History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

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 …

Fetishismus:Facism, Sodomy, And The Exhibition, Matthew P. Gershovich

Masters Theses

Fetishismus examines the contemporary dislocation between homosexuality and queerness. Homosexuality is the biological, innate quality of same-sex attraction. Queerness is rooted in deviance, perversion, and sociologically attached to the “other.” Although almost always used in an explicitly homosexual connotation, “queerness” is not entirely contingent on the physical engagement of homosexual acts. In historical usage, queer is used as a pejorative adjective, implying a lack of masculinity with the intent to invoke repulsion. In contemporary parlance the two are treated as synonymous. This intertwined relationship relies on the forced lack of social and spatial belonging that is rooted in a foundational …

My Mother The Mountain, Ricky Vasan

Masters Theses

Teach me How to Write a Love Song

I catch a glimpse of my mother sitting on her bed in her bedroom from the bathroom mirror. What a rare occurrence! One I am not fortunate enough to witness as often as I would like. A moment that I know —even before it has occurred—will one day become my dearest desire for wanting to turn back time. This moment is a mirage. Once I return to my senses, after the passing of a twelve-hour lag, it will already be too late.

This is the place where I wish to work from. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

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 …

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. …

41.82379°N, 71.38497°W, Xiaotong Cai

Masters Theses

I, Xiaotong Cai, have known an abandoned bridge was lifted and stuck at 64-degree from 1976. I have walked and bent down towards it for over 60 times, each paralleling a journal entry. The visits and 27,351 words (up until May 5th) are the living proof: observation, encounters, correspondence, collectively and personally. It’s been nine months since it emerged in flux. Two flesh. A moving outsider and a still bridge. How can an Unused giant activate a human body? Who is the attractor and intervener?

Here, my solution is to conduct a series of small gestures. I say, interpreting without …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

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 …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

.

Painting As Sfx, Callie Coccia

Masters Theses

Almost all of the subject matter I have been preoccupied with these past two years (and my adult life) has originated from a place of dissonance. There’s a narrative experience that things like wax figures, midcentury film, and theme parks insist upon. That narrative insistence contrasts with an observed reality. Epcot does not have a slice of Italy housed within the park, Bette Davis does not have an evil twin (A Stolen Life [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock is not Alfred Hitchcock. Yet these narratives are so overbearingly convincing or coercive that their sweaty alternate …

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, …

Embodied River: Deliberate Unbuilding In Post-Dam Landscapes, Travis Kelley

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities and challenges that legacy hydro-powered dams and mill complexes offer. Through historical and contemporary analysis of New England’s 14,000 dams and of a particular site in Maynard, Massachusetts, the research delves into the factors that make these interventions so challenging. It begins from an assumption rooted in the ethical and environmental imperative to remove or modify legacy dams, which are those built for a purpose that is no longer being utilized, and rejects the existing binary of “remove” vs “preserve,” which is the dominant narrative in the dam removal conversation as it exists in 2026. …

Within Boundaries: Collecting And Exhibiting Chinese Contemporary Art In M+, Hong Kong, Lei April Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how M+, Hong Kong’s museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture, collects and exhibits Chinese contemporary art under political and institutional constraint. It argues that M+ operates through adaptive autonomy, a condition in which curatorial and educational strategies transform limitation into method. By analyzing the museum’s formation, exhibition practices, and comparison with other Asian institutions such as the Asia Culture Center in South Korea, the Power Station of Art in China, and the National Gallery Singapore, the study reveals how M+ sustains visibility of Chinese contemporary art with political sensitive topic through 绥靖 (Sui Jing; subtle appeasement) …

V.1 Fall 2025, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2025 issue contains articles on the intersection of the natural world and human experience, technology, identity, immigration, activism, divestment, institutional history, political resistance, decolonization, and the digital vs. physical realms. The issue contains experimental poetry, visual essays, and reflections on the "nature of publication".

The Arch And The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsitǎ, Ana Popescu

Masters Theses

The Arch and The Looking Glass: Umbli Cu Cioara Vopsită (You Are Walking Around with a Painted Crow)

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics in the Department of Ceramics of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

By Ana Popescu, 2025

Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:

Lesley Baker, Shoji Satake (Chair), Heather Bhandari, Tucker Houlihan

Date: May 17th, 2025

Location: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island

To be opened for self-reflection in 10 years, on May 17th, 2035:

I’ve been mulling over how to make …

I Don't Want To Talk About It, Margaryta Winkler

Masters Theses

This thesis is a contradiction. It is an attempt to verbalize what words can’t capture. It asks what is lost, what is gained and what can only be said when nothing is said at all. It is a love letter to wordless visual narratives. Drawing on the work of animators and illustrators like Gints Zilbalodis, Don Herzfeldt, Shaun Tan and Sophie Burrows, as well as the author’s own explorations, it looks at the risks and rewards of wordless storytelling. It is about silence, but not absence. It is about images that refuse to be reduced to captions and stories that …

Buddha, Resituated, Min Sun

Masters Theses

The Asian Arts Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents significant cultural artifacts in a minimalist, neutral environment that disconnects them from their original historical and spatial contexts. By proposing display techniques that emphasize the origin and background of objects, it asks whether audiences from diverse cultural backgrounds can be enabled to connect empathetically with and learn from the heritage represented by these objects displayed out of context.

This thesis explores how exhibition design can reframe decontextualized artifacts to restore cultural meaning. By unpacking the room chronologically and geographically, and drawing from the spatial language of the Yungang Grottoes, …

Unframing Venus: Redefining The Female Nude, Sage Leafsong

Masters Theses

Historically women have been excluded from becoming acclaimed artists due to societal, educational, and institutional barriers. This exclusion has had many repercussions in Western art––in a large part it has made celebrated male artists the norm, while celebrated female artists are the exception.

These same barriers often precluded women from depicting themselves in art. When women did paint, they were encouraged to paint domestic scenes such as flowers or still lifes and were prohibited from studying or depicting the nude form. This gap of representation was filled by male artists who have felt empowered to sexualize women with no consequence. …

The Terror Of The Threshold: On Impermanence, Enclothed Hauntology, And Rest, David M. Legrand

Masters Theses

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Pressing Into Absence, Linda Sok

Masters Theses

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources. …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …