History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Strata: Portraits Of The Alvarado & The Southwest, Kayla R. Duncan

Masters Theses

History isn't the past; it is a continuing unfolding of the moment, yet we cannot feel time. We see traces of age through patina on copper, the wrinkles on a face from decades of laughter, or the holes in your favorite shirt. Similarly within architecture, what remains: ruins and fragments serve as layers that indicate the passage of time. In what ways are these layers exposed? Hidden? Erased? How do we determine what layers are worthy to be erased, maintained, or glorified as use of a structure or place continues to evolve through time?

The history of Albuquerque spans the …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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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 …

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 …

Temporal Ubiquity, Brittni Mosby

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis examines looking as a sacred and relational practice rooted in familial memory, storytelling, and the photographic archive. Drawing from early experiences of engaging family photographs alongside my mother and great-grandmother, I conceptualize these encounters as the formation of “temporal altars”: living vessels that activate space, memory, and multiplicity. These intimate acts of looking and listening position the home as a critical site where Black subjectivity is held with care and complexity.

By casting these modes of perception into domestic spaces, my thesis not only resists reductive external gazes but interrogates the archive as a colonial apparatus structured by …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

Clue In The Roman Style House: A Twist On The Classic Board Game Featuring A Fusion Of Ancient And Modern Roman Influences, Madelyn Junk

Honors Projects

Throughout time, games have been used to convey how society functions. They hint at societal structure, behavioral patterns, and roles of community members. Specifically, board games are excellent ways to teach players about attention to detail and how to synthesize information.

This unique and functional honors project finds its strength as a detail-oriented game that stresses the importance of critical thinking and deduction as it further rewards those skills through play and friendly competition. It combines art history, education, and graphic design disciplines to result in a creative output alongside a research paper. Its final product is a playable game …

Maa': An Analysis From The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection, Claire T. Chilla

Department of Anthropology

Research of a maa’ textile within the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection (MWESC) from Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Report discusses different knowledge systems including technical and physical as well as cosmological and spiritual from the Toraja people. Also analyses affects of colonialism, trade, spirituality, tourism, and funerary practices.

An Introduction To East Asian Art In Three Journeys, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the full version of this record. For individual tour guides, visit the following links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/ Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. Students learn methods of visual analysis while also exploring …

The Southwest Black Artists Collective: Afro-Modern Ecology, Kinship, And Collectivity In The Desert Southwest, Bradley L. Petty

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Southwest Black Artists Collective (SBAC) as a site of

Afro-diasporic kinship, artistic production, and spatial intervention within the Desert

Southwest. Operating within a region where Black populations are comparatively small

and institutional support is diffuse, SBAC emerges as both a response to and a

reconfiguration of the regional artistic landscape. The Collective constructs an affirming

community through shared artistic practice, exhibitions, and the maintenance of The

Projects/Space in Tucson, Arizona, where public engagement and private creative

exchange coexist.

Drawing on theories of human ecology, this study expands existing frameworks

by introducing the concept of Afro-modern ecology, …

Maa’: An Analysis From The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection, Claire T. Chilla

Department of Anthropology

An analysis of Maa’ textiles from Sulawesi Indonesia. Discusses both the artistic symbolism, possible physical creation, and the spiritual connection of the textile for the Torajans. Informs through the lens of globalization, colonization, and funerary practices from the country of origin.

Self-Fashioning In Contemporary Figurative Painting, Hal Hardin

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper positions my painting practice as a form of resistance to historical constructions of gender, identity, and visibility, shaped by my experience as a queer, nonbinary person navigating womanhood in the American South. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I argue that Western figurative painting has long disciplined the feminine body, exploiting it and commodifying it into an easily consumable object.

In response, I appropriate and distort these visual conventions. My figures refuse to behave: they stretch, slouch, and linger in ambiguity, resisting fixed interpretation. Placed in spaces of visibility and …

Artistic Embodiment: The Role Of Art-Based Research In Communicating Disability Experiences, Juliana Scheopner

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Visual art has immense potential to communicate complex experiences of disability. As a disabled artist, I am interested in how disability has been portrayed in artwork, particularly in how other disabled artists choose to represent their lived experiences. Through art-based research, this study explores how disabled artists have used portraiture to depict their disability. Selected art includes work from Frida Kahlo, Deborah Padfield, Persimmon Blackbridge, and the author. Following an analysis of literature, selected artworks, and salient disability scholarship, emergent themes were identified. The focus on the complexity of disability experiences demonstrated the importance of considering a wide range of …

Tarot - Reimagined: Monotype Tarot Landscapes, Eleanor B. Nelson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Printmaking is a form of artmaking that utilizes transferring marks from the matrix to the final piece of paper, often through a press. These processes are able to create an edition of multiple identical prints. This is typically considered the highlight of using print processes; however, the process of making monotypes allows for one original piece. Through the process of researching and creating watercolor monotypes, I made a collection of ten original pieces, all depicting different landscapes throughout the Tarot deck. Each piece is 9” x 12” printed on a 13” x 17” piece of paper and created with watercolor, …

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

Weathered, Haylee A. Dyess

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Weathered focuses on themes of change, accumulation, time, and acceptance. Each artwork holds layers of information and experiences that form a unique narrative for all its viewers. The construction of each piece is a symbol of the physical ability it takes to create each painting. After my mobility was hindered due to my medical conditions, a new appreciation for physical health and the world I live in was gained. Striving to pack this sense of appreciation into my work, my method became a way for me to cope with my illness and to enjoy being creative, freely.

My art is …

Rooted Transformations, Ricardo D. Moctezuma

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In my ventures through art I realized that I underwent an experience that was tailored to my process of release. As I struggled to share my emotions, I became distant and dissociated, I felt detached from others and even from myself. This process was something I visualized in my art from, the Tears, to Self Destruction, to the Release and onto the Garden. I’ve always felt myself in a state of Release, partly healed and partly damaged. All I knew was that the garden represented a new beginning for me, I just never knew what that Garden was. Time passes …

Weaving Ideology: Textiles In Florentine And Venetian Painting Of The Cinquecento, Ruben Verità

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Renaissance art historical scholarship has largely ignored the political and cultural significance woven into the representation of textiles, as well as their communicative potential in paintings. In this study, I examine how textiles in their various forms carry the potential to go beyond their normative categorization as decoration. Through a comparative analysis of the paintings produced in two politically distinct polities—Florence and Venice—during the sixteenth century, I integrate Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and Michael Baxandall’s period eye to elucidate how painted fabric was not the representation of a passive decorative ornament. Rather, it was an active and legible proxy …

Harriet Hosmer: Femininity And Stone, Savannah V. Parrish

Undergraduate Theses

Harriet Hosmer was an American woman sculptor who studied in Rome, Italy, from 1853 to 1900. Hosmer led her own cohort of women artists and inspired other artists in Rome. Hosmer’s sculptures and the controversies surrounding them exemplify her experiences as a career woman of her time. Hosmer made sculptures of women who defied the will of men, both mythical and historical. Hosmer’s sculptures show how she felt restricted in the world, particularly in the field of sculpture as a woman and how like the figures of her sculptures she found freedom in stone, where she could tell the stories …

Res Historica, Volume 5, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette Phd

Res Historica

The 2026 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, Julia Ackerman, Callyn Wright, Logan Davis, and John Hinton. Cover art by Mary Beth Lee.

From Lino To Luxury: Class, Taste And Identity In The Mid-Twentieth Century Irish Provincial ‘Good Room’, Angela Mehegan

Irish Communication Review

The aim of this paper is to position issues of class and taste within the context of the home and through the lens of the domestic in mid-twentieth century provincial Ireland from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. This was a time of unprecedented economic growth and heralded a period of social and cultural change. Our homes and the artefacts we surround ourselves with are central to our sense of self and how we wish to be seen by others. Issues of class, taste, status, gender, and aesthetic possibilities are unpacked by focusing on the ‘Good Room’ as a …

From The Pit, Joshua C. Goering

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Clay retains histories; the memory of each action it experiences is depicted on its surface and in its form.  I am a potter focused on making objects that capture these moments. Pinching, scraping, trimming, throwing, and carving expose tooth and excavate form, revealing the qualities of the material and showing the marks of handwork. As a potter, I am interested in participating in a history of vessel making and understanding making through an interpretation of the historic object. The work acts as an archive, accumulating information about process, materials, and a greater context of elder objects. Integrating these vocabularies creates …

Kappa Pi Constitution, Kappa Pi National Fraternity

Documents

The Kappa Pi Constitution (1930)

Sparks Under Ashes, Ani Sargsyan

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Rooted in hope, reflections on longing, family history, and the contemporary Armenian experience take precedence in Sparks Under Ashes. The title of the show itself derives from my great-grandfather’s notebook, which details his unjust exile during the Great Purge of the Soviet era and other life experiences. His handwriting becomes ingrained in my work as both our marks collide through painting, drawing, and transfer processes to bridge the time between us and celebrate generations of resilience.

Acts of endurance are crucial for Armenia’s survival because attempts of erasure have always been prominent, with the 1915 genocide being the darkest …