History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Re-Imagining Design For Affordable Housing In Mexico, Kenza Fernandez Dominguez

Scripps Senior Theses

Since the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, affordable housing developments in Mexico have been produced in a massive, unsustainable scale. The speed at which these developments are produced equates to the carelessness that goes into their planning. At large, the developments’ monotonous design is aesthetically dehumanizing and fails to promote a sense of community. These developments lack basic infrastructure, and their residents have abandoned them, which has incentivized increased criminal activity.

In this paper, I will be looking at successful models of affordable housing globally, exploring the histories of communal living, and function of architectural collages. Based on my findings, …

Popping (Post)Modernism: Joaquín Torres-Garcia & Latin America's Pop Art Movement, Alexandra Branscom

Scripps Senior Theses

Even though the canon of Western Art History has attributed the Pop movement to the US and the UK, artists from around the world have made significant contributions to pop art and formed their own Pop movements. This includes the Latin American pop artists Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexican), Antonio Henrique Amaral (Brazilian), and Juan Dávila (Chilean), who, between the years 1968 and 1974, fled right-wing political unrest of their respective home countries and gained artistic education in dominant, imperialistic countries. These artists subvert the capitalistic, adverting language of pop art to promote the localized political sensibilities of their home countries and …

Foster Rhodes Jackson And The Visual Conquest Of The West, Eve Kaufman

Scripps Senior Theses

Colonizers settled the Los Angeles and the Southern California region in part by using Modernism’s visual rhetoric and propagandic implications during the time of suburban sprawl. Suburban sprawl refers to the mass single family home development which took place from the 1920^[1]s until now but peaked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Los Angeles sprawl grew particularly in the 1950^[2]s as soldiers returned from WWII. It was a way for middle class white families to accrue generational wealth and follow through on the American Dream^[3].

The primary result however disenfranchised already marginalized groups. This …

Visual Teaching Of Geometry And The Origins Of 20th Century Abstract Art, Stephen Luecking

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

As a group, the artists educated near the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries possessed greater mathematical knowledge than expected of artists today, especially regarding constructive skills in Euclidean geometry. Educational theory of the time stressed such skills for students in general, who needed these to enter the workplace of the time. Mathematics teaching then stressed the use of manipulatives, i.e., visual and interactive aids thought to better fix the student’s acquisition of mathematical skills. This visual training, especially in geometry, significantly affected the early development of abstraction in art. This paper presents examples of this visual …

On The Use Of Geometric Elements In The Works Of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy And Piet Mondrian, Kimberly Spayd, Molly Reynolds, Christian Lansinger

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Working in overlapping artistic circles in the first half of the twentieth century, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Piet Mondrian had very different intentions for how their pieces would affect viewers. But while their aims differed dramatically, the individual techniques they employed were both rooted in a mathematical foundation. Moholy-Nagy used simple two-dimensional shapes, scaled repetition of those shapes, and variations in perspective to illustrate the potential benefits of machine technology to the common person. Mondrian, alternatively, limited the elements in his work to perpendicular lines, asymmetry, and a dedicated adherence to the plane in order to align his viewer's metaphysical state …

Trauma And Recovery: A Confessional Process, Mia Siracusa

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

The "Postmodern Geographies" Of Frank Gehry's Los Angeles, Katherine Shearer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which Frank Gehry’s architectural contributions to Los Angeles’ social and built environment have shaped the region’s “postmodern geographies” throughout the 20^th and 21^st century. Through a focused exploration of three of Gehry’s postmodernist structures in Greater Los Angeles—a house, a library, and a concert hall—this thesis analyses how Gehry and his designs reflected and affected the artistic and socio-spatial development of Los Angeles’ “decidedly postmodern landscape.”

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Ecotones, Chas Schroeder

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the intersection of pastoral, urban and idiosyncratic visions. It may reveal the aesthetic and emotional possibilities inherent in the broad-ranging subjects I employ: game animals, advertising, colonialism, love, numerals, textiles, drugs, abstraction, competitive sports, displacement, architecture, gender-bending, civil-rights movements, transgressive literature, social media, indigenous peoples, graphic design, glamour, fashion, hip-hop, rock-n-roll, graffiti, cowboy, exhibitionism and other niche cultures in America. Pieces emerge intuitively via personal narrative and lodged memories as guides. The disjunctive compositions are a breed of contemporary formalism mated with abstraction.

La Desnuda Rebelde Y El Bodegón Subversivo: Una Reinterpretación Del Arte De Olga Costa Y María Izquierdo, Carly Goodkin

CMC Senior Theses

This paper explores the art of Olga Costa and María Izquierdo. The history of the Mexican revolution is outlined and then presented again with a focus on women’s issues and involvement. Next is a discussion of national identity construction after the revolution, with attention paid to the role of the “Big Three,” muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros. While scholars often credit male artists for their involvement in this process, the contributions of female artists tend to be overlooked. Although the work of female artists is often portrayed as limited to their personal experiences, this thesis argues …

From The Attic To The Cosmos: Myth In The Art Of Anselm Kiefer 1973-2007, Isabel L. Roth

Scripps Senior Theses

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany, 1945—the year of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, and subsequently, the end of World War II. His own beginnings were shrouded by a national “repression” of history. This repression was at odds with Kiefer’s needs to establish his own origin. For this reason, the spirituality in his earlier work is often overshadowed by its subject—Nazi Germany. This thesis will look back on Kiefer’s work through the lens of mythology in an effort to re-evaluate his earlier art within the context of his works since 1990. From the 1970s to the present, Kiefer has drawn from mythology …

The Gesamtkunstwerk Of A Reunifying Metropolis: Berlin’S Kunsthaus Tacheles, Emma Camille Scheidt

Scripps Senior Theses

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin was faced with the challenge to reunify in both political and cultural realms. Berlin is noted throughout history as a metropolis that is characterized by flux; the Post-Wende [Post-Wall] era is another remarkable transitional phase in Berlin’s history. During this era, the city was extremely porous and susceptible to cultural forces that could easily define the city’s malleable future. This essay discusses such forces and events that were planned by the city government, as well as an organic grassroots force that was especially significant in the cultural reunification. This …

Choreographing Modernity: Loïe Fuller And Her Influence On The Arts, Katharine Hutchins

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis, which studies the effect Loïe Fuller had on artists at the turn of the 20^th century, redefines her role in art and society. An American dancer born in 1862, Fuller is often hailed as one of the forefathers of modern dance and a technological engineer, but she is too rarely shown in control of how the audience perceived her. This work gives an overview of Art Nouveau and the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris in which she performed. It closely examines her impact on painters, illustrators, and lithographers: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Will Bradley, and Jules Cheret. …

Spectacular Shadows: Djuna Barnes's Styles Of Estrangement In Nightwood, Erica Nicole Bellman

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Textual Apparitions: Power, Language, And Site In The Work Of Jenny Holzer, Peter Holden Fox

Pomona Senior Theses

Jenny Holzer's text-based projects have attracted the attention of critics, historians, and curators from Des Moines to Dresden. An understanding of the complex interplay between language, gender, power, and site within Holzer's work demonstrates how a singular interpretive approach is insufficient for discussing the multitude of meanings her projects produce. Perhaps most significantly, a fresh analysis of Holzer's work and critical reactions to it challenges the story of modernism and postmodernism and the relationship between these two terms.