Fine Arts Commons^™

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

A Poor Third? A Reexamination Of Manuscript And Print Markets In Fifteenth And Sixteenth-Century Rouen, Kate Hodgson

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

Manuscript and print scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have deemed Rouen a ‘poor third’ to the workshops in Paris and Lyon. Lacking the cultural status and political influence of these two major centers of book production, Rouen’s manuscript tradition has been coined an “eclectic” group of illuminators who were limited to a local, discontinuous demand for books and whose regional role hardly even bears examination. However, Between 1419 and 1449, Rouen was an epicenter of political and economic exchange between Normandy and England. The city’s manuscript ateliers experienced a period of unparalleled patronage from an international, elite clientele, …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

Lars Gustaf Sellstedt: Art In Buffalo And The Buffalo Fine Art Academy, Shannon N. Gilmartin

History Theses

This Master’s Thesis Project researches the life of a forgotten Buffalo artist, Lars Gustaf Sellstedt. He was born in Sundsvall, Sweden and started his life as a sailor when he became a cabin boy as an early teenager. For most of his young life until his mid-twenties, Sellstedt was a sailor traveling to all corners of the world. He started his journey as an artist while in between sailing jobs. Over many decades he portraits locally and abroad mainly in the Caribbean Islands. Sellstedt was one of the few artists in 19th century Buffalo, sharing the profession with William J. …

Reading The Room: Memory, Dwelling, And The Everyday, Sara R. Hardin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In any space, there is a residue that coats the present with a patina of memory. Creating layered imagery in dream-like paintings and prints, I use the domestic realm as a metaphor for the internal world of the mind, memories, and private thoughts, including them in compositions with symbols like the boundaries of windows, doors, and gates. These metaphorical structures also portray outward identities, which guard inner emotions. The conceptual aspects of these compositional elements weave together memories of the past and places of the present into a unified whole.

I began graduate school at the beginning of the COVID-19 …

Procedural City Generation With Combined Architectures For Real-Time Visualization, Griffin Poyck

All Theses

The work and research of this paper sought to build upon traditional city generation and simulation in creating a tool that both realistically simulates cities and their prominent features and also creates aesthetic and artistically rich cities using assets that combine several contemporary or near contemporary architectural styles. The major city features simulated are the surrounding terrain, road networks, individual buildings, and building placement. The tools used to both create and integrate these features were created in Houdini with Unreal Engine 5 as the intended final destination. This research was influenced by the city, town, and road networking of Ghost …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Mandala: On The Logos Of Place, Michael Schwartz

Journal of Conscious Evolution

Suddenly, during the night, one awakens while dreaming – aware that this is a dream. The “rules” of action, reaction, and of form itself are not that of the waking state – one might leap in the air and fly, transform one’s body into any number of forms, reach up in the sky and grab the sun and clouds, pulling them to the side, bringing forth a canopy of moon and stars. The entire scene, in the lucid dream, has a heightened sense of radiance and joy, vitality and freedom.

Imagine this sense of lucid dreaming is occurring right here …

Origami Club - A Gateway Into The Art Of Self Expression, Minjae Song, Noah Vincent Rachwitz

Honors Program: Expanded Learning Clubs

The Nebraska Honors Program's Origami Club is an engaging platform for 3rd-5th graders that uses the fascinating Japanese art of origami to create a rich, interactive learning environment. Under the guidance of experienced instructors Minjae Song and Noah Rachwitz, and supplemented with YouTube tutorials, the club facilitates a captivating journey from simple projects to complex designs, skillfully developing each student's creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving capabilities. Each session is planned meticulously to ensure an immersive experience, starting with anticipation-building project reveals and culminating in the production of personal origami masterpieces. As a hands-on club, students are encouraged to question, explore, assist …

Valuation, Tobias Gilbert

Art and Art History Honors Projects

My Studio Art honors project seeks to question the delineation between art, craft, and design and the lack of value placed on most everyday objects. While in our society homes are seen as an investment to be maintained and passed down, almost none of the objects that fill said home receive this level of care leading to mass consumerism of objects made merely to fit a function, not to last or hold their value. Valuation is a set of dining room furniture made of red oak and white ash accompanied by a full set of ceramic dinnerware and napkins. The …

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia Perkins

Honors Capstones

Contemporary environmental art can be inspired by personal experience and reflections between the artist and their surroundings. Black women have a unique interaction with and relation to their environment. I would like to unpack the relationships between Black women and the environment by exploring a few different artists’ work, and by dissecting the effects race and gender have on one’s view of the natural world. I have studied the work of four artists: Torkwase Dyson, Allison Jane Hamilton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Calida Garcia Rawles. Environmentally, I have a specific interest in bodies of water / Black waterways because of …

Light Leaf: Observations Of Leaves In Light, Paul Kelley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

For me, spending time in isolation yielded some interesting findings, as I began to closely observe the various leaves that engulf my backyard. Every new day brought with it a new detail, a subtlety with every shift in light, revealing an endless array of abstractions, textures and colors. I was seeing the hidden life of leaves dancing in the sunlight. Naturally, I began documenting my observations.

Presenting And Curating Contemporary Installation Art; The Work Of Cornelia Parker And Céline Condorelli, Bridget Curtis

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The popular sentiment in curation among contemporary British art institutions has emphasized the attempt to reconcile with the divide between public art and art presented in institutions. The globalization of Britain in contemporary times has led to the wide dissemination of shows curated by British institutions. The location artwork is exhibited can change the reception and interaction with the work. Artists who use their work as a means of activism can benefit from the perception of a global audience. The question arises as to how impactful activism art can be when exhibited within the contemporary institution versus when it is …

Lost & Found, Minji Choi, Myeongkyo Kim

MA Projects

Lost and Found focuses on olfactory art and stimulates the sense of smell through
various means and materials. In this exhibition, diverse associations of the sense of smell are evoked through visual art. Through these fragrant works of art, personal, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions are conveyed and explored. The exhibition's title, Lost & Found, refers to the restoration of the sense of smell, which many people have temporarily lost due to the physiological and social effects of COVID-19.

(Un)Orthodox Orient, Su Ergeneli

MA Projects

The term Orient was born from a Western-created body of knowledge, or rather discourse, with the authority of the West over the East. This paper, through historical and political analysis of the Orient, questions the reasoning and accuracy of the institutionalized Western knowledge of classical cultural archetypes of the East. Orientalism is a product of the West discovering the Orient and dominating and restructuring the Orient. Hence, it is represented by the dominating
frameworks. By taking the Orient out of the ideological discourse, this paper emphasizes Orient as an individual and evaluates the Near Eastern art market’s transformation as its …

Artificial Minds, Lara Bayer

MA Projects

This paper explores the artistic possibilities of artificial intelligence, as well as its ability to act as a creative being through its learned knowledge from the collective consciousness of human beings, whether this learned knowledge can be used by the AI to represent reality, and whether this can be problematic regarding learned biases from the preexisting ones of our own. Looking at the history of how far artificial intelligence has come within the creative artistic realm, examining the technical aspects of how exactly an AI is able to generate original art, and examining four artists that all collaborate with artificially …

Untamed: The Terrifying Beauty Behind The Works Of Woman Surrealists, Shely Calderon Benpalti

MA Projects

An exhibition of work spanning the works of five late North American and Latin American born or naturalized female Surrealist artists, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Leonor Fini (1907-1996) and Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). Untamed explores themes of female existence, alchemy, astrology, dreams and symbolism through painting works on paper and photography. Between the dark years during the first world war, the second world war and postwar, Surrealism as a means of possibility to live a dream-like life were the theory behind this artist's body of work. The deception of dreams, parallel realities and profound studies into …

Revolution And Revelation: An Early Russian Avant-Garde Private Collection, Olivia A. Aurtenechea Eguiron

MA Projects

Revolution and Revelation: An Early Russian Avant-Garde Private Collection is an
exhibition proposal with accompanying essays that explore the value and influence of the Russian Avant-Garde art movement, highlighting its significance as a revolutionary force in early twentieth-century art. While the first essay provides a comprehensive overview of the Russian Avant-Garde art movement, the second one explores the considerations and advantages of exhibiting a private collection of early Russian Avant-Garde art, specifically Suprematism, in either a museum or a gallery. The first essay, A Look Into Russian Avant-Garde, delves into the value and influence of the movement acknowledging the challenge …

Monumentality Of The Artist Chapel: Dissecting Light, Color, Spirituality, And Permanence, Katherine Isler

MA Theses

The concept and creation of the artist chapel is an opportunity presented to only a select few artists. Artist chapels are monumental, permanent works of art that expose a sweeping summary of the artists oeuvre and act as a window into the mind of the artist. The chapels of Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, and Mark Rothko present a variety of similarities through the mediums of light and color. These characteristics take the artist chapel from a piece of art, to a transcendent
/="/">environment that cocoons the viewer in a space of both the seen and unseen. Each of these …

The Women Of Impressionism: The Influence Of Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, And Eva Gonzalès On The Art Market, Caroline Finden

MA Theses

My thesis addresses three overlooked female Impressionist artists, Berthe
Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Eva Gonzalès, the hardships that they faced during their lifetimes, the sociological and political influences that shaped their narratives, and the triumphs that allow us to call them great female artists today. Art historians and feminists alike, such as the exalted Linda Nochlin, have searched for understanding as to why so many extraordinary female artists have gone unnoticed throughout art history, often leaving more questions than answers. To better understand each of these women I analyze both an iconic work and the highest selling work at auction …

Spirituality And Abstract Art, Hao Zheng

MA Theses

Through a close analysis of abstract art and metaphysics (ontological and psychical), the paper examines how metaphysics might be related to abstract art, as well as the early emergence of abstract art in diverse cultures around the world, and its development from the 19th to the 20th century in the modern art world. The paper conducts an examination of some modern abstract art pioneers, as perceived by general public, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Agnes Pilton, who
experimented with the art form in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their intentions based on metaphysics: spirituality and mythology are included in …

On Curation: A Hermeneutical Approach, Elisabeth Yumin Kröber

MA Theses

Starting point of this paper is the philosophical field of hermeneutics.
/="/">Hermeneutics was established to account for different conditions of understanding
/="/">and how they shape our interpretative processes. As different times constitute
/="/">different conditions, the goal of the discipline essentially is to bridge the temporal
/="/">gap between the creation of a work and its perception at a given point in time.
/="/">Whereas traditionally, understanding was a matter of analyzing the historical
/="/">tradition of author/artist and reader/viewer, nowadays, the perception and
/="/">interpretation of art is shaped by another instance, the curator. Under the premise …

Artists In Legacy-Land: Endowing Foundations To Balance Market And Philanthropic Activity, Lucas Mischler

MA Theses

In this paper, artist-endowed foundations are examined to assess the direct and indirect impact of their philanthropic activity on the art market. Beginning with an overview of historical and contextual variables paving the way for private philanthropy in the 20th century, specific case studies are analyzed--established foundations, as well as varying formats for smaller foundations, that illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the art market and artist-endowed foundations. Emphasis is placed on the newfound popularity of artists establishing foundations, and securing legacy, within their lifetimes rather than upon death, as this has the potential to yield the best results. Best practices …

Keith Haring And Jean-Michel Basquiat: Visionaries Of The Legendary Art Movement Of The Eighties In Downtown, New York City, Ritu Cipy

MA Theses

The 1980s in New York Downtown culture was about rebellion. A vibrant community of young artists had occupied Lower Manhattan; interested in various art forms like painting, music, dance and theatre. The community thrived in an area largely ignored by Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It was an explosion of creativity that has had reverberations ever since. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s and Keith Haring’s art grew out of that zeitgeist. Their art was an uprising against a world that did not support their talent. Their need to enforce a social change prompted them into
using their work as a call to action. Their illegal …

Manifesting Magic: Occultism And Feminism In The Art Of Leonora Carrington And Remedios Varo, Margaret Dirschl

MA Theses

The artworks of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo are replete with
/="/">symbolism and evocations of the occult, formulating bodies of work that are charged with magic and mysticism. When studied within the context of their male contemporaries of the Surrealist group, it becomes apparent that this use of the occult operates as a compelling and historically based feminist strategy. Immediately stemming from the occult revival of the previous century and the issues for females presented by Surrealism, the foundations of this idea originate much earlier in the pagan traditions of antiquity and the witch hunts of the 15th through …

Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby

Theses and Dissertations

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies.

Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, …

Artistic Representation And Self Esteem, Brianna Davis

Honors College Theses

Dependent upon the constructs of the perception of self and the viewpoint of others, humans base the value of their self esteem on outer perspectives rather than internal ones. For this thesis in particular, the outer perspective to be examined is representation in the field of the arts. This thesis project explores the process of self esteem, artistic representation in the arts, how one affects the other, a history of the correlation between the two, and ways to inform and educate the masses with the tools necessary to advance representation in the arts thus raising the self esteem of its …

New Frontiers In Technology: Can Traditional Intellectual Property Rights Laws Be Adapted And Applied To Nfts?, Mariyah S. Wakhariya

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

A decade ago, ‘NFTs’ were rarely heard of or known to anyone, unless they worked in or kept up with the tech world. However, they are not new - they have been around for almost two decades. Their popularity has grown over the past few years. ‘NFT’ stands for ‘non-fungible token’. An NFT is a digital file with a unique identity that is verified on a blockchain and is therefore not interchangeable - i.e., a kind of crypto asset, like an authentication certificate for digital artifacts. In theory, NFTs can represent almost any real or intangible property. These days, it …

Introduction To Contemporary Art Across Political Divides, Alla Myzelev, Tijen Tunali

Art History

This book addresses the need for a more sustained knowledge and multidisciplinary understanding of what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. The book’s main inquiry is whether contemporary art can or cannot cultivate an “agonistic” way of togetherness and facilitate difficult conversations through a multitude of contradictions, diverging views and conflicting visions. With Marxist, feminist and ecologist perspectives, the contributors analyze contemporary art worlds across the globe in relation to memory, conflict, trauma, transitional justice, social engagement, social resistance and activism.

In this volume artists, activists, art …