Fine Arts Commons^™

Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores and conceptualizes the idea of a world where my people were never colonized, a world where we are still existing with our culture, our powers and the idea of voodoo. I place myself, friends, and family in positions of power, in spaces the world took away from us due to the color our skin. This is the world my practice aims to create.

Sweet Spot, Kajin Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Disparate projections, transparent prints, iridescent screens resonate with each other in the installation Sweet Spot, creating an environment where images are touched and looked through. This overlap of images creates an imaginary coexistence of here and there - each one connected with the others, but also separate, on its own terms.

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Theatre During Covid-19: Perceptions Of High School Students And Teachers, Marissa Lizette Trujillo

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

COVID-19 changed the way theatre was done in a high school setting. Students were required to wear masks and physically distance, and some even did theatre remotely. Doing theatre with limitations was especially difficult because the face and body play a vital role in helping actors tell a story. In this study, the researcher sought to understand what the perceptions of high school theatre students and teachers were while doing theatre during COVID-19. A survey, two focus group interviews, a group interview, and an individual interview were used to collect data, as well as observations in three theatre classes and …

An Introduction To Theatre Of Omniscience, Kierstan K. Conway

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Theatre is an art of infinite possibility and is created and viewed from a variety of different lenses. Throughout history, artistic movements such as realism, surrealism, naturalism, expressionism, romanticism, and many more have influenced the ideologies of theatrical artists. Theatre practitioners make a stake in their artistic beliefs in the form of manifestos, which encapsulate their understanding in an abstract or concrete way. In reading and studying these manifestos, the individual then has the choice to follow suit to a school of thought, or derive their own philosophy. Theatre, in one viewpoint, can be understood as a means of omniscience, …

An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

Power Dressing: Feather Fans And The Visual Language Of Female Portraiture, Charlotte Svetkey

Theses and Dissertations

Feather fans in sixteenth-century portraiture not only allowed the female sitter to express her own claims to wealth, status, and power but also acted as a visual indicator of changes that were occurring on the global stage. Both fans and sitters will be evaluated through ideas of gender and class.

Icarus Rooted, Lacey Minor

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis conceptually frames and accompanies the MFA body of work Icarus Rooted by Lacey Minor. This work grapples with the acceptance of impermanence and illustrates her personal narrative about grieving family lost to addiction — juxtaposed with societal reflections on the opioid epidemic in America — using the potato as a symbol for the addicted body.

Missing, Murdered, Indigenous, Matthew Bollinger

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

The missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic is an issue currently affecting Indigenous people in North America. To articulate my concept visually, old photographs that showcase American culture (predominantly white) are drawn on, cut-up, and recomposed into portraits of missing Navajo women.

El Paso Segundo Barrio Muralism: Barrio History, Memory, And Identity In Community Artwork, Eduardo García

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

The border city of El Paso, Texas has a longstanding tradition of muralism in one of its oldest neighborhoods- the downtown Segundo Barrio. Though these manifestations have not received as much scholarly attention as other borderland muralist traditions, they echo a similar theme of community artwork focused on sociohistorical issues, cultural memory, and barrio identity relevant to their geopolitical space. Through a study of mural artists and programs in the downtown El Paso area, I view the use of specific iconography and themes as expressions of Segundo Barrio history, memory, and identity. These artists have continued a lineage of …

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings draw from personal memory, as well as the nostalgic longing and nightmarish foreboding of the irrational psyche. Cosmic ruptures, cliffs, cemeteries, and parking lots appear alongside snowglobes and canopy beds. I aim to suggest things to be wary of, while giving space for optimistic fantasy and reflective wonder.

A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

This text imagines a reconciliation where the slick, sterile nature of contemporary objects and conditions might offer a sort of soft retreat. Sisyphus Lounge, a modular installation of light, near-defunct-technologies and carefully cluttered “stuff,” attempts to locate and explore value systems fogged by dis/information and the impossibility to articulate is-ness.

Errantry, Simon A. Benjamin

Theses and Dissertations

Errantry, Simon Benjamin's current body of work, named after Édouard Glissant’s theory, is comprised of a series of multi-channel video installations and related works. Errantry is centered on the polyphonic rhythms of coastal space, the Caribbean sea, and the life sustained by it in a non-linear narrative that raises questions about time, labor, environmental degradation and the ongoingness of colonialism.

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Home, It Turns Out, Is Always A Matter Of Paperwork, Leonardo Madriz

Theses and Dissertations

A meandering of life-thinking on notions of migration & diaspora, assimilation, place & home, family & loss, cruel optimism and new imaginaries - through text, film & video, installation, and expanded cinema.

Surplus City, Claudio Nolasco

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

No abstract provided.

Stories From Home: Yvonne Montoya And Shannon Parrales In Conversation, Yvonne Montoya

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

In this conversation, New Mexican contemporary dance artists Yvonne Montoya and Shannon Parrales discuss their dance journeys and their work on Montoya’s current projects: Stories from Home and Stories from Home: COVID-19 Addendum.

Aztlán Del Sol, Marcus Zúñiga

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

An artistic writing developed from the themes and concepts of an of art installation made by a visual artist of Mexican-American descent from New Mexico. The work references the relationship of Aztec mythology to the American Southwest, art theoretical discourse in object oriented ontology and aesthetics, and key ideas in astronomy. Additionally interwoven is an expanded sense for interpreting ancestry and history under the constructs of multicultural conceptions of time, specifically cultures with notable spiritual rituals of Sun worship and observation.

Cosmic Desert Art, Mike Graham De La Rosa

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

The Cosmic Desert are the designs inspired by chile hallucinations, desert creatures, and the long weird neon nights in the Borderworld. Made with love on the banks of the Rio Grande.

My family is originally from Northern Mexico but I grew up in Northern New Mexico down river of both where Al Hurricane and Nuclear Annihilation were originally created. Amongst chollas, rattle snakes, and river willow, the imagining of New Mexico permeates the landscapes. The Cosmic Desert is inhabited lowriders, taco trucks, neon adobe bars, cholas, native peoples, immigrants, punk rockers and cowboys. Just beyond the darkness, our imagination takes …

Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar

Theses and Dissertations

The works of Silvia Gruner (born 1959) illustrate the use of time registers as strategies to express contemporary subjectivity’s experiences with globalized environments between 1986-2014. Through this approach, the artist connects her production to the social politics of Mexico to critique the effects of globalization on Mexican society and culture.

Look Over Here: A Brief History And Exhibition Of Black Women In Photography, Millie Drury

English and Creative Writing Presentations

This is an informative online photography exhibition. It contains a brief history of black women in photography before presenting ten black female photographers in chronological order according to years active with a short profile and examples of their work. This exhibition is meant to give students and faculty exposure to the work of black female photographers and understand the history behind their present status in the field.

Weather Permitting, Acadia Kandora

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Weather Permitting is an exhibition of objects and printed matter, primarily in the form of publicationsthat examine my relationship to nature and the idea of nature as both sanctuary and armor. At a young age, my parents would take my on a hike every Sunday instead of going to church. The hikes acted as a weekly pilgrimage deep into the woods and a ritual instilling the idea of nature being a place of spiritual refuge and retreat. A sanctuary - of course, weather permitting.

As I grew up and experienced hardship, my first instinct has always been to go hide …

Turning Tides, Lauren Whitmore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthesizing personal narrative, sociological phenomenon, and art historical analysis, Turning Tides examines the relationship between power dynamics and sexual assault. Inequities and injustices with regard to the handling of sexual assault, and the norms that allow this issue to be pervasive, are woven throughout the cultural fabric of the United States. Feminists and feminist activist artists in the 1970s brought the matters women, and other marginalized groups, were facing to the forefront of political and social dialogue. The resulting work left an indelible mark on public perceptions and allowed for other activists and artists to build upon the foundations; creating …

In Search Of Ourselves, We Find Each Other, Kalyn Fay Barnoski

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

in search of ourselves, we find each other is a fully collaborative, multi-platform exhibit centered on developing and locating relationships to both self and community. Challenging societal individualism, the exhibit focuses on collective, relational creativity using Indigenous methodologies for community. It is about me. It is about you. It is about us.

Optimistic And A Little Flawed, Christian Schultz

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accompanying exhibition to this paper, Optimistic and Flawed is a body of drawings and objects that explores the liminal space between playful and intended actions. Inspired by the landscape of the yard and the actions that take place within, the goalless play of a child and the laborious maintenance of an adult. The value of play exists within labor and labor exists within play. The drawings observe this through the theoretical framework of telic and paratelic motivational states as they relate to drawing. Abstracted yards and landscapes provide a space for the labor of the hand. A history of …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

Do You Want To Be Tender?, Leah Grant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, you will find a body of writings and artworks that reflect Leah Grant’s art practice and research. Throughout the paper, you will see Leah alternate back and forth between her artwork and writings. Leah Grant addresses her personal experience as a Black woman and what it means it explore vulnerability through understanding how the relationships around her affects the relationship she has with herself. Leah has created a collection of poems, prints, and video and audio collages that assist her with revealing and concealing.

Made Of Water, Covered In Mud, Nicole Norman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My fixation on water as metaphor is a product of my cosmic design; Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I am made of water, begging to be held. Anything liquid has this same desire. I use my art practice to examine the fluidity of physical and digital spaces; how they transform almost constantly. This is only possible through the use of containers that give form to abstract ideas and make them easier to drink (read: digest). Containers can vary in size and shape, but their purpose remains the same. A drinking glass, a swimming pool, a creek bed. These are …