Fine Arts Commons^™

An Investigation Into The Scottsdale Art Week: Cultural Focus, Location, And Sustainability In An Already Saturated Environment, Sophia K. Meshel

MA Theses

This thesis examines the role of regional art fairs within the wider American art market and examines how these events contribute to the growth of local cultural artistic ecosystems. While firmly established international art fairs often dominate attention within the global market, lesser known regional fairs play an important role in connecting artists, galleries, collectors, and cultural platforms within specific communities. Through analysis of established regional fairs and consideration of factors such as artist selection, audience engagement, institutional partnerships, and economic impact, this study investigates how art fairs can move beyond temporary commercial events to become meaningful cultural platforms. Particular …

Echoes Of A Country In Question: Visualizing And Constructing Lebanese Identity Through Contemporary Artistic Practice At The Venice Biennale, Anoush Manoukian

MA Theses

Historically (and presently) riven by sectarianism, struggling with massively degraded infrastructure, and seething with starkly apparent class divisions, Lebanon has long been tied up with bloody postwar politics, paralyzed by innumerable crippling setbacks on its path to recovery. During war, images of conflict have been plastered across media stations, firming the country’s place in the global conversation and imagination; everyone had heard about Lebanon, and people from the art world were attracted to the work being produced in Beirut: a localized body of work that was thematically interesting, formally unique, aesthetically neoconceptual and allegorical in approach. Unresolved conflicts have long …

Ideology And Iconography In Gustav Machatý’S Ecstasy (1933), Karl E. Toepfer

Open Educational Resources

This essay discusses the cinematic construction of sexual ecstatic experience in Gustav Machaty's 1933 film Ecstasy. Sergei Eisenstein's theory of cinematic montage governs the shapes the way the filmmakers organize the representation of erotic desire and rapture. But the film also shows affinity with the Czech "Poetist" movement of the 1920s in constructing a guiding view of ecstatic experience. The essay analyzes many images in the film, and concludes with an application of montage theory of ecstatic cinema to the consumption of erotic videos and internet imagery.

Among The Remnants, Jade-Lynn B. Lewis Vance

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis serves as supporting documentation and research for my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Among the Remnants, at West Virginia University. This dissertation will explain how my artistic vision, influences, research, and thesis exhibition fits into larger art and cultural contexts. Drawing from art history and theory, my work explores memory, touch, and fragmentation. My fascination with artifacts and the stories they hold inspires my research and drives me to create personal connections within my own art. The figurative sculptures serve as a vessel for recalling impactful experiences and embodying personal perception and these interactions. The …

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Adaptive Compulsion, Amanda A. Santos

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Adaptive

Adjective

Adap.tive ( ə-ˈdap-tiv)

of, relating to, or being a heritable trait that serves a specific function and improves an organism's fitness or survival

Compulsion

Noun

Com.pul.sion (kəm-ˈpəl-shən)

a repetitive behavior or mental act that a person feels driven to perform to alleviate the anxiety and distress caused by an unwanted thought or urge, known as an obsession.

For years we have lived in unprecedented times. From the worldwide quarantine in 2020 resulting from the pandemic, to our current US political crisis. The constant barrage of events is overwhelming and demoralizing.

The work in this gallery is a display …

Red Thread, Unknotted: A Visual Self-Inquiry Into Becoming Artist /Educator, Jennifer Jervis

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

This arts-based self-inquiry presents a counternarrative of one woman artist/educator navigating identity formation, agency, and resistance within the gendered structures of the contemporary art world. Informed by posthuman feminist theory and guided by a/r/tography, the study uses artmaking as both inquiry and data to challenge the persistent divide between artist and art educator—particularly as experienced by women. Through reflexive writing and textile-based creation, the author offers a material and embodied critique of the systemic expectations that diminish women’s artistic authority and invisibilize their creative labor. The resulting work becomes a site of resistance, reclaiming artist identity through the layered intersections …

Tailoring Black Style And Its Powerful Pieces: From West Africa To The U.S. West Coast And Everything In-Between, Gabriel Capellan

Occasional Essays

Introduction:

On September 19, 2025, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum (MET) with some of the Bronx African American History Project team. The people in attendance were Graduate Assistant, Anthony Rosado, and Undergraduate Assistants, Serena Velasquez and Emma Garr, wonderful people, I tell you. After the tour, we ended up at the American art exhibit and had podcast conversations about history for what felt like both hours and very brief minutes... We went to the MET to see a particular piece that was in the Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibit curated by Barnard professor, Monica L. Miller …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Front Matter, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Redefining Gender And Rural Life In The Pampas: Alessandra Sanguinetti’S The Adventures Of Guille And Belinda Series, Alejandra López-Oliveros

Art Inquiries

At the time of Argentina’s independence, the gauchos (nomadic horsemen) had become the symbol of the nation in its purest form. Celebrated as independent, heroic and strong, and usually portrayed as the sole inhabitants of the Pampa, the idealized image of the gaucho has flooded popular culture and art even today, to the detriment of flesh-and-bone wage laborers of all genders. As opposed to this static image, I propose to examine Alessandra Sanguinetti’s photographic series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda (ongoing since 1999), which focuses on girls and women in the countryside, pointedly highlights their previous absence. By contrasting …

Review - Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Annie Dell'aria

Art Inquiries

Shahzia Sikander’s work spans traditions from multiple continents, eras, and media. Trained in the traditional miniature painting of South Asia and Persia, yet creating monumental pieces that command space both inside and outside the gallery, this artistic polymath maintains a signature style rooted in sumptuous detail and motifs that drip with layers of meaning. In Collective Behavior, a multi-part, career-spanning traveling museum exhibition of works made over the past 35 years, Sikander’s full array of talent and artistic evolution is on display.

Review: The Visionary Art Of Minnie Evans, Cynthia Fowler

Art Inquiries

The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans was a small exhibition of 16 drawings and paintings by Minnie Evans (1892-1987) on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, which holds a significant collection of her work. Evans was born in North Carolina and spent most of her life in Wilmington. Her artworks are colorful compositions rich with decorative details that illustrate her dreams and visions. But the exhibition attempted to expand our understanding of Evans’s work beyond them. Divided into three categories — “Wilmington Landscapes,” “Spiritual Nature,” and “Visual Culture” …

A Formidable Female Network: The Role Of Women In William Henry Fox Talbot’S Establishment Of Early Photography, Rose Teanby Phd

Art Inquiries

This paper explores how women assisted William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) to establish his Photogenic Drawing and Calotype photographic processes in Great Britain and Europe. Utilising preserved contemporary correspondence as a primary source of unedited transcribed conversations, the genesis of photography can be revisited from an alternative viewpoint of extensive familial collaboration. Letters between Talbot and his female relatives exposed a sophisticated network of interconnected mid 19^th century social elite, providing multiple opportunities for informal advocacy and timely dissemination of the new scientific art.

Epistolary exchanges from 1839 to 1858 provide new insights into women’s subtle, less visible influence …

Review: 60th October Salon - What’S Left?, Rachel Klipa

Art Inquiries

Spread across nine venues and public spaces in Belgrade, Serbia, the 60th October Salon’s concept posed a pressing question: What’s Left? In a moment marked by oppressive capitalism, cultural erasure, and the slow dismantling of socialist ideals, this year’s biennial resisted nostalgia and nationalism. Instead, it probed the emotional and political residues of systems in flux, examining how art can sustain memory, provoke continuity, and imagine new futures in uncertain times.

Art Inquiries Volume Xx No 1 2025 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Review: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Jessica J. Stephenson

Art Inquiries

In 1987, Luna Luna, a fairground/immersive art installation, opened in Hamburg, Germany. A decades-long project in the making, it was conceived and realized by André Heller, a Vienna-based avant-garde artist, musician, film-maker, and author favoring multimedia work including circuses, parades, variety shows, firework displays and poetic gardens. Over the course of three months, about 300,000 attendees traversed Heller’s Luna Luna’s exuberant space with performances, music, and rides on art works that took the form of Ferris wheels, carousals, infinity mirror rooms, puppet shows and other theatrics. The works were created by more than 30 artists including notable 20 …

Conjuring Elizabeth Fulhame: Using Ai To Depict The Invisible Woman From The Dawn Of Photography., Yvette Hamilton

Art Inquiries

Histories of the origins of photography are dominated by men, but the lesser-known contributions of women, such as the British chemist Elizabeth Fulhame, were fundamental to its success. Fulhame’s eighteenth-century chemical experiments directly contributed to the birth of photography, however, she is either totally obscured, or only briefly footnoted, in foundational texts on the history of photography. Her obscuration is heightened by the complete absence of any surviving images of her - she is, quite literally, invisible within a medium whose history privileges the visible.

This paper charts my practice-led research that used AI generative imaging to create speculative portraits …

Exhibition Review - Sung Tieu: 1992, 2025, Lina Alam

Art Inquiries

Over the last decade, we have witnessed the ascendancy, consolidation and mobilization of far-right movements around the world – not least in Germany. The Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu lives there and produces mixed-media work on recent histories of state violence, racism, migration and surveillance. In her solo show 1992, 2025 at the KW (Kunst Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Tieu expanded on her previous projects about the 1980 labor recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that resulted in nearly 70,000 Vietnamese workers relocating to Germany. Her new body of work …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

The Arch And The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsitǎ, Ana Popescu

Masters Theses

The Arch and The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsită (You Are Walking Around with a Painted Crow)

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics in the Department of Ceramics of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

By Ana Popescu, 2025

Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:

Lesley Baker, Shoji Satake (Chair), Heather Bhandari, Tucker Houlihan

Date: May 17th, 2025

Location: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island

To be opened for self-reflection in 10 years, on May 17th, 2035:

I’ve been mulling over how to make …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

The Terror Of The Threshold: On Impermanence, Enclothed Hauntology, And Rest, David M. Legrand

Masters Theses

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined …

I Don't Want To Talk About It, Margaryta Winkler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a contradiction. It is an attempt to verbalize what words can’t capture. It asks what is lost, what is gained and what can only be said when nothing is said at all. It is a love letter to wordless visual narratives. Drawing on the work of animators and illustrators like Gints Zilbalodis, Don Herzfeldt, Shaun Tan and Sophie Burrows, as well as the author’s own explorations, it looks at the risks and rewards of wordless storytelling. It is about silence, but not absence. It is about images that refuse to be reduced to captions and stories that …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Pressing Into Absence, Linda Sok

Masters Theses

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources. …

Considering The Ethics Of Conserving American Art: White Nationalism And The Evolving Meanings Of Nineteenth-Century Genre And Landscape Painting, Evan M. Crocker

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the stylistic and conceptual qualities of American genre and landscape painting from the antebellum period and how these qualities acted in service to establishing white nationalism before the Civil War. The intricate and calculated system of typing in genre painting presented carefully crafted idealizations of quintessential Americans, defined by their whiteness and maleness. Landscape painters of the early- to mid-nineteenth century endowed their compositions with a sense of wondrous opportunity which justified and upheld westward expansion under Manifest Destiny. At the intersection of genre and landscape practices sits plantation paintings—specifically house portraits—in which the plantation serves as …

Trans-Pacific Connections: Chinese Porcelain And Aztec Motifs In Colonial Mexico, Natalia Ramirez

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This research explores artworks within the Global Baroque as visual and ideological evidence through which colonial power, trade, and cross-cultural influence shaped the material culture of the early modern world. Centering on blue and white ceramics as a key medium of transcultural and trans-local exchange, the study analyzes how global motifs, particularly those drawn from Aztec and Chinese traditions, were reinterpreted, aestheticized, and circulated in Aztec and Novohispanic artistic practices.

Through a close observational comparison of Aztec and Chinese decorative systems, the study recognizes contrasting systems of cultural documentation embedded within similar visual forms. Aztec motifs, rooted in ritual, calendrical, …

Encountering The Imaginary: Félix Régamey In Japan And The Legacy Of Japonisme, Nicolas Moiseyev

Art and Art History Honors Projects

This thesis critically examines Félix Régamey’s transformative role in the development of Japonisme, highlighting his pivotal contribution to bridging Western perceptions and authentic Japanese culture during the late nineteenth century. Through an exploration of his firsthand experiences in Japan, Régamey emerges as a multifaceted and paradoxical figure—an artist, educator, and author—whose pursuits reshaped the narrative of Japanese art and cultural exchange in France amid the fervor of Japonisme. His immersion in Japanese society enabled him to engage directly with its artistic traditions, which he skillfully translated for European audiences. This study reveals Régamey’s efforts to challenge the prevailing Orientalist stereotypes …