History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

The Making Of Transpacific Video Art, 1966–1988, Haeyun Park

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first English-written study that narrates the development of video art through a transnational and inter-regional analysis of Japanese, Korean and Asian-American artworks from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, which played a central role in establishing video as a truly international visual language. My transpacific approach to video art contests nation-based studies of art history and challenges the transatlantic narrative of video art in Anglo-American art historical literature, which has focused on the relation between video art in Western Europe and North America. I articulate the Transpacific as a geopolitical and an intellectual model of interaction between …

Shared Idiosyncrasies: Stuart Davis And Giorgio De Chirico, Virginia Melvin

Theses and Dissertations

Within the scholarship produced on Stuart Davis, the influence of twentieth century European avant-garde artists has been identified as critical to his growth and establishment of an idiosyncratic style. Missing in these studies is the exposure and impact of the Metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico on works produced by Davis between late 1927 through 1929. The influence of de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings on Davis becomes evident when comparing stylistic techniques applied by Davis to those pioneered by the Metaphysical artist.

Ivan Puni's Berlin Period: 1920-1924, Elena Kakuriev

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is dedicated to the work of the Russian Avant-Garde artist Ivan Albertovich Puni (1892-1956): an artist, a theorist and writer, an organizer of exhibition, a teacher of art, and above all, an innovator. This thesis presents an account of the artist's Berlin period (1920-1924), which has so far lacked scholarly attention.

The thesis begins with a close analysis of Puni's Russian period (1914-1919). In this time span,

Ivan Puni demonstrated his ability to adopt a wide gamut of diverse artistic styles. Puni first elaborated works akin to Cubist constructions. However, starting from 1915, the artist became a major …

Gus Solomons Jr.: Analyzing The Dances Of An Early Black Postmodernist, Zsuzsanna Orban

Theses and Dissertations

Gus Solomons jr. was one of the first Black dancers to participate in the Judson Dance Theater workshops, but was never fully integrated into the white, postmodern dance world. This thesis looks at several of his works which exemplify his use of site-specificity and innovative technologies, including dual-screen video dances.

Double Documents: Imaging And Installation In Sturtevant’S “Duchamps”, Chris Murtha

Theses and Dissertations

The artist Sturtevant produced exacting but inherently distinct recreations of artworks only recently completed by her contemporaries. This thesis examines the body of work she created after Marcel Duchamp between 1966 and 1973, and how that work reveals the central and entwined roles of photography and installation in her practice.

The Fate Of National Socialist Visual Culture: Iconoclasm, Censorship, And Preservation In Germany, 1945–2020, Denali Elizabeth Kemper

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how Nazi architecture, fine arts, and ephemera survived the postwar period and were gradually rehabilitated through study and exhibition. Each chapter surveys the changing reception of Nazi art from 1945-2020, leading to its display in German museums as historical documents and “visual culture,” rather than “fine” art.

Quality And Simplicity: Rebecca Salsbury James, Folk Art, And Modernism In The United States, Caroline Seabolt

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the work of Rebecca Salsbury James and its contributions to the development of interwar modernism in the United States. Using mediums traditionally employed by folk artists, reverse painting on glass and the colcha stitch, James expressed her interest in quality and simplicity with a proto-feminist sensibility.

Bernice Lee Bing’S Art And Spiritual Practice, Lin Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Living and working in northern California between the late 1950s and 1990s, abstract painter Bernice Lee Bing practiced Zen, Nichiren, and Nyingma Buddhism. This thesis studies what the visual and conceptual impact of these spiritual practices had on her abstract and visionary paintings.

“Women Of Allah” And “The Book Of Kings:” Shirin Neshat’S Narratives Of Returning Home, Zahra Banyamerian

Dissertations and Theses

Using the framework of nostalgia defined by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, this thesis revisited the series “Women of Allah” and “The Book of Kings,” that Shirin Neshat created twenty years apart. It argues that the photographs of both series became the terrain through which Neshat narrates the relationship between her past, present, and future. She constructs her longing for home in “Women of Allah'' and she visualizes her homecoming in “The Book of Kings.” The central point to this research is Neshat’s personal relationship to an event that caused her a traumatic experience, the experience that interrupted …

Son Of Esther, Shah Of The Persian Empire: The Judeo-Islamic-Persian Tapestry Of Ardashirnameh’S Miniature Paintings, Gilad Bendavid

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

The Power And Attraction Of Transgression: John Martin's Depiction Of Lucifer, Kseniia Krivileva

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Tools For Thought: Artifacts From The History Of Comparative Psychology, Dylan Kerr

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the history of comparative psychology through close readings of apparatuses used in seminal experiments on animal behavior, drawing connections between seemingly disparate areas of human culture—including art, architecture, mythology, and economics—and the development of the science, with a particular focus on behaviorist and cognitive approaches.

Using Monuments To Teach About Racism, Colonialism, And Sexism, Susan Phillip

Publications and Research

This chapter examines how an interdisciplinary high-impact practice approach to teaching and learning using selected contested monuments can reveal intersections of racism, colonialism, and sexism, and lay the foundation for students’ civic engagement. In place-based and virtual experiences, students observe and investigate local and national monuments, integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, including history, psychology, art, culture, and tourism. Students make critical analyses about how monuments reveal power relationships in our society. Students from various disciplines explore the origin of contested monuments, the evolving national and local debates around them, and their effect on students’ learning to evaluate historical, contemporary, and …

An Ode To James Van Der Zee: Lorna Simpson’S 9 Props, Emilie C. Boone

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Shared Provenance: Investigating Safavid-Mughal Cultural Exchange Through Luxury Silks In The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries, Nazanin Hedayat Munroe

Publications and Research

When examining silk textiles attributed to the early modern Persianate world, there is always some uncertainty as to whether they were produced in Safavid Iran or Mughal India. The confusion is warranted: the two courts share many of the same ideas, images, and even family connections, creating a broad cultural overlap. This becomes apparent in the arts from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, as politics and patronage prompted the migration of key Safavid artists, including weavers, from Iran to Mughal India. As Persian painting was developed in the royal atelier, luxury silks were also produced with Safavid techniques.

Examining these imported …

The Berbers: Constructed Identities By Foreigners On African Soil, Zineb Askaoui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the textual evidence pertaining to the identity of the local North African population of Morocco. In examining the literature about North Africans and the inscriptions in North Africa, I wish to determine who their authors were. Since North Africa has been invaded and colonized multiple times throughout history, the available literature written by both the foreigners who colonized it and the locals yielded interesting and sometimes contrasting results.

The names that address the local North Africans are pertinent expressions of identity or of forceful submission. This study examines four different terms that have been used to describe …

Accomplices In Art: The Expansion Of Authorship In The 1970s And '80s, Sydney Stutterheim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation introduces the “accomplice,” a new figure in histories of performance and appropriation art in the United States and Western Europe during the 1970s and '80s that allows us to completely revise the relations of property, agency, and authorship that have been assumed in these fields. The accomplice is defined here as a type of agent who shares in the responsibility of artworks that are often centered on tactics of legal or ethical disobedience while the recognition of her or his authorial position in the artistic production is deliberately obscured, diminished, or overlooked. Focusing on the work …

The Art Of Opacity: Guy De Cointet In L.A., Media Farzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides the first detailed study of the work of French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983), specifically the books, objects, and performances he produced in Los Angeles between 1971 and 1983. Much of this work mined pop-cultural sources—genre fiction, magazine advertising, and television serials—for texts, which he reused in deliberately obfuscated ways: in pseudonymous publications written in code or invented languages, as well as in sigil-like paintings that doubled as props for performances in which actors delivered contradictory interpretations of the encoded objects. I argue that Cointet’s appropriations of the visual and narrative logics of postwar culture provide a …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

Staging The Modern, Building The Nation: Exhibiting Israeli Art, 1939–1965, Chelsea Haines

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the role Israeli art exhibitions played in nation-building from 1939 to 1965. During this formative period, Israeli artists, curators, and government officials established new art institutions in the country and participated in a growing roster of international exhibitions overseas. Together, the art and architecture of these exhibitions helped to produce a concept of both modern Israeli art and Israel itself as a modern nation. As much as the project of Zionism rested on the creation of a homogenous Hebrew culture, the formation of “Israeli art” in these exhibitions relied on postwar European claims for visual art as …

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962–1992, Christopher T. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Histories of “primitivism” in the avant-garde show that Euro-American modernism was always engaged in the appropriation of nonwestern and Indigenous art, with particular interest in Northwest Coast Native art forms by the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Indian Space Painters. However, there has been little consideration for how Northwest Coast Native artists chose to engage with the styles and tenets of Western modern art. To date, the history of post-war Northwest Coast Native art has been dominated by what is known as the Renaissance, a narrative in which artists pursued a neo-traditional style in modern times through the recovered and revival …

Norman Lewis: Linearity, Politics, And Pedagogy In His Abstract Expressionism, 1946–1964, Andrianna T. Campbell-Lafleur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Norman Lewis’s studio practice between the years 1946-1964 in particular his associations with the painters Romare Bearden, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith. Lewis’s influence extended far into the twenty-first century. As told by numerous contemporary art practitioners—Firelei Baez, Mark Bradford, David Kennedy Cutler, Charles Gaines, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, RJ Messineo, and Jack Whitten—Lewis was the mentor, friend, father and grandfather figure of an innovative black artist working with abstraction. In Chapter 1: An Integrative Line of Becoming, I trace Lewis’s change from Social Realism in the 1930s to semi-abstract portraits and genre paintings …

Landscape And Lore: River Acheron And The Oracle Of The Dead, Lashante St. Fleur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to explore the cultural relationships between people, landscape, memory and ritual, this master’s thesis focuses on the Acheron River in Epirus, Greece, long believed to harbor an entrance into Hades, the Greek underworld. Various entrances into the chthonic, or subterranean land of the dead, are peppered throughout Greece, with each tied to their own local myths, legends, folklore and cults. According to those traditions, Hades could be accessed from several terrestrial rivers thought to be connected to Oceanus, the primordial world-encompassing river surrounding all of creation. Flowing forth from River Ocean were all above- and underground rivers and …

Tracing The Human-Avian Relationship In Iceland, Melanie Sua

Theses and Dissertations

An in-depth investigation explores the history of birds in Iceland and the interaction between birds and humans from the 9th through the 19th century, with the help of archaeological evidence, traditional and historical materials.

The Harlem Book Of The Dead: Pan-Africanism, Funerary Portraiture, And The African-American Way Of Death, Jessica D. Feldman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the text and images contained in James Van Der Zee and Camille Billops’s seminal photobook The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). The title, frontispiece, and introduction, combined with Van Der Zee’s funerary portraits, illuminate the connection between African-American rituals of death and Pan-Africanism. While these two concepts appear to be distinct, they are both predicated upon and intrinsically linked to key values in African American culture, including liberation and the meaning of community. Each chapter focuses on a different contextual framework for situating The Harlem Book of the Dead within the historical and political moment …

The Flower Paintings Of Albert York, Scott Seaboldt

Theses and Dissertations

Albert York (American, 1928–2009) is said to have created approximately 250 paintings. Along with a biographical study, a selective analysis of the over 90 flower paintings is conducted through historical, comparative, and analytical investigations. The floral works are definitive touchstones of York's artistic growth and remain rich with symbolic content.

Painting Politics: The Anarchist Art And Lives Of Camille Pissarro And Barnett Newman, Johan Marby

Theses and Dissertations

The times in and around the Paris Commune and the Depression followed by Second World War in the United States were instances in history that greatly influenced artists’ output. This thesis investigates how anarchist thought and activities during these periods, respectively, affected the œuvres of Camille Pissarro and Barnett Newman.

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Reproducing The New Negro: James Van Der Zee’S Photographic Vision In Newsprint, Emilie C. Boone

Publications and Research

In the summer of 1924, as a departure from his concentration on portraits in his Harlem studio, James Van Der Zee served as the official photographer for the Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Many of the resulting photographs were published in the organization’s popular, internationally distributed newspaper, the Negro World. The newsprint medium in which the UNIA photographs appeared in reproduction, along with their editorial arrangement on the page, animated a different photographic vision from that of the gelatin silver print studio portraits often celebrated as Van Der Zee’s defining contribution …