History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Menetekel: Ishmael's Black Whale And The Semiotics Of Doom, Todd Tyner Cronkhite

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study employs the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael, as a focal critic to interpret several potential examples of ominous writing on the wall, or menetekel. It concludes that the message of such writing, owing primarily to its irrevocably deictic relationship with the surface it is written on, is fundamentally apocalyptic in nature, regardless of its explicit content. The physical walls of the “kingdom” are incorporated into the grammar of the menetekel as object, so that its elemental message, “I was here,” becomes not only an admission of criminal trespass, but also a direct threat to the current order and …

The Dance Of Domesticity: How Gender Constructs Obscure Lived Experience At Museums, Marcy J. Botwick

Museum Studies Theses

My thesis focuses on Mary Shepard Greene Blumenschein and Ernest L. Blumenschein, married artists born in the late 1860s. Ernest Blumenschein was an important regional artist and member of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). Paintings by Blumenschein and other TSA members promoted tourism in the Southwestern United States through annual exhibitions and their use in advertising the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF). Mary Greene Blumenschein was an award-winning painter and illustrator whose work focused on images of women at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, she is now a secondary and obscure figure in art history. …

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence And The Performative Turn In Mexico, Kylee Aragon

Museum Studies Theses

The Body Articulated: Gender Violence and the Performative Turn in Mexico explores the role of performance art in raising awareness for gender-based crimes. My thesis investigates the performative response to gender-based violence in contemporary art in Mexico during the 1970’s and then again in the post-NAFTA era, with the aim of examining the use of the artists body, the voices of women as substitution for the body, and the bodies of others as means of creating a greater awareness to the feminicidal epidemic. Artists like Mónica Mayer and Lorena Wolffer use their body and the voices of woman, as opposed …

Constantino Escalante's Lithographs In La Orquesta And The National Legacy Of The Mexican Constitution Of 1857, Steven V. Cary

Art & Art History ETDs

ABSTRACT

An examination of the lithographic prints of Constantino Escalante in the Mexican publication, La Orquesta, was undertaken for the years 1861 through 1868. Foremost among La Orquesta’s concerns and repeatedly appearing in Escalante’s work, is the importance of the Constitution of 1857 as the Liberal instrument for Mexico’s journey to become a sovereign, modern state. During a tumultuous period of 19^th century Mexican history, Escalante and La Orquesta dealt with sustained threats and censorship, causing frequent and intermittent shutdowns. An early supporter of Benito Juárez, La Orquesta radically amended its positive view of Juárez following the unsuccessful …

Graphic Scotland: Visuality And Empire, 1810 – 1913, Laura Michelle Golobish

Art & Art History ETDs

Graphic Scotland: Visuality and Empire, 1810–1913 interrogates the aesthetic, technological, and literary conventions used to represent Scotland’s character in nineteenth-century publications. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, publishers, authors, and readers began to correlate the material format of prints, books, illustration, and bookbinding with individual and national character. Periodicals and literature drew the correlations between the aesthetic conventions of picturesque Scottish landscape, physiognomy of Scottish authors, and bookbinding to frame ideas about Scottish character as a didactic model for middle class British and American readers. Thus, Graphic Scotland offers an intertextual reading of three illustrated publications about Scotland–J.R. Osgood’s 1882 …

“By Order Of The Commandant General”: Eighteenth-Century Bourbon Reforms And The Architecture Of Mission San Francisco De La Espada, San Antonio, Texas, James E. Ivey

Art & Art History ETDs

The effects of Bourbon reforms on mission architecture of the northern frontier of New Spain have not been examined in the surprisingly limited historiography of the San Antonio, Texas missions. The few existing architectural studies overlook major structural and developmental changes at the missions. Using the construction history of Mission San Francisco de la Espada, I argue that most of these changes are the result of the application of the Bourbon-revised mission administrative method, the método nuevo, made possible by the Patronato Real Universal of 1753 that gave the King of Spain temporal control over the Catholic Church within …

Living Between The Lines: How Japanese Crafts Taught Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, And Eileen Gray To See Modern Domestic Space, Regina Nabil Emmer

Art & Art History ETDs

Histories of European and U.S. modernism conventionally accept that Enlightenment rational thought set modern architecture’s terms and criteria in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Rationalism privileges visual and material properties; distinguishes between art, architecture, and craft; and identifies space with the structure that frames it. It normalized the view that buildings stand fixed, independent of our interaction with them, and perpetuates assumptions about what physically defines domestic space. Consequently, Japan’s significance for modern domestic space in Europe and the U.S. has been interpreted as structurally evident. Simultaneously, the architecture of European and U.S. modernists who did not think like rationalists …

Beauty, Real Or Apparent: Christian Kings, Muslim Artisans, And The Development Of An Imperial Image Through The Silk And Horticulture Industries In Sicily. (Ca. 1090-1190), Casey K. Brown

History ETDs

In the wake of the Norman conquest of Sicily in the second half of the eleventh century, the Mediterranean island housed a diverse collection of Greek, Latin, and Muslim communities. Norman kings chose Palermo to become the seat of Latin-Christian Sicilian government for its productivity and strategic location and included the island into the complex world of self-fashioning politics and exchange. For Sicilian and ‘foreign’ Muslims alike, the imperious pose Roger II and his successors held created a precarious balancing act between the real and imagined worlds of Sicily. The content of this thesis is primarily concerned with the impact …

From Stasis To Ecstasy: Tracing Bernard Of Clairvaux's "Queer" Influence On French Gothic Art, Jackson O. Larson

Art & Art History ETDs

I trace the progression of figural sculpture in the Latin West from the static statues of the late-tenth century to the ecstatic statues of the mid-thirteenth century. I explore the various reasons for the return of freestanding figural sculpture and suggest that the return is indicative of an eroticization of the Christian holy figures. I suggest that Bernard of Clairvaux’s erotic theology in the twelfth century resulted in a synthesis of eros and Christian devotion that allowed latent classicism to find purchase in Christian art. I submit that Bernard’s influence on European art is a form of “queering”—a process by …

Stripped And Exploited Blackness: Black Nude Men In The Art Of F. Holland Day And John Singer Sargent, David P. Saiz

Art & Art History ETDs

Black representation in late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century U.S. art and visual culture is primarily dominated by racist depictions produced by white elite (usually male) artists. Exploiting Black male nude subjects in their art production, F. Holland Day and John Singer Sargent are inextricably tied to this complicated legacy. For Day, his African series featuring U.S.-born model, J.R. Carter, extracts the subject from his time and place to present him as an exotic African subject/object. On the other hand, Sargent encounters Black Bahamian laborers at Miami’s Villa Vizcaya where he then documents his subjects in watercolor as bathers in the surrounding subtropical …

Aztlán Del Sol, Marcus Zúñiga

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest

An artistic writing developed from the themes and concepts of an of art installation made by a visual artist of Mexican-American descent from New Mexico. The work references the relationship of Aztec mythology to the American Southwest, art theoretical discourse in object oriented ontology and aesthetics, and key ideas in astronomy. Additionally interwoven is an expanded sense for interpreting ancestry and history under the constructs of multicultural conceptions of time, specifically cultures with notable spiritual rituals of Sun worship and observation.

El Paso Segundo Barrio Muralism: Barrio History, Memory, And Identity In Community Artwork, Eduardo García

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest

The border city of El Paso, Texas has a longstanding tradition of muralism in one of its oldest neighborhoods- the downtown Segundo Barrio. Though these manifestations have not received as much scholarly attention as other borderland muralist traditions, they echo a similar theme of community artwork focused on sociohistorical issues, cultural memory, and barrio identity relevant to their geopolitical space. Through a study of mural artists and programs in the downtown El Paso area, I view the use of specific iconography and themes as expressions of Segundo Barrio history, memory, and identity. These artists have continued a lineage of …

William Blake's Satan As A Hermaphrodite, Genevieve E. Hartsock

Art & Art History ETDs

Depictions of Satan had started off with a grotesque and monstrous figure, but depictions of and attitudes towards the character shifted with the publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, although the aesthetics of the figure shifted, I argue that William Blake’s renderings of Satan continue the tradition of rendering them as monstrous and grotesque in a new way, in that Blake renders Satan as a hermaphrodite. Attitudes towards hermaphrodites has shifted over time, but the attitude of regarding them as unnatural or monstrous harkens back to ancient Greece, and these attitudes were only furthered with time and the advent …

(Review) Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration, Presented At The University Of New Mexico Art Museum, David Saiz, Paloma Barraza

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

(Review) A Memorial To Those Who Mourn: Marie Watt’S Untitled (Mother, Mother) And Correlating Sewing Circle, Angie Rizzo

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

Counter-Mapping As Display: Unfolding, Revealing, And Concealing Intermediary Spaces, Larson Ellen

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

The Zimmerman Library Mural In The National Register Of Historic Places: A Working Paper And Timeline, Samuel E. Sisneros

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Working paper and timeline about the nomination and listing process of the UNM Zimmerman Library “Three Peoples” paintings to the National Register of Historic Places.

Imperial Myths, Abject Devotion: Mapping Affect In New Mexican Visual Culture And Discourse, N. C. Lira-Pérez

American Studies ETDs

New Mexican visual art and culture, as molded by state-sanctioned endeavors, is often casted in order to conceal the tension, conflict, and violence of settler colonialism and imperialism. Widely known myths of empire, such as the Tricultural myth, create a visualizing enterprise through which settler colonial logics transit and create political material reality. This thesis explores the following questions: How do New Mexican Hispanos and queer Chicanxs position themselves in relation to the logics of settler colonialism and empire? How are they positioned in relation to settler colonialism and empire? On the one hand, I argue that the state of …

The Origins And Development Of Textile Writing In Peru, William M. Cheek

Art & Art History ETDs

Scholars once considered Inka khipus (14^th-16^th CE) to be a technological development unique to the Inka Empire. We now know that the earlier central Andean Wari (6^th-11^th CE) also made use of khipus, calling into question the Inka primacy of the technology. Understanding the origins and transformation of khipu notation in the Andes sheds light on the ways that information technologies figured into Andean state formation and administration, and impacts larger understandings of how tactile notational systems develop into writing and information storage. This study articulates how, just as the Inka inherited khipu technology …

"Maa-Multh-Nii" People Who Came Floating In: Analogues Between Nuu-Chah-Nulth And Tlingit With Spanish Colonial Expeditions In The Eighteenth Century, Suzanne R. Mcleod

Art & Art History ETDs

Spanish explorers first navigated the 2,400-kilometer stretch of the Pacific Northwest Coast in the latter part of the eighteenth-century, largely in response to rumors that Russian traders had established a presence in lands north of Alta California (then considered Spanish territory). Spain launched a series of expeditions to the region, the first in 1774 under Juan Josef Pérez Hernández, and the final, in 1792, under Alejandro Malaspina. The Spanish remained in the area until 1794 when political and territorial tensions with the incoming British forced a negotiation known historically as the Nootka Convention. By 1795, the empire abandoned its aspirations …

Pilgrimage To The Virgin Of Juquila: The Negotiation Of Catholic Institutional Power In Colonial Oaxaca, Paloma Barraza

Art & Art History ETDs

Despite the contemporary popularity of the pilgrimage site of the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina of Juquila, the statuette of Oaxaca’s Virgin of Juquila is often eclipsed by the more well-known tilma image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The limited art historical scholarship has failed to address the statuette of the Virgin of Juquila as an icon that signifies both Indigenous and Catholic power dating back to the seventeenth century. Dominican missionaries used the statuette as a mediator for religious conversion practices in the local Chatino community. Furthermore, the moment the Virgin of Juquila gained significant Indigenous popularity …

Contemporary Alaska Native Identities: Creation And Curation By Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tess Mccoy

Art & Art History ETDs

I focus on contemporary Alaska Native artist, Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq, Athbaskan, Irish, German), her works of art, exhibitions, and her curatorial practices to explain the presentation history of Native American people and how this affects present-day exhibitions. Through her work, I explore the importance of agency of Native people through identity, depictions of themselves, and their people in museum spaces. I examine the history of museum culture as the way in which indigenous agency is removed and reconstructed to fit the needs of interest groups. In contrast, Kelliher-Combs and other advocates attempt to intervene and interrogate the persistence of archaic …

Shawn Hunt's Transformation Mask: The Intersection Of Contemporary And Traditional Heiltsuk Art, Terese R. Lukey

Art & Art History ETDs

Shawn Hunt is an artist of Heiltsuk (Bella Bella), French, and Scottish Canadian ancestry who is at the forefront of contemporary Northwest Coast art in the Vancouver area. Historic artworks of his community have been often overlooked in scholarly literature due to the seeming willingness of the people to adapt to colonization. Viewed as a “tainted” culture, the Heiltsuk have been noticeably ignored in the art historical realm. However, their masks are some of the best examples of traditional regalia that are found in museums across Canada and the United States. Contemporary native artists of the Northwest Coast continue to …

Paper Presented At The National Council Of Preservation Education Conference, Samuel E. Sisneros

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Historic preservation’s principles and practices directly correlate and support the charge of librarians and archivists to provide resources for the public and contribute to scholarship and community building. This paper, presented at the National Council of Preservation Education conference in Denver, Colorado (Oct. 10-12, 2019), will discuss the research methodologies, historical context and preservation issues of a recovery project of an historic site in New Mexico.

Arts Of Resistance: Ecologic History And Contemporary Interventions In The Valley Of Mexico, Chloë L. Courtney

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis analyzes two contemporary artworks concerning Mexico City’s complex socio-ecologic history: the installation The Return of a Lake (2012), by Maria Thereza Alves, and the performance Plan Acalote (2015) by the collective Plan Acalli (Carlos Huitzil and Ehecatl Morales). Mexico City faces land subsidence, flooding, and water shortages. Systemic power imbalances and ongoing efforts to transform a wetland landscape to a city conforming to Eurocentric ideals concentrate these problems in marginal communities. Using strategies of eco-criticism, decolonial thought, and performance studies, I argue that The Return of a Lake and Plan Acalote link broad social and ecologic problems with …

Compositional Analysis And Cross-Cultural Examination Of Blue And Blue-Green Post-Fire Colorants On Tolita-Tumaco Ceramics, Breanna F. Reiss

Art & Art History ETDs

Blue and blue-green ceramic colorants are an uncommon occurrence in the ancient Americas. This paper explores blue and blue-green post-fire colorants used by the coastal Tolita-Tumaco culture of ancient coastal Ecuador and Colombia through compositional testing and cross-cultural comparison. Using X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy, one sample each of blue and blue-green colorants were tested to identify the mineral composition present. Though the colorants were thought to likely originate from copper carbonates like azurite or malachite, or perhaps even similar to other Mesoamerican pigments like Maya Blue, the blue-green pigment, collected at La Tolita, …

The Indigenous Sovereign Body: Gender, Sexuality And Performance., Michelle S. Mcgeough, Michelle Susan Mcgeough

Art & Art History ETDs

Gender variance and artist production are not topics that are often discussed within the discipline of art history. In fact gender variance and in particular its relationship to sexual orientation was not a topic studied, much less discussed outside of the medical community until the mid-twentieth century. It was generally thought that sexuality and gender were “biologically determined” and deviation from the heterosexual norm was considered pathological. In contrast, Indigenous nations in Canada and the United States had a very different understanding regarding the relationship between gender, biology, and sexual object of choice. One area that provides us with a …

Porous Time And Space In Contemporary Photography: How Social Constructions Of Space And Reenactment Produce Alternative Histories, Emma Brooke Lehrer Stein

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines how the photograph can exceed the long-rooted debate around medium specific notions of photographic truth, since all realisms are historical and constantly changing. Applying theories of socially constructed space and porous time to analysis of these case studies presents alternative photographic histories that show past and present together. Boris Mikhailov, as a dissident artist and post-Soviet documentarian of new Russian capitalism, presents histories of visual culture that compete and overlap during the Soviet era and afterward. Mikhailov refers to the multiplicity of voices found in his photographic practice as a state of “coexistence.” Looking at photographs of …

Cultural Imprint: A History Of Northwest Coast Native And First Nations Prints, India Rael Young

Art & Art History ETDs

Cultural imPRINT provides the first substantive art historical investigation into Northwest Coast Indigenous prints. Since the 1960s, Northwest Coast artists have employed the print medium to share their histories, heritage, and culture amongst each other and with the larger world. Because print artists number in the hundreds, and print editions in the thousands, this dissertation takes a socio-cultural approach to understanding the purposes for the medium’s production and circulation. First, it analyzes the deep histories of reproduction in the North American art world and in Northwest Coast Indigenous communities, asserting that reproduction within coastal communities serves to perpetuate history from …

Testimonies Of Violence: Images Of Franciscan Martyrs In The Provinces Of New Spain, Emmanuel Ortega

Art & Art History ETDs

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Franciscan martyr portraits became popular in monastic spaces of the Spanish viceroyalties of central Mexico. To visually construct the meritorious life of these martyrs, artists drew inspiration from hagiographic chronicles that described various Native rebellions, which featured the graphic depiction of the gruesome deaths of friars. The prospect of martyrdom enticed novices to follow in their footsteps in service to God, but also to the Crown, whose presence in the northern territories of New Spain intensified during the period of the Bourbon reforms. In my dissertation I explore this propagandistic approach to martyr …