter forms transformed into illegible shapes which are painted on landscape backgrounds, often depicting an aesthetic of textual elements receding into space. All these works are inspired by the Qibla, which is represented in the abstract and painted using acrylic media. Occasionally image transfers are mounted on the painted surface.

Visual representations like mine are communicative without forcing the viewer to one specific idea. …

Resist: A Controversial Display And Reflections On The Academic Library’S Role In Promoting Discourse And Engagement, Stephanie Beene, Cindy Pierard

Urban Library Journal

Libraries engage communities in a variety of ways, including through exhibitions and displays. However, librarians may not always know how to promote critical discourse if controversy arises surrounding exhibits or displays. This article reflects on one academic library’s experience hosting a controversial display during a divisive political time for the library’s parent institution, its broader urban community, and the United States as a whole. The authors contextualize the display, created by a local art collective, against the backdrop of creative activism, and consider implications for library displays and exhibits within similar environments. Rather than retreating from controversy, libraries have an …

A Phenomenological, Arts-Based Study Of Art Therapists’ Self-Reflective Practice, Laurie Ponsford-Hill

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This phenomenological, arts-based study examined the experiences of 15 art therapists using five-minute, full-bodied self-portraiture with 55 minutes of self-reflective journaling once a week for four weeks at the end of each work week. The therapists determined the location for this practice. Subsequently, the four artworks, as a serial, were explored with each participant in a one-hour telephone or Skype interview to understand their lived experience through art, and its signs, and symbols. This process enabled the therapists to act as witness to their respective self/selves, deepening their insights and connections about self. The transcribed audio-taped interviews were manually coded …

Pulse Flow, Hollis Moore

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

My urgency to celebrate "pulse flow" and unfold knowledge and power surrounding water resources in the delta is emphasized through preformative field research in place, dialogue with local community members, and the presentation of maps as layered, fluid and permeable.

(Disambiguation), Amy Johnson

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

disambiguation, means to make something clear. I want to make a few things clear. I also want to give a few things the ambiguity they deserve.

Field Guide, Madeline Helland

Scripps Senior Theses

Field Guide is a mixed-media artist book detailing the exploration of a fictitious culture through cartography, narrative, and illustration. It is presented through the lens of an amateur archaeologist, navigating a chain of islands to search for ruins and artifacts. In part, the project is focused on the fantasy of an imagined world. The island chain is a place entirely of my own creation. By creating the viewpoint of an outside explorer, it was possible to navigate through this world. Although I, as the artist, can know everything about this fictitious world, adopting the perspective of someone distanced by time …

Under The Influence: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Psychedelics, Jody Roun

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The following research will outline the effects of psychedelics from an interdisciplinary approach, which is to say that I will explore the neuroscience behind psychedelic drugs and how it relates to creativity, as a primary focus, while examining the role of additional points included along the way. The goal of this research, is to gain a deeper understanding of psychedelics and truly decipher what it means to be under the influence, as the most important goal of this human existence is to achieve understanding. The aforementioned is a point that great minds like Albert Einstein and Humphry Osmond impressed on …

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

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

Julia Margaret Cameron's Photographs As Paintings, Winnie Wu

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

This paper argues that in order to better understand the photographic techniques, and compositional choices employed by Julia Margaret Cameron, one must analyze them in terms of the language of paintings. By using photography to stage painterly tableaus, Cameron blurred reality and fiction, the result of which is the equalization of all those she photographed, be they famed Victorian poets or female maids.

Power Suit, Clarice Cuda

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The focus of this project began in utilizing hair as a vehicle to investigate rituals associated with mourning, grief, and the liminal space that exists between life and death. After an in depth search into the cultural, physical, spiritual, and material aspects of hair, I enacted process and labor to create a sculptural form that performs in response to grief.

I chose to work with acrylic hair, as it exists in a space between the real and unreal, and visually is absorbed as the uncanny representation of the separated body. I wanted to discuss the body, while emphasizing its absence. …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Ultrasound—Re:Viewing Bodies, Minjee Jeon

Theses and Dissertations

A medical evaluation of physical impairment imposes the additional burden of “labeling” the patient with the condition. The binary nature of the normal versus abnormal label emphasizes difference and can lead to trauma. Understanding differences, however, can lead to the generation of new forms and thus, more sensitive differentiation and representation. Tension is created by exploring different bodily forms—a dialectic between form and essence. I am designing a space that visualizes and illuminates difference as a source of trauma and amplifying the tension by comparing figures that represent varying degrees of normalcy. This forms a critique of idealized form and …

Quotations Like The Sharpest Claws, Johanna Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic.

The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Enact In Disappearance, Stephanie Demer

Theses and Dissertations

Enact in Disappearance excavates the unseen through the medium of photography in order to chart a new strategy for knowing and communing with a complicated world.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.