History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Uncovering The Story Of Sally Maria Johnson: Revealing The History Of The Portrait Of A Painting, Yuanzhen Song

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Portrait of Sally Maria Johnson by the artist James Johnson is a 19^th century oval shaped portrait in the collection of the Buffalo History Museum.  It suffered from structural damages and paint loss resulting from surface alterations and previous restoration campaigns.  This study combines art historical research with scientific analysis to explore both the biography of the subject and the materiality of the painting.  Through local research including historical newspaper articles in Buffalo, the story of Sally Maria Johnson (the wife of Buffalo’s first mayor) was uncovered.  High-resolution imaging techniques were used to document the surface condition and identify …

Art Inquiries, Vol. 21, Oct. 15, 2026 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Ornamental Letters In J.R.R. Tolkien's Manuscripts, Eduardo Boheme Kumamoto

Journal of Tolkien Research

The purpose of this article is to examine ornamental letters and decoration that in some way interacts with letterforms in J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts. I explore Tolkien’s use of elements such as double strokes, color, dots, and flourishes to add prominence and beauty to the letterforms; where possible I also try to establish a relation between these ornaments and medieval manuscripts.

On Stage: Startling Visibility, Operatic Drama, And George Tooker’S Un Ballo In Maschera, Alex Del Dago

Art Inquiries

As a part of its centennial advertising campaign, the Metropolitan Opera in New York commissioned the American figurative painter George Tooker (1920-2011) to create a fine art image inspired after Giuseppe Verdi’s 1859 opera, Un Ballo in Maschera. Within the artist's composition, themes around masquerading, skepticism, and surveillance arise, all of which are common threads within both Tooker’s and Verdi’s work. Primary questions that can be asked from looking at this type of subject matter include: who is truthfully themselves, who may be someone other than they initially say they are, and most importantly, how does the ambiguity of gendered …

Robert Indiana, Love, Biblical Authority, And American Art In The 1960s, David Mccarthy

Art Inquiries

Years before Robert Indiana suggested that his canonical LOVE paintings and sculptures carried erotic connotations, he was explicit in indicating that the series was to be understood as spiritual. In 1973, as the United States Postal Service issued some three hundred and thirty million stamps with his design, he specifically explained that the genesis of LOVE should be traced to his childhood training in Christian Science. Although scholars have certainly acknowledged this background, none, so far, have sufficiently addressed the actual foundational text of the faith, nor have they adequately addressed the evidence of Christian references found in the artist’s …

On Loss And Absence: Textiles Of Mourning And Survival, Art Institute Of Chicago, Chicago, Il, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Floating World: A.A. Murakami, Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, Tx, Yumi Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Art Inquiries, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Here Come The Brides: Sylvia Sleigh, Lawrence Alloway, And Hetty Remington, Andrew D. Hottle

Art Inquiries

Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), a Welsh-born artist who lived and worked in England before settling in the United States, is known primarily for her uninhibited portraits of nude men, many of which were painted in New York City during the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Over the last half-century, Sleigh’s male nudes have been both admired and derided for disrupting the conventional paradigm of the male artist and unclothed female model. Among them are Philip Golub Reclining (1971; private collection) and The Turkish Bath (1973; David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago), which were inspired by canonical …

Adrienne L. Childs, Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure In European Decorative Arts, Brigid M. Boyle

Art Inquiries

Ornamental Blackness by Adrienne L. Childs offers the first comprehensive survey of European luxury and utilitarian objects that treat Black Africans as decorative motifs. Proceeding chronologically from the middle Baroque period to the late nineteenth century, Childs charts the initial production of racialized objects for royal courts and aristocratic households and their later dissemination to middle-class homes. Items such as furniture, light fixtures, clocks, tableware, porcelain figurines, and treasury objects became an apparatus for controlling and fetishizing Black bodies, reinforcing the idea of Black servitude as normal. Many of these objects were crafted from precious natural materials whose extraction and …

Memory In Fragments: The Lives Of Ancient Maya Sculptures By Megan E. O’Neil, Jeanette Nicewinter

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Harry Boone: From Entropy To Renewal, Gertrude Herbert Institute Of Art, Augusta, Ga, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

On Canvas: The Origins And Implications Of A Common Phrase, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

Why do modern art historians and conservators describe paintings executed on cloth in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as works on canvas, when late medieval and early Renaissance sources never do the same? This article answers that question by tracing and analyzing the evolution of canvas as a term in the history of painting. Until the late 1400s, it will be argued, the term canvas and its regional variants connoted coarse woven fabrics made of hemp that were associated with rugged, utilitarian needs and rural poverty—but not with painting. By contrast, artists and related texts relied on …

Alison Place, Ed., Feminist Designer: On The Personal And The Political In Design, Anmol Shrivastava

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Art Of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-1782) By Christina K. Lindeman, Amanda Strasik

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Encoded, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Ny, Tamara Smithers

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Between Their Hands And Mine, Ellie Barnes

Art and Art History Honors Projects

We better understand the people who came before us through objects, images, and stories. Between Their Hands and Mine is a studio art honors project that connects wheel-thrown ceramics to the stories and experiences of the women in my life, known and unknown. Adorning the home with love and care through objects like cups with butterflies was common in my upbringing. My family’s Norwegian background inspired the florals and stripes that decorate the surface. This series of plates, bowls, mugs, and other dinnerware set amongst a dining room and ancestral objects is reminiscent of the homemaking women in my life.

Familiar Corners, Lilia Gonzalez-Baldwin

Art and Art History Honors Projects

The mundane is defined as lacking interest; dull, unimportant. My honors project aims to find the beauty in the mundane moments that linger in the domestic spaces that hold meaning to me. My desire to amplify the figures, spaces, and belongings that formed my childhood home and current apartment inspired me to create numerous highly detailed, overlapping works that act as portals into rooms in these spaces. In Shaving Cream, 2008, my 6-year-old self is shaving my older sister’s legs in the bathtub. In Down in their Nest, posters, trinkets, and stuffed animals act as easter eggs for my childhood.

Morphological And Woodworking Technology Analysis Of Wooden Piles From The Molenvliet Canal, Mrt Jakarta Phase 2 Cp-202 Project, Central Jakarta, Aisyah F. Sugoro, R. Cecep Permana

International Review of Humanities Studies

The aim of this study is to determine the correlation between the wooden embankment structure (wooden beams, wooden piles, and wooden planks) in the embankment installation system and the geographical conditions of Batavia along Jalan Hayam Wuruk and Jalan Gajah Mada, where the embankment structure has shifted due to ground movement. The research stages consist of observation, description, and explanation or interpretation of the processed data. Based on the analysis of wooden piles from the Molenvliet Canal embankment structure, it can be concluded that 17^th century Batavian society applied a multi-stage pile production process, ranging from raw material selection, …

West Coast Workshop To Southwest Institute, Hannah Marie Cerne

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis considers Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico (originally established as Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, CA), and its contributions to collaborative printmaking. Originally founded in 1960 by June Wayne with Clinton Adams and Garo Antreasian, Tamarind Lithography Workshop (the precursor to Tamarind Institute) revitalized lithography through structured collaboration between artists and master printers, alongside rigorous training programs. This thesis provides an institutional history of the workshop during its relocation to the University of New Mexico, highlighting its transformation into a university-based institute that integrated education and professional production. Using social and labor-based methodologies, this study analyzes how …

"The First Web Novel At 30: The Collection And The Creative Process", Robert Arellano, Scott Rettberg

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Summer 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Sunshine '69, recognized as the first novelistic hypertext fiction published on the web. While the full work remains accessible online—an "(un)supervised" preservation achievement in itself—the archive remains split between boxes and memory. This conversation between the work's creator and a major scholar in electronic literature documents both specific preservation challenges and systemic patterns in what the field chooses to preserve.

Topics include: figuring out web-born composition before established methodologies existed; the three decades of technical decisions that kept a 1996 work alive through format obsolescence and server migrations; and what gets lost …

Man.A.Machine.Txt, James H. Pardue

ELO (un)supervised 2026

man.A.machine.txt is an audiovisual composition generated in real time through a real-time multimedia system that remediates the words of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, a foundational text of eighteenth-century materialist philosophy. The system produces cut-up poetry and a particle cloud, transforming the original text into a shifting field of language and data. In Man a Machine, La Mettrie argues that body and soul are inseparable, proposing sleep as the moment in which their unity becomes undeniable. By remediating this text, I seek to reactivate its materialist concerns within our present technological condition—one increasingly defined by …

Soft Korsi: An Embodied Spatial Interior System For Communal Warmth, Faezeh Panahandeh

Graduate Final Projects

ABSTRACT

Soft Korsi: An Embodied Spatial Interior System for Communal Warmth reconceptualizes the historic Iranian Korsi as an innovative textile-based interior system. Traditionally, the Korsi functioned not only as a heating device but also as a spatial, material, cultural, and embodied system, which brought people together around a shared warm focal point. The integration of a heat source, textile coverings, floor seating arrangements, closeness of bodies, and domestic traditions related to warmth made possible a collective experience, rather than an individual or environmental one.

This design project seeks to address the disappearance of the Korsi from contemporary domestic environments as …

From Peril To Perseverance: Dr. Arthur C. Parker And The Seneca Arts Project, Brennan Ciccolone

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Like many Native people, the Haudenosaunee were subjected to culturcide and assimilation using residential schools like the Thomas Indian School in the late 19th and early 20th century. During this time, in 1925, the Seneca archaeologist Dr. Arthur C. Parker was hired as the director of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. Parker used his museum position to uplift and preserve Haudenosaunee arts and culture. This paper focuses on his Seneca Arts Project (1935-1941), which gathered art and artifacts from both ancient and contemporary Haudenosaunee members. This project explores how Parker’s work was used to help revitalize and honor Native …

Radiance After Exile: Visionism And The Art Of M, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This essay introduces and critically examines Visionism, the artistic philosophy developed by contemporary Australian painter M. Emerging from a practice shaped by early success, prolonged creative exile, and eventual return, Visionism is presented not as a stylistic movement but as a visual philosophy concerned with atmosphere, symbolism, transcendence, and the persistence of intensity after critique. Situating Visionism within contemporary debates surrounding postmodernism and metamodernism, the essay argues that M's work occupies a distinctive position within a broader cultural shift toward renewed engagements with meaning, affect, and sincerity.

Drawing on the artist’s own reflections, alongside theoretical perspectives from David Sudnow, Timotheus …

A History Of The Underground Comix Scene: The Seriousness Of An Unserious Genre, Harris Darcie Shugart

Master's Theses

The Underground Comix Scene of the 1960s and 1970s was born out of an age of censorship. The Comics Code Authority, a regulatory body created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, established guidelines requiring publishing houses to self-regulate following a recommendation from the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953. Comix with an X, for their X-rated nature, represent an emerging counter-culture in the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s, with an epicenter of San Francisco. These comix and their artists were not interested in obtaining the looming ‘Seal of Approval’ from the …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

A Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Assembly Line: Jewelry, Facture, And Alienation, Jonathon A. Zalakos

Masters Theses

A Pot of Gold at the End of the Assembly Line integrates icons of mass-manufacturing with signifiers of joyful work, stimulating a dialogue between industrial and craft labour. Visible traces of the making process left on these works conjure a spectral ‘maker’, implied by the fingerprints, toolmarks, assembly, and conspicuous decision making of an ‘other’. As we relate to these signifiers as opportunities for our own bodily action, this spectre speaks in our own voice. Possessed by this ghost, viewers are vicariously thrust into an imaginary context and made sensitive to the nature of this work — whether it validates …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …