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Editor’S Note, Deepak Shimkhada

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This special issue of Monsoon is dedicated to the studies honoring the goddess traditions in South Asia. The onset of the Monsoon Season in South Asia typically commences in June and continues until late August and early September. The publication of this issue, therefore, has been strategically timed to coincide with that season, which is a vital source of sustenance for millions of individuals in this part of the world. This anthology consisting of five papers—written by scholars with expertise in the field of goddess and women studies—speak unequivocally about the goddesses or women for their strength, beauty, wisdom, and …

Constructing Jain Goddess Padmavātī In Gujarati Literature, Venu Mehta

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Worship of the goddess Padmāvatī emerged more than a thousand years ago. This article explores three songs about her in Gujarati by Paṇḍit Vīrvijayajī (1773-1852). By analyzing the style and form of his work, one learns a great deal about devotional liturgies that commemorate goddess Padmāvatī’s protection of the Jina Pārśvanātha and, in turn, his protection of her.

Women’S Voices From History: Gond Rani Durgawati And Rani Lakshmibhai, Nandini Sengupta, Moupia Basu

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Two strong women are compared and contrasted in this article. Gond Rani Durgawati (1524-1564) led a resistance movement in Jabalpur against the Mughal rule of Akbar. Rani Lakshmibai (1828-1858) organized the people of Jhansi against Sir Hugh Rose, an officer defending the interests of the British East India Company. Both women continue to be remembered for their bravery and their loyalty to the people they ruled.

Mai Bhago And Amrita Devi Bishnoi: Women Of Strength, Sowmya Ayyar

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Mai Bhago (1670-1720), also known as Bhag Kaur, distinguished herself on the battlefield to defend the Sikh faith. Amrita Devi Bishnoi (d. 1730) is said to have sacrificed her life with 362 others to protect the Khejari trees in the Rajasthan desert. Both women continue to inspire social justice and ecological activism.

An Examination Of Gandhian Economic And Political Thought And Its Relevance To The Empowerment Of Women, Purnima Mehta Bhatt

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) sought to alleviate poverty and empower women. His commitment to nonviolence and the economic ideal of “small is beautiful” continue to inspire grassroots movements around the globe. This article discusses the Chipko movement of northern India, the protection of rain forests in Kerala’s Silent Valley, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), and Medha Patkar’s valiant though ultimately futile attempt to save the Narmada River from a massive government damming project. The ongoing legacy of these movements can be found in AWAG, the Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group and Women’s Shanti Sena (Peace Force).

Indigenous Stitch-Arts Of India: Tradition And Revival In A Global Age, Punam Madhok

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Stitch art allows for the creative expression and economic support of countless women throughout India. This article examines four notable styles: chikankari, flora and fauna stitched in white thread on fine white cotton, rabari, the stitching of mirrors into colorful cloth, phulkari, resplendent flowery motifs sewn into shawls in Punjab, and kantha, Bengali patch work yielding quilts and seating mats. In addition to describing each technique, this article discusses how women have been economically empowered through this art by such organizations as Self-Help Enterprise (SHE) in Kolkata and Adithi, a women’s cooperative, in Bihar.

Identities Of Women In Indian Art And History, Nalini Rao

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The stereotypical image of Indian women portrayed in the art of stone sculpture is often interpreted as images of beauty that are sensuous, religious as well depict social life. There are historical reasons for depicting her as such. This paper inquires into the changing depiction and social forces that influenced feminine imagery. This paper examines the portrayal of beauty through idealization of female body which has evolved over the centuries in India. It also aims to understand their changing status and explores issues of feminine identity, status, and empowerment largely in ancient and medieval India. It also provides a brief …

Sana Sana: Unlearning Generational Expectation Through Performance, Jalen R. Ash

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is an exploration of identity as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) body traversing through the generational histories of my family and the struggle of cultural loss to our assimilation of Whiteness. Through the multi-faceted medium of performance, my work uses physical and mental spaces of self and technology to understand how the body functions as a screen. Our bodies house projections of generational expectations that have trickled down from the past into the present. These projections shape our own unique identities along with the personal experiences we gather as we move through the various spaces of …

Death Spaces And Distant Skies (Every Day We Say Goodbye), Renee Estee

Theses and Dissertations

Linking ideas and imagery of the Australian Outback, Hauntology and Orphism, my practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. Operating as visual love letters and epitaphs, my paintings coalesce figuration and abstraction to conjure spaces where I can commune with the deceased and contend with future loss.

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

Imprints Of Life: Rubbings From Carved Stones Of The Han Dynasty, Elinor G. Gass, Yan Sun

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Imprints of Life: Rubbings from Carved Stones of the Han Dynasty explores the connectivity between an individual’s character and the historical narratives celebrated in Han society; on display in Schmucker Art Gallery are rubbings taken from carvings on architectural components of burial chambers and above ground shrines in the western Shandong Province. These rubbings, selected from Gettysburg College’s Special Collections and College Archives, date from approximately the 1st to 2nd century and illustrate the values of Confucianism and Daoism, the two prevalent philosophies embraced at the time. Confucianism establishes rules of morality and piety, while Daoism focuses on the balance …

Wings Of Change: A Visual And Cultural Analysis Of Mujer Angel, Taylor Carrico

The Compass

In the middle of the twentieth century, Mexico sought to reestablish its national identity. Following on the heels of the Mexican Revolution, an extended period of social upheaval and regional conflicts that transformed the country, artists and visionaries alike struggled to determine how the reborn nation would distinguish itself. While many movements in this period looked towards the future and sought utopia, there was one which concentrated instead on exploring the precolonial past and distilling the essence of “Mexicanity'' from there. This movement was known as the Mexicanidad in Spanish; or, in the precolonial Nahuatl language, the Mexicayotl. In …

The Office Of Possible Projects, Juliette Walker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This writing is a companion to the MFA thesis projects that I presented in the Spring 2022 semester at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. My thesis work did not exist as a singular, solo exhibition in a traditional gallery space like it did for most of the artists in my graduating cohort; rather, I completed three different but substantial and interrelated projects, many of which occurred outside of traditional art spaces: the Office of Possible Projects at the Fayetteville Public Library, the Cake Stand Biennale which took place across the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the office of …

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Monuments Are For The Living: The Confederate Mound Monument And The Falsehood Of Reconciliation Statues, Janelle O'Malley

Student Projects

In 2015 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began tracking Confederate symbol usage in the United States, namely focusing on confederate flags and monuments. That same year a white supremacist fatally shot nine Black worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The shooter in this case had confederate symbols all over their home. This sparked conversation nationally about confederate symbolism and its true purpose. In turn, the conversation led to highly contested debates on confederate monuments and statues. Between 2015 and 2020, 148 confederate statues were removed from the public eye. But the most shocking …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

Rethinking Watteau In The Context Of Early Eighteenth-Century Bourgeois Culture, Bronwyn C. Roe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the work of Antoine Watteau through a social-art historical lens. Traditionally, Watteau's fêtes galantes have been closely aligned to the culture of the French nobility. However, a closer look into the artist's background, training, social milieu, and the class identity of his primary buyers reveals an alternative class alignment, inviting new interpretations for Watteau's most elusive work. This thesis challenges the close association between Watteau and the French nobility and aims to broaden the socio-visual landscape from which Watteau was drawing, namely that of a burgeoning bourgeois consumer culture. In particular, the culture of emulation, with its …

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

Sandstorm Spring 2022, Leslie Malland

Sandstorm: A Journal of Arts and Letters

Full Manuscript

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

The Met Costume Institute: Evolution, Metamorphosis, And Cultural Phenomenon, Shelby Kanski

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Living Space, Emily North

Art and Art History Honors Projects

The living room is a place where people can feel comfortable, interact with each other, and display some of their most prized possessions. This project uses five pieces of furniture to create a room; an armchair, chaise lounge, bookcase, coffee table, and lamp. These elements, combined with textiles, wall art, and knick knacks come together to make a warm and inviting space that I feel represents myself, and my love of nostalgia, heirlooms, and handmade items.

Choppy Forgeries: A Vr Sculpting Game, Jonah Warren

Frameless

Choppy Forgeries is a fast-paced sculpting game made for virtual reality headsets. The game is intended to give players the opportunity to practice and appreciate the skills associated with artmaking and sculpture (Seeley and Kozbelt, 2008, 163–166) in a fun, light- hearted, competitive context. The game also requires players to closely examine and engage with famous classical sculpture from art history through its gameplay.

The Currency (Volume 1, Issue 1), Elsa Akesson, Claudio Castillo, Sophie Delaplaine, Jade Wu, Maria Paula Suarez

The Currency--SIA Student Magazine

Table of Contents

Page 2: Elsa Akesson, "Kids of Morondava," 2020, oil & acrylic on linen, 130 x 97 cm.

Page 4: An Interview with Generative Artist Claudio Castillo by Sophie Delaplaine, SIA-London '22

Page 9: Jade Wu, "Grain Rain," 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 36"

Page 11: Navigating the Artworld: My Personal Journey as an Emerging Artist through the Pandemic by Maria Paula Suarez, SIA-NY '23

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

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

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …