History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

V.1 Winter 2024, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2024 issue is formatted as a calendar featuring images of current RISD students recreating scenes from historical photos taken at RISD.

V.1 Fall 2023, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2023 issue contains articles on bubbles, a performance at AS220 "Belated Avowal" by RISD MFA student Cat Ashley, sleeping and dreaming, interviews of RISD students, a critical review of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, movement experiments, a Jake Shore show at Providence student gallery Ladybug Providence, and George Orwell's book "Why I Write," along with creative writing on a variety of topics.

The Role Of Moroccan Street Art In Decolonial Discourse And Binary Deconstruction, Taylor Rokala

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As a country historically subjected to French colonialism and currently the site of a burgeoning street art scene, Morocco is a locus for street art that contributes to the decolonial project and deconstruction of remaining colonial structures left by the French. Drawing from Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, the idea of gaze, and bell hooks’s counter concept of oppositional gaze, this paper seeks to understand how Moroccan street artists use their art to challenge the binary opposition between tradition and modernity constructed during the French Protectorate. I will discuss the theme of temporality, because of street art’s ephemeral nature and …

Postindustrial Playbook++, Maxwell Fertik

Masters Theses

There is no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem. Every inch of the planet is impacted by industrial development and its chemical legacy has mutated the soil and water. As a response, this thesis is designed to promote abundant over extractive resources and visualize a post-industrial reality. It consists of a series of objects, writing and design research on the relationship of industry and ecosystem.

In many ways it is a playbook++, laying out possible strategies or “plays’’ for making do with what exists around us amid collapse.

Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica)(ي'ڑ*), a plant that grows in the most degraded …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

The Hospitality Of Doubt, Ian Grieve

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper discusses the last two years of research toward a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art. I mainly address my painting practice, but while in the program, I have worked in collage, ceramics, intaglio printmaking, and sculpture. My paintings are thick, multilayered, and often contain ambiguous narratives. The pictures develop through engagement, openness, and response within the work. I seek and embrace connection with viewers of the work. The spectator ‘completes’ the art and enhances or alters the artworks meaning by observing it and applying their individual perspectives. I seek to incorporate a sense of nostalgia and familiarity. …

Speak Now To Forever Hold Your Piece: On Aesthetic Ownership And Interpretation, Spencer Heitman

Honors Theses

The primary objectives of this research are to describe ways in the interpretation of art-objects is shaped by their ownership and to endorse fan culture participation as a mechanism through which people might be led to aesthetic value. This analysis shall be grounded in an understanding of trust and shall point the reader toward care, noting that these phenomena positively correlate and help interpreters to receive meaning of more abundance and depth. It will be initially claimed that art interpretation is itself contribution to aesthetic dialogue with artists. This claim is grounded in an understanding of art’s communicative capacities and …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

In The Air 2023, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

In the Air was a community-based photography and poetry zine that was designed to reflect student experiences and build community across majors on campus. The first and only issue is divided into four chapters that contain creative writing and student artwork: To Be in Love, School(ed), Observations, and Life.

V.1 Spring 2023, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2023 issue contains articles on storytelling, mapmaking, the instagram account @tihngs, a reception at the RISD Museum for artist Adam Silverman, the Battambang Market, technological transcendence, fairy tales and Kara Walker, artistic processes of grad students, David Hammons' piece Rock Head, developments in higher education, a platform used by a THAD class, and other student creative writing.

V.1 Winter 2023, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2023 issue has a theme of text, images, and communication. It contains written pieces that experiment with text and language, student visual art, and other work.

The Speculative Artifact 2022, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

The Speculative Artifact was a student publication created for the Graphic Design seminar/studio Critical Issues Studio, taught by Anther Kiley in Fall 2022. The publication features designs and concepts for artifacts of the future created by students. Artifacts include language aids, a sex worker kit, food packaging, a garden pack, style-transferred furniture, a post-taste apartment, a maze sculpture, a personality magazine, animal-human cohabitation, signage, a friend-dating system, coding tech, a transhuman sticker book, and television programming with animal languages

V.1 Fall 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2022 issue centers on the theme "what do you see?" and contains articles on a lecture by Camille Norment, the curator for the student exhibition "No Longer Transparent," the new RISD identity, elevators at RISD, various objects, crabs, the Prov-Wash bathrooms, the history of the drinking straw, drawing, Charles Mingus, and the 2022 grad show, along with other student creative writing.

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

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 …

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

“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.

Postmarked 2022, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Postmarked was a publication started during the COVID-19 pandemic by three RISD architecture students. The first issue has the theme of "sonder" and contains student writing and artwork on postcards that deal with this theme.

V.1 Spring 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2022 issue contains writings divided into five categories: ecosystems, homes, archaeologies, explorations, and new constructions. Writings touch on urban ecology, wilderness, physical and mental health, identity, and other topics. Visual work is also present in this issue.

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

The Disappearance Of The Anti-Aesthetic; The Death Of Fashion, Scrap Evans

Capstone Showcase

In this essay, Scrap explores the connection between famous nihilist and postmodernist theorists, Dadaism, the concept of the anti-aesthetic, and today's high fashion. They provide a history of nihilism and follow its influence through time upon other social, political, and artistic movements. They then make direct connections between famous theorists' prose and famous fashion designers' collections. Finally, they analyze the current state of the fashion world and discuss their plan of action.

V.1 Winter 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2022 issue is a special edition "art writing capsule," with three zines that each feature a student writing about a work of art, and a fourth zine with an editor's note and postscript. Writing 1 is Angelina Rogers on Salman Toor's "Two Boys with a Dog," Writing 2 is Maxwell Fertik on Shahzia Sikander's "Epistrophe," and Writing 3 is Sabo Kpade on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's "Any Number of Preoccupations."

V.1 Fall 2021, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2021 issue is formatted as a zine and contains notes from students displayed on their phones and otherwise, along with student creative writing.

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.

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 …

The Glob, Spring 2021, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

The Glob was a one-off student newspaper created for the course Words, Images and Ideas, ILLUS 3412-01, taught by Ernest A. Bryant III. Students contributed 1-2 pages each of writing and images on topics such as COVID-19, fashion and style, risograph printing, and more.

Manuscript For Aesthetic/Design Guidelines For Campus Master Planning Bethel University, Wayne Roosa, Eugene Johnson

Art and Design Faculty Works

This document is the manuscript version before graphic design and copyediting. Follow this link to see the final version.

The situation that inspired and drove these aesthetic guidelines for campus master planning were unique to the history Bethel University and Seminary. By the early 1960s, Bethel was outgrowing its site on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. The opportunity to purchase 160 acres in Arden Hills arose and the leap of faith was taken to buy this land and relocate. But it was not that simple. More was involved than mere practical problems of too-little space solved by an abundance …