Fine Arts Commons^™

Hope In The Living Water, Athena Grace Schamowski

Theses - ALL

This thesis focuses on the concepts and ideas behind my paintings. It aims to explain the conceptual and theological aspects of my works as well as the importance of faith in a Christian’s life. Using my own experiences, I reveal how faith can help us understand sufferings, and how through our faith-related experiences we mature in spirit, learn to understand God’s ways, and ultimately enjoy His companionship. Though our faith does not live by understanding all the ways of God, by growing in faith we will understand in spirit that all things will work out for good for those who …

Chinese Women’S Perspectives In Metaphorical Narratives: Exploring Identity, Growth, And Societal Expectations Through Illustration, Cancan Jin

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the struggles and growth of Chinese women through metaphorical narratives, focusing on how they navigate societal expectations, gender inequality, and personal identity. First, it examines the importance of metaphor and anthropomorphism in storytelling. It analyzes how these techniques are used to address women's issues. Second, it explores the social background of Chinese women, from the May Fourth Movement, which challenged traditional gender roles, to the socialist era’s push for labor equality, and the modern struggles of workplace discrimination and the "double burden." Third, it introduces Tortoise on the Way, a visual thesis written and illustrated by the …

The Idiot's Asylum: What Better Place To Do It Than From My Own Grave?, Kara Stallings

Theses - ALL

The Idiot's Asylum: “What better place to do it than from my own grave?” is an essay that examines how vulnerability and collaboration operate as the throughlines of collective creativity. By utilizing live performance, large-scale installation, video, food, and humor, I explore how immersing my audience in a unique experience encourages them to bear witness to or physically engage in a social and vulnerable act of trust – especially within a state of uncertainty. I consider historical and cultural movements centered around radical play, humor, and participation such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Situationism, and feminist performance art to be foundational …

Allegories In Fiction: Shaping Our Thoughts And Outcome Of Technological Advancements, Rick Li

Theses - ALL

This thesis investigates how fictional storytelling, particularly in science fiction films, games, and literature, influences real-world technological advancements and public perception of innovation. By examining recurring themes such as automation, technological overdependence, ethical dilemmas in AI, this study highlights how media functions as a cultural reflection to reality, and as a speculative tool. While drawing on popular examples like The Terminator (1984), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), I, Robot (2004), and The Mitchells vs. The Machines (2021), this research also considers the importance of contemporary and minority voices like artist Kapwani Kiwanga in reimagining futures beyond dominant Western narratives. These stories reflect …

Breaking Boundaries: Memory And Female Identity, Hui Qi

Theses - ALL

My artistic practice revolves around material exploration and transformation. Initially, I focused on wearable metal jewelry, as its precision and independent craftsmanship allowed me to express the strength of female identity. Inspired by Mindy Herrin-Lewis’s use of micro-sculpting and her integration of ceramics and metal enameling, I began incorporating color, texture, and layered surfaces to express emotion and personal narrative. By merging metal, enamel, ceramics, and found objects, I create contemporary jewelry and sculptural pieces that bridge traditional craftsmanship with modern storytelling. This thesis explores how art serves as a tool for reshaping identity and reclaiming autonomy. In navigating the …

Existing Now In Space And Time: In A Body With Limits On Both, Kirstin Dunlap

Theses - ALL

Kirstin Dunlap’s work is deeply rooted in her understanding of the personal connection between the body and the Earth. Every individual’s life experience is shaped by their relationship with these two bodies—both of which undergo growth, erosion, and decay processes. For Dunlap, there is a striking similarity between these two realms: both are places of tension, where struggles for survival unfold. She sees herself in the fringes of the Earth, in areas where natural forces collide. This conflict mirrors a personal battle within her own body, where her immune system mistakenly attacks itself, resulting in a body that is progressively …

In Favor Of The Mother-Artist: The Case For Self-Actualization In Motherhood, Lottie Elizabeth Caiella

Theses - ALL

This thesis paper discusses the symbiotic relationship between the roles of mothering and being an artist and makes the case for why art made by mothers can have a lasting impact on both society as well as within the family dynamics of the artists’ lives. The obstacles that stand in the way of mothers pursuing art, or even pursuing becoming her full self, are many. This paper reimagines what the role of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs might look like from the lens of a caretaker, and how it can be an overall triumph for society from a wider perspective. This …

Creative Expression Through Worldbuilding: A Study On The Connections Between Literature And Music Through Analysis Of Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive, Lauralei S. Palmer

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the worldbuilding connections visible throughout fantasy literature and musical works. Though their tools seem different, authors, composers, and performers use equivalent techniques to draw in their audiences and produce an immersive, emotional experience. This research focuses on American author Brandon Sanderson’s highly detailed worldbuilding in his epic fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive. The Stormlight Archive exhibits the three pillars of worldbuilding: completeness, invention, and consistency. This research also examines Franz Liszt’s Les Préludes, a symphonic poem based on Alfonse Lamartine’s poem, Ode. Finally, this thesis culminates in the fusion of literary and musical worldbuilding in description …

An Approach To Teaching Sight-Reading: The Station Technique, Aislinn K. L. Queen

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

The station learning technique is more effective than traditional teaching methods regarding academic achievement and student engagement. However, stations are not a typical method high school teachers use when teaching sight-reading in a choir classroom. This study investigated the implementation of the station learning technique in a high school choir setting. The participants were a single classroom of 17 students and two teachers. The data collection tools included student self-assessments, skill assessments, sight-reading rubrics, student and teacher surveys, and student and teacher focus group interviews. Qualitative data was analyzed and coded using the constant comparative method, and the quantitative data …

Uses And Perceptions Of Student Leadership Roles In A Secondary Choral Program, Jenna M. Rickerhauser

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

This study examined student leadership structure in a high school choral program, including data from a junior high director in the district. It aimed to evaluate the role and influence of a designated student leader in a secondary choral program through perceptions from student leaders, student members, and directors. Collected data included surveys, focus groups, individual interviews, field notes, and observation notes. The researcher analyzed the data using the constant comparative method. The resulting data fit into four level 2 codes: program structure, roles of student leaders, influence/impact on the choir, and personal impact of leadership on student leaders. The …

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, …

Ableism And Museum Art Education: A Qualitative Phenomenological Study Of Museum-Based Visual Studio Art Teachers, Elizabeth W. Buck

Doctor of Education Program Dissertations

All people, including individuals with disabilities, who participate in hands-on visual art can experience various benefits. However, visual studio art teachers, especially museum-based teachers, have various backgrounds that do not always include education or training in serving individuals with disabilities. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore how museum-based visual studio art teachers perceived that their training and preparation informed their awareness of ableism and ability to serve students with disabilities in art museums in the New England region of the United States. Twelve museum-based, visual studio art teachers participated in this study through semi-structured interviews. Through …

Thresholds, Dagon Blank

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thresholds focuses on liminal spaces, moments of change, and those who cross these boundaries. For instance, transitions from the old to the new, unconscious to conscious, the known to the unknown, or where man meets nature. Sometimes, I think of them as a threshold where both sides are trying to cross simultaneously, but the door is only big enough for one to fit. The scenes in these paintings focus on the figure set in the contemporary world, referencing symbols of classical paintings, mythology, and philosophy.

The scenes are dynamic and driven by the expressiveness of the human figure and the …

Shell Quilt: Piecing Memory Through Quilting, Collage, And Printmaking, Grace M. Woodruff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Shell Quilt is a mixed media quilt and accompanying book which collect an amalgamation of found, hand dyed, and printed fabric pieces. This project serves as a visual tether and inquiry into my late grandmother Sylvia’s life and a way of piecing together memories of my time with her. As a conceptual frame for my thesis project, Shell Quilt, I have looked to the process of femmage, a term initially coined by Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, which I interpret as a portmanteau of feminism and collage. Through the lens of femmage, I explore the processes of collage, quilting, …

Firing The Canon: Queer Representation In The Magical Girl Genre, Lena C. Humble

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This research delves into the impact queer representation in the shoujo (Japanese for young girl) genre has on audiences. More specifically, the “Magical Girl” (a subgenre of shoujo) genre’s main focus is about ordinary girls whose lives are drastically changed when they are given magical powers. One of the major plot points of magical girl media is how these girls find balance with their ordinary lives with their magical alter egos, and their attempts to keep these lives separate. Much of this media follows a small group of girls, who tend to build deeply emotionally intimate relationships as they share …

The Dragon's Eye: A Quest For Tabletop Role-Playing's Visual Culture, Benjamin Kent

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

The world of Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPGs) has always been defined and dominated by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the game that pioneered the industry in the 1970’s. Meanwhile during this time, independent games have consistently innovated new ways of utilizing this highly creative field both in contrast and in concert with D&D’s growth. As a decade-long player and developing creator of these games, I hold a vested interest in furthering our understanding of them. The visual aspects of these products are well-documented and celebrated, but in this essay I attempt to define the overall landscape of TRPG visual culture …

The Liminal Space Of Dreams: Narration Of Dreams In Graphic Novel And Comics, Muyang Li

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the dream as a narrative in graphic novels and comics, examining its character as a subconscious experience depicted by means of visual storytelling. Focusing on psychological, symbolic, and aesthetic functions of dream narrative, I demonstrate that dream narration offers an allegory by means of which both creator and reader can explore issues of identity, desire and trauma in an intimate and healing way. In analyzing these functions of dream narration, I draw upon ideas from theorists such as C.J Jung, Freud and other scholars who have engaged their work on the psychological perspective of the experience of …

Illustrated Nonfiction In The Screen Age, Katie Klaras

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

The addictive qualities of our phones and incessant demands on our attention pose consequential challenges to individuals and the collective. In the age of screens, what are illustrated nonfiction books uniquely positioned to offer modern audiences? This essay seeks to understand how the genre can serve as one possible antidote to the infinite scroll. I examine the qualities of three illustrated nonfiction texts: Abbi Jacobson’s I Might Regret This, Shaina Feinberg and Julia Rothman’s How We Got By, and Nora Krug’s Diaries of War. The essay considers how the slower pace of the reading experience, the careful curation of image …

Lines Of Thought: The Cartoon As A Phenomenological Object And A Philosophical Tool, Thomas Attwood

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Cartooning’s greatest strength is its simplicity. This essay argues that the cartoon’s inherent modesty and accessibility are central to its philosophical utility, and that its spare visual language conveys more than meets the eye. Drawing on phenomenology, it considers cartooning as a process grounded in the body, and it investigates the bodily encounter between the viewer and the cartoon. Through an analysis of cartooning work by Saul Steinberg, R.O. Blechman, and Liana Finck - a “family of cartoonists” - it demonstrates how a line-drawn, representational cartooning language can transform the act of looking into a participatory experience that interrogates issues …

America Is Banking On You! Selling American Ideology During World War Ii, David W. Maupin

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay uncovers advertising from World War II found in tear sheet archives. Through deep reading and contextual analysis, this essay seeks to determine what these advertisements—found in magazines, newspapers, and posters—were asking their viewers to do in response to the global conflict of the 1940s. It argues that advertisers used emotions and racism to entice citizens of specific classes to invest, enlist, and align their values with American ideals. The creators of these advertisements were hired by American companies, who used government sponsored tactics to woo citizens to the American Ideology while keeping the corporate brand in the public …

Froggy People: Anthropomorphism And Slice-Of-Life In Autobiographical Comics, Maddie Baker

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores how the following three comics categories overlap and interact with one another: slice-of-life, anthropomorphic, and autobiographical. I search for reasons why comic makers would choose to tell their own daily life stories using animal avatars rather than their own faces. While each of these three categories has been studied extensively individually, I hope to find additional insights by observing how comic makers employ the genres together as storytelling devices. Each category has unique narratological power which impacts the reader’s experience. For example, anthropomorphism affects how the author and reader internalize and relate to characters. Slice-of-life comics are …

Hauntological Warfare: Explorations In Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, And Online Affect, Roy Uptain

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis, Hauntological Warfare: Explorations in Propaganda, Influence Campaigns, and Online Aesthetics, investigates how ideological power continues to shape contemporary reality through both overt and spectral means. Drawing from concepts like hauntology, psychological operations (PsyOps), and disinformation aesthetics, I examine how propaganda does not simply vanish once its immediate goals are achieved, but instead lingers—reshaping memory, identity, and cultural narratives through what I call hauntological warfare.

My post-conceptual research-based art practice engages this terrain by creating site-specific installations, performances, and media works that make these invisible forces perceptible. Works such as Kill Zones (for Boeing) (2024), r/RoastMe (2024), …

Unmeasured, Detached, And Isolated: The Legitimation Of A Domesticated Identity, Eva M. Agüero

MFA in Visual Art

Unmeasured, detached and isolated explores the lingering effects of colonialism on identity, behavior, and cultural perception through the lens of my personal experience as a Venezuelan immigrant in the United States. I investigate how colonial legacies—especially those codified through manuals of etiquette like Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras—continue to shape self-perception and societal expectations. Through video, sculpture, miniatures, and installation, I reconstruct a visual language that resists simplification and reclaims complexity. Engaging with the symbolic weight of tropical imagery, domestic spaces, and hybrid aesthetics, my work challenges Eurocentric frameworks and examines the figure of the migrant …

Undefinitive, Lan Mu

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis project, Undefinitive, examines the cyclical process of destruction, transformation, and rebirth through installation, ceramics, and text. With a deep unease toward my own gendered body, I investigate how vulnerability, both physical and psychological, can become a site of resistance and empowerment. Drawing from feminist theory, Chinese mythology, and stream-of-consciousness narratives, my work explores the monstrous and the fragmented as inseparable states of one’s becoming. Through references to body art, speculative fiction, and queer theory, I reimagine femininity and queerness as forces capable of dismantaling societal structure and forging new modes of existence.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where …

Digital And Physical Spaces: All At Once, Addyson Hoey

MFA in Visual Art

In this thesis, I explore our experience of digital and physical spaces in the ever-increasing presence of technology. By investigating the intersections of these spaces, I focus on how our experiences in the physical world are processed through the digital space, to re-merge in lived spaces. Through digital collage paintings, I explore how assisted chance and machine destruction can be productive in the formation of space that is not possible on the screen. By using the drop shadow as primary content, my work takes on the arrangements of surface and space—rather than the requirements of the physical world. In addition, …

Transmutation, Sam Berger

MFA in Visual Art

My artistic practice is about change itself. I am inspired by the doubling and layering effects that came out of Surrealist Photography. Scale, fracture, and doubling are intentional components of my process. I combine those methods to create complex works of art, focusing on the untamable light that I hope to capture when making my images, which often are self portraits. Poetry is an integral element of this thesis text as well as my art making process. Through my poetic work I hope to offer my audience a glimpse into how I see and experience the world. This thesis text …

Places, Please!, Catie Cook

MFA in Visual Art

Growing up in the American South as the daughter of a scenic designer, I frequently found myself on both the physical stage of the theatre and the metaphorical stage of gender performance. Through immersive oil paintings, I seek to visually represent where these two experiences merge, depicting imagery and characters from my childhood staged in theatrical and uncanny environments. In this thesis I explore the canine motif as my primary subject, positioning the Dalmatian as a self-insert and exploring the show dog as a foil to the Southern beauty. Building upon Judith Butlers theory of gender performance, and Laura Mulvey’s …

Go Cry About It!, Grace C. Ryder

MFA in Visual Art

I have always been a crier. I have always felt deeply and intensely. Goodbyes, heartbreak, joy, and empathy—I’m grateful to feel it all, even when it hurts. My artwork often investigates vulnerable topics through making the personal public using self archival and diaristic elements. Inspired by my familial and romantic relationships, I explore my connections to other people and how I memorialize and honor them. My painted works often depict ephemeral objects, establishing their value through the use of oil paints while my sculptures are often exaggerated, oversize forms, emphasizing the passage of time.

From January 1st to December 31st …

The Kinship Of Creatives, Saba Saif Ur Rehman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This research essay contends that artists and creative individuals must recognize their agency in shaping societal narratives, particularly during times of technological and political upheaval. The essay draws on the insights and contributions of visionaries like Walter Benjamin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tomm Moore to emphasize the power of imagination and creativity in addressing real-world issues. It argues that previous technological advances have often reinforced hierarchical and oppressive systems, benefitting a select few while neglecting the masses. As we enter the fourth Industrial Revolution, this essay calls the artists to reclaim their tools from being co-opted for exclusionary and …

Adler, Asterios, & Maus, Crystal Ganatra

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Adler, Asterios, & Maus examines how small visual decisions in illustrations make up a language. And when the dialect changes from the predominant one in a graphic novel, something novel happens. A scene or specific quality gets the spotlight. It also explores how these visuals tie to Adlerian psychology and El Refaeian ideas on autobiography, behavior, and emotion. It identifies through two interesting grpahic novels- Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli and Maus by Art Spiegelman- how these ideas can be used to understand ourselves. It intensely zeroes in on specific moments of visual language shift. Some of these change range …