Fine Arts Commons^™

Not Reaching The End, Yiyun Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the middle ground as an unstable and continuously negotiated condition rather than a fixed point of balance or compromise. Beginning with the idea of rabbitness—not as an image or symbol, but as a mode of sensing characterized by sensitivity, immediacy, and constant adjustment—the research investigates how perception operates within moments of uncertainty, hesitation, and instability.

Drawing from Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the Real as ruptures within symbolic structures, this project considers experiences that resist complete articulation: moments of anxiety, hesitation, and unresolvable tension. Rather than treating these moments as interruptions, this thesis approaches them as productive …

Numb., Anna Rapson

Masters Theses

Social media platforms, from their conception, posed a break in the lived experience of the average human being’s day to day routines. Although access to information has always been shaped by portals into other lived realities—through photojournalism, print legacy media, news broadcasts both on radio and television—social media has posited a novel phenomenological architecture where borders between embodied reality and perception of lived experience are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. This morphed duality of consciousness positions the body and mind in tension, deconstructing pre-social media conceptions of the ontology of lived experience. In a digital world shaped by limitless input by …

Held In Sediment, Kati Lowe

Masters Theses

This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, …

Deep Cuts: Bearing Witness To The Erosion Of Evidence, Maya Lakshmi Srinivasan Md

Masters Theses

In my Master of Fine Arts thesis in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, I examine the intersection of my dual practices as a general surgery resident and artist. Both disciplines require precision, incision, and tactility to navigate the human condition. My art practice is a method of processing the emotional toll of surgical training and the simultaneous societal erosion of scientific authority. My thesis work focuses on challenging the rise of medical pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism. The focal piece in this installation, In Tallow We Trust, consists of three woodblock relief prints at the scale of an …

The Right To Withdraw: Soft Boundaries And Material Refuge In The Workplace, Zhihao (Sky) Xing

Masters Theses

Traditionally, architecture has provided physical protection through solid structures and defined boundaries, while modern interior spaces have evolved further to serve function, efficiency, and the operational needs of society. These include open-plan offices, art school studios, and other public spaces like libraries. Although physical rigidity and operational efficiency have been well served by the modern built environment, the psychological experiences of those within it remain largely overlooked - a lack of privacy, emotional support, and space for emotional withdrawal.

This research explores why contemporary workplaces often expose individuals to sensory overload and why people often retreat to stairwells, restrooms, or …

How To Make A Jumpsuit, Xue Huang

Masters Theses

Through interdisciplinary artistic research combining illustration, embroidery, garment construction, and installation, this thesis investigates how patriarchal narratives become internalized within the female body and disconnect women from embodied forms of feminine knowledge and vitality.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, Jungian psychology, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and feminist writings by Audre Lorde and Karina Blancarte, the project examines how systems of productivity, control, and gendered ideology shape both psychological experience and bodily perception.

The thesis culminates in a large-scale textile installation titled How to Make a Jumpsuit, consisting of embroidered silk panels, commercial jumpsuit pattern pieces, meridian imagery, sculptural …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …

All The Hours Of Light, Isabel Horgan

Masters Theses

My wisdom teeth were extracted in November 2025. I put it off for 5 years. In 2019, my first wisdom tooth emerged as a blood blister. It grew through a vein. I attempted to pop the blister, but instead pulled on the vein, which was so viscerally disturbing that I almost fainted. Every night that followed, I stood at the mirror over the bathroom sink and poked at it. Eventually, enough of the tooth showed that I needed to scrape stuff out of the crevices. It resulted in about a year of having a hole in my mouth that I …

The Porous Auto Body, Banshee Maria

Masters Theses

Balances within the human body and auto mechanical structures share a staggering amount in common. The two are intrinsically linked through their shared reliance on intricate internal and external systems to be in balance in order to function. Our biological makeup consists of electrical, fluid and chemical systems which mirror the machines we have chosen to forge. I am plagued by the human need to see ourselves mirrored in metal form, or perhaps we are just unable to create too far outside ourselves, resulting in the leeching of human structures into all technology we construct.

The Old Testament of the …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Chronos | Kairos: Exploring Time Through Experimental Comics And Artist’S Books, Rhea Pradeep

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how the reading experience of comics changes when they are presented in various artist’s book formats, particularly through the lens of time and space. This project encourages the practice of close reading, arguing that the physical form of a book is not only a container for the content, but also plays a part in its meaning-making. It shifts the narrative pace, perception of time and reader engagement. Research in this paper is heavily influenced by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. This interdisciplinary, practice-led research combines narrative analysis of experimental comics, close reading of …

Resistant Silence Engraved Trauma, Silence In Domestic Spaces, & Acts Of Resistance, Priyanka Kumar

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that silence surrounding trauma within domestic spaces is not merely an absence of speech or a condition of voicelessness, but it functions as an act of resistance. Focusing on domestic abuse within patriarchal structures, this research examines the ways trauma is embodied, negotiated, and concealed in everyday life. Central in this inquiry is the figure of the “sole witness” to abuse, those who live in close proximity to violence, endure its aftermath and negotiate survival through subtle and often unseen acts of resistance.

I am not attempting to define trauma, but the thesis explores the traces trauma …

Through You I Will Feel, Mitchell L. Poon

Masters Theses

Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper.

The written thesis is a culmination of my time at …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Open_______, Eitan Boiarsky

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how ambiguity can function as a deliberate design strategy rather than a condition to eliminate. While modern design traditions have prioritized clarity, efficiency, and immediate legibility, this work revisits Umberto Eco's concept of the Open Work and Oskar Hansen's Open Form to argue that openness is not a failure of design but a method within it.

Through a series of workshops and object-based experiments, ambiguity is structured as a design instrument that invites interpretation rather than delivering fixed meaning. Participants encounter unfamiliar forms with deliberately withheld information, producing moments of hesitation, speculation, and reinterpretation. These encounters demonstrate …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

Love In Passing Time, Elysa T. Adams

Masters Theses

Elysa Adams, 2026

Love in Passing Time reflects on how the Black church has molded my understanding of faith, family, and community. Working across relief, screenprint, sculpture, and sound, my practice explores how knowledge is shared across generations through music, tradition, and adornment.

The exhibition draws on my upbringing as a pastor’s child, in which the church serves as both a spiritual and communal home. These experiences appear through sculptural paper garments based on childhood memories, tambourines featuring the faces of people who have impacted my life, carved portraits of my grandparents, and sculptural pews that reference the architecture of …

Jewelry As A Portable Sanctuary, Yuhao Li

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how individuals remain intact in the presence of emotional difficulty. Rather than treating protection as withdrawal, the research proposes that stability emerges through the construction of an interior structure capable of holding vulnerability without collapse. Drawing on psychological theory, philosophy, and spatial thinking, it frames emotional repair as a spatial condition: an interior that can contain experience and be returned to when external conditions become unstable.
Within this framework, jewelry is redefined as a material extension of this interior. Positioned between body and world, it operates as a structure of containment, functioning as a portable …

Love Letters To Insects: Affect-Based Science Communication, Manuela Guzmán

Masters Theses

Love Letters to Insects is a series of artists’ books that, mimicking a scientific insect collection, asks how visual narrative can shape and reframe our relationship to our environment.

Delving into the historical construction of the nature-culture divide, my thesis considers how colonial history has shaped modes of representation in Latin America that distance, objectify, and “other” living beings. Engaging with science, history, philosophy, and decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, as well as the work of comic artists and theorists, I think about the way I learned to interact with my environment and find in visual storytelling a place to challenge …

Gray Sheep, Jennifer Richie

Masters Theses

When material comforts are not available or accessible, how can we care for one another with what is available? Can these methods be scaled up? How can we emulate the tight cultural bonds of people who relied on each other due to their isolation from cultural centers (like towns and cities)? Is it possible to be self-sufficient and not wealthy in the 21st century or has this ability died with past generations?

Using only scraps, found and discarded materials, and items from RISD’s Loop Lab and Second Life, I explore the skills and engineering that would have been a necessary …

Where Forms Dream, Siran Liu

Masters Theses

What does it mean to dream?

There is a passages from Daoist classic ‘Zhuangzi’, attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou: The “Butterfly Dream”:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou

In this story, the dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. …

Painting As Sfx, Callie Coccia

Masters Theses

Almost all of the subject matter I have been preoccupied with these past two years (and my adult life) has originated from a place of dissonance. There’s a narrative experience that things like wax figures, midcentury film, and theme parks insist upon. That narrative insistence contrasts with an observed reality. Epcot does not have a slice of Italy housed within the park, Bette Davis does not have an evil twin (A Stolen Life [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock is not Alfred Hitchcock. Yet these narratives are so overbearingly convincing or coercive that their sweaty alternate …

Between Seeing And Knowing, Pavol Roskovensky

Masters Theses

Abstract

For me, painting often begins with an experience of the world that cannot immediately be explained. As a child in Slovakia during the Velvet Revolution, I saw a flag disappear from the town square and a new one take its place. What changed was color and proportion; but the feeling of the space and my relation to it changed completely. That moment has stayed with me because it revealed something I continue to believe: before language, before explanation, visual form has the power to move us.

In my practice, I approach painting as a site of perception, discovery, and …

The Maroon Cycle, Lloyd-Princeton Cangé

Masters Theses

The key element that ties most of the major franchises together, whether the IP is a YA series or a videogame is the epic story or epic poem. From The Iliad and the Odyssey to Dragonball and Demon Slayer, the epic is a wellspring of endless iteration. Here, language does not merely buttress and support the work, as is often the case in contemporary art, but language is the narrative, the direct source material. The epic poem that is The Maroon Cycle will consist of both prose stanzas and images in the form of paintings, drawings, collages, prints, and photographs. …

If The Sun Were As Big As My Heart, What Would Be The Distance Between The Sun And The Earth? Or How To Domesticate The Sun, Catalina Martinez, Catalina Martinez Rojas

Masters Theses

If the Sun were as big as my heart, what would be the distance between the Sun and the Earth? Or how to domesticate the Sun is a multidisciplinary installation project that explores how emotional, spiritual, and perceptual experiences can be translated into material form. Beginning from a speculative mathematical proposition that reduces the scale of the Sun to the size of the artist’s heart, the project investigates distance not only as a physical condition, but also as an emotional and domestic one.

Drawing from Colombian vallenato traditions, everyday observations of sunlight, and references ranging from Agnes Martin and Wayne …

Synecdoche: Archiving Violence In Schools, Jillian Whitney

Art Theses and Dissertations

K-12 Educators often find themselves thrust into a swamp of politics they never asked to enter. It is in this swamp that educators strive to meet students’ social, emotional, and educational needs. However, issues such as school shootings, racism, and gender inequality all make it difficult for schools to be what they should be: an equalizing, safe place where children can learn. These problems weaken the school system and harm public interest while leading to teacher burnout.

Synecdoche: Archiving Violence in Schools is a body of paintings and experimental artist books that responds to the everyday experiences of the educators …

Quiero Ver Dónde Dejé Mi Ombligo (I Want To See Where I Left My Belly Button), Karina Ramirez

Art Theses and Dissertations

My MFA thesis investigates the emotional and material bonds between the places I have visited and those I call home through painting. Family histories, cultural inheritances, and personal memories connect me to each location, transforming landscapes into repositories of lived experiences. Through careful observation and the gathering of materials influenced by local architecture, landscapes, and changing atmospheres, my work aims to understand how places are felt, remembered, and carried through time.

My work centers around places I have lived and visited, including Los Angeles, California, USA; Dallas, Texas, USA; and San Juan del Río Durango, Mexico. Throughout my life, I …