History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

Sana Sana: Unlearning Generational Expectation Through Performance, Jalen R. Ash

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work is an exploration of identity as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) body traversing through the generational histories of my family and the struggle of cultural loss to our assimilation of Whiteness. Through the multi-faceted medium of performance, my work uses physical and mental spaces of self and technology to understand how the body functions as a screen. Our bodies house projections of generational expectations that have trickled down from the past into the present. These projections shape our own unique identities along with the personal experiences we gather as we move through the various spaces of …

The Art Of Surviving: Alchemy Of Healing Trauma In Relation To Identity: A Self Study., Rebecca Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis explores trauma’s physical and psychological aspects concerning identity as an artistic practice. Through exploring materials, subject matter, and media, my approach to trauma is based on personal and socially engaged experiences and my attempt to re-conceptualize that experience through the language of contemporary art. Extensively this work is governed by childhood memories and the critical aspect of being raised as a female in a patriarchal society. Being raised female comes with a certain number of expectations and requirements. This work creates a physical and spiritual connection between trauma and the identity of what is female. Discussing these …

A Boy Born On Wednesday, Charles Krampah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My relocation to America has presented an unprecedented space for self-examination. The components of my identity and personality have been laid bare before me; My blackness in the face of racism and white hegemony, my African heritage in the face of post-colonialism and imperialism, and my faith in the face of an increasingly secular western culture.

Am I who thought I was? Am I more or less? Why do I feel like a different person, and what does this mean for my future?

My research and art practice serve as a form of introspection. I tell an internal story in …

Visual Diaries: Towards Art History As Storytelling, Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This essay examines variants of what I refer to as “visual diaries” – or thinking through images and written or oral language – as important “worldmaking” exercises, essential for students of color, women, sexual minorities, or other marginalized subjects. I provide my reflections on assigning this dynamic and student-centered, practice-based assignment in my contemporary art courses at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) of higher education and a summer art residency program unaffiliated with a university. Besides my reflections on my pedagogy, I also share student feedback from unsolicited testimonials and answers to questionnaires. I argue that visual diaries transform students into …

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.

Circulation Of Images, From Recognition To Erasure: An Artist’S Response, Lei Xie

Artl@s Bulletin

This article revolves around my practice, as an artist, which has an essential link with images and their circulation. In a subtle way, painting offers me a language allowing me to explore the polysemy of the chosen image, to experience a vocabulary both figurative and abstract. My practice could choose and process "ordinary" images, which are diffused but whose diffusion does not alter the subject, and has no consequence on the latter. It can also retain images whose strength is intrinsic to their circulation, to their popularization, to their controversy, images which will however ultimately generate paintings, and simultaneously erasing …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Rui(N)Ation: Narratives Of Art And Urban Revitalization In Detroit, Jessica Ks Cappuccitti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation considers the City of Detroit as a case study for analyzing the complex role that artists and art institutions are playing in the potential re-growth and revitalization of the city. I specifically look at artists and arts organizations who are working against the popular narrative of Detroit as “ruin city.” Their efforts create counter narratives that emphasize stories of survival and showcase vibrant communities. By focussing on artist-led and institutional initiatives, I emphasize the importance of art in both community and narrative-building.

This research has taken the form of a written dissertation and two adapted projects, and positions …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

The Unveiling Of Us, Alexis Parra

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Unveiling of Us is an affirmation by, of and for wom^n of color. In this collaboration, we - subject and photographer - seek to reclaim the performance, production and beauty of individual identities that are informed by collective pasts. Everyday acts of performance are emphasized in these images through objects and gestures that reference the day to day practices of black and brown wom^n based on our histories, our cultures and our senses of self. This is our space to claim: the viewer looks, but the subjects hold the gaze as they declare power through a notion of beauty. …

Restoration, Shannon M. Slaight-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The marks I make in clay have different characteristics, and the physical mark of one’s fingertips or visual record of the hand is personal and intimate. This visible activity is the evidence of my constant presence and control within each object. Its repetitive meditation produces a private relief from my persistent anxieties. This exploration for me is not only visual, but also physical. This is the start of my infatuation with the idea of pattern. It has its own discrete visual language and modes of communication; and through my research I am developing a method of intercommunication.