History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Faith’S Midwest Modern Forms: Midcentury Catholic Churches In St. Louis By Murphy And Mackey, Architects, Mary Reid Brunstrom

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This project originated in my research on three modernist churches commissioned by the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis from 1948-54 which was then under the progressive leadership of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Joseph E. Ritter. What factors accounted for these unprecedented forms for sacred architecture? The architectural partnership of Murphy and Mackey designed the churches in accordance with the new liturgical reform protocols that were embedded in the designs of the German architect, Rudolf Schwarz and his colleagues and disseminated through Catholic pastors of German origin in the St. Louis parishes. Other strands of modernism were also implicated in Murphy and …

Codifying Domesticity: The Story Of The Recommended Minimum Requirements For Small Dwelling Construction Of 1923, The Housing Policy Of The Hoover Secretariat, And The Impact On American Residential Architecture, Noah Morris

Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design Theses & Dissertations

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fire disasters and health-safety issues led to the widespread adoption of building codes. While the National Board of Fire Underwriters published the National Building Code in 1905, the code did not maintain regulatory consistency across the nation. This lack of consistency across the nation and socio-economic factors contributed to a nation-wide housing shortage of a million units by 1919. During World War I, the government addressed the housing crisis through the United States Housing Corporation and Emergency Fleet Corporation, building public housing based on the ideals of the Garden City Movement.[1] Following the …

Raisin Fingers, Sophia Hatzikos

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a sculptor that uses site reactive interactions, video documentation, and studio-based processes to explore landscape. I investigate my multifaceted relationship of self to my sensorial memory of landscape. Through themes of memory, loss and longing intertwined with my personal connection to water. I identify the intersections of sculpture and landscape seeking ways in which environments shapes decisions in the making process.

Through case studies of two distinct landscapes, Malaki and Tyson, I look at how these environments serve as sources of inspiration and material for experimentation. By identifying the ways in which I researched at each site respectively …

The Daily Struggle: Philip Guston And American Art In The 1930s, Maxwell Dunbar

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

American art in the 1930s was shaped by questions of social relevance and utility. The crisis of the Great Depression left millions destitute, and the contradictions of capitalism were exposed for all to see. Many artists and intellectuals, despite their marginal and specialized status in American social life, recognized that there was a need to connect their work to the mass mobilization of the working class, who were organizing in the face of unprecedented poverty and misery. The culture of working-class radicalism in this period, now commonly referred to as the “Red Decade,” was the result of the rapid development …

Colliding Worlds: Visual Culture In France And Colonial Algeria (1918-1962), Lacy Murphy

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The decline of French colonialism in Algeria and the Algerian War lay at the fault line of several tectonic forces. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War challenged France’s global stature, destabilized the colonial apparatus, and fostered unprecedented intercolonial intellectual exchange. These events provided the global context for Algeria’s national revolution, a prolonged period of conflict that was all in one a civil war that redefined Algerian identity, a political and military scandal that led to the downfall of the French Fourth Republic in 1958, influenced Cold War politics, and continues to shape national identity in both …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

Modernism As Public Art: Reawakening The Social Agency Of Abstract Public Sculpture, 1950–1980, Tola Porter

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a critical reassessment of postwar modern public sculpture and offers a framework for both the reevaluation and reawakening of these significant, inherited public images. Between 1950 and 1980, as a result of new national policies, the United Kingdom and the United States experienced a boom in public sculpture. That phenomenon was augmented by architectural modernism, whose stark buildings called for the addition of sculpture. The growing prestige of abstract art made it a popular choice for architects and commissioners, who sought to leverage the cachet of contemporary artists. For both private sector architects and public sector patrons, …

The Ephemerality Of The Living And The Persistence Of The Inanimate, Erin Johnston

MFA in Visual Art

I create fragile, sculptural works with paper. Either cast from pre-existing objects or constructed forms, my three-dimensional works ultimately become pure paper objects. I use the visual language of absence, memory, ruin and ephemerality to present modern artifacts and address the now. I am interested in how the manufactured crumbs we leave behind as a species reveal our collective desires, and our relationship to the body and mortality. I am fascinated with, and even enchanted by, the proliferation of material objects and their tendency to surpass the lifespan of any single human. Perhaps this behavior of producing lasting creations is …

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Echoed Sites And The Unknowable Object, Joseph Canizales

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis will discuss the expanded field of sculpture, simulacra, digital technology, and two terms I’ve devised: the unknowable object, and echoed sites. Within these two terms, I’m concerned with the complicated relationship between humans and geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. In echoed sites I create sculptures with and without a geologic site or object, by way of digital technology. These forms display two states paradoxically in balance, where what’s presented leaves more questions than answers. Thus, as part of echoed sites, exists the unknowable object. …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Un'orrida Bellezza: Religious Polychrome Sculpture In The Kingdom Of Naples (1503-1714), Lindsay Rose Elizabeth Sheedy

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, “Un’orrida bellezza: Religious Polychrome Sculpture in the Kingdom of Naples,” situates polychrome sculpture in the evolving religious and cultural landscape of Southern Italy during the Regno di Napoli (1503-1714). In this period, a series of upheavals inextricably altered the fabric of the Kingdom of Naples, including the establishment of the Spanish viceroyalty in 1503, the Counter Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, and a series of crippling plagues. This period of change, trauma, and subjugation provoked reactions from all levels of culture, making Southern Italy a fertile laboratory of innovation and exchange. These shifts took physical form in polychrome …

Mosque Architecture And Identity: A Study Of The Autochthonous Mosque In China, Yutong Ma

Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design Theses & Dissertations

This thesis argues that an autochthonous mosque architecture exists in China, and this historical type adequately serves as a reference for contemporary mosque building in southeastern China in light of how it responded to the Chinese cultural and urban contexts. Many Hui Muslims and architects in this region refuse to consider historical mosque architecture built in traditional Chinese architectural style as their cultural references in constructing new mosques, as they believe that the traditional Chinese architectural language is insufficient to express their identity as Muslims. Instead, they prefer a collection of symbolic architectural elements to be used in mosque architecture …

Spectacular Ambition: The Failure And Reception Of Leonardo Da Vinci’S Equestrian Monument To Francesco Sforza, Emily Jean Hanson

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

At the close of the fifteenth century, a drastic change in political circumstances compelled Leonardo da Vinci to swiftly leave Milan. His patron, Lodovico Sforza, had been run out by the invading French army, who made quick work of exiling and executing Sforza’s inner circle. Leonardo abandoned the career he had established in Milan to return to Florence, with an even greater number of unfinished projects than he had already left behind in the Tuscan city. Yet now the artist brought with him a reputation of spectacular ambition, for he famously designed a colossal equestrian monument for the Duke of …

Art And Empathy: Self Discovery In A Dark Forest, Younser Lee

Graduate School of Art Theses

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40 million people report feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress as the world moves at an increasingly rapid pace and faces unprecedented challenges. However, many ignore these negative thoughts and fail to acknowledge them as a serious issue. My art, which shares my own experiences, creates safe, cathartic places for viewers to think about their own emotional experiences. Crucial to this process is my use of daily objects and the creation of individualized, participatory, and multisensory experiences.

My art relates to daily life and the negative emotions that we experience daily. I …

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

Sustaining The Republic: The Power Of Political Prints By Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, André Gill, And Alfred Le Petit, Maxime Valsamas

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The fight for the liberty of the press was an ongoing struggle in France since the French Revolution in 1789 and it remained a factor until July 1881, when liberal press laws were enacted by the Republican officials in charge of governing the country at the time. The press was the life and soul of political life in nineteenth-century France. Prints formed a core currency of communication; they were the most important vehicle of visual information as they reached a far greater percentage of the population than did artworks in other media, and they had the force to unite people. …

É̉Tienne De Beaumont, Surrealist Dance, And Transformations In The Paris Avant-Garde, 1913-1938, Amanda Holly Beresford

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation puts into conversation the career of the aristocratic French patron and would-be impresario of modernism, Count Étienne de Beaumont, and the conflicted relationship between Surrealism and dance in Paris during the period between the two World Wars. Beaumont and Surrealism represent respectively an older, reactionary, and a newer, radical, manifestation of the avant-garde in French culture. Beaumont’s flamboyant self-performance— his eccentric personal style, his extravagant costume balls, his wide network of associates in the Parisian artworld, and his ambitions as a Maecenas to rival Diaghilev—establish him as a central figure of reactionary modernism in the 1920s. This tendency …

Pleasure Is All Mine, Lola Ogbara

Graduate School of Art Theses

One’s identity is shaped by many factors such as race, culture, physical appearance, nationality, and religion—amongst many more. As an artist, the subjugation of identity in the context of race, gender, and sexuality is a world I examine closely. Subverting myths of sexual deviancy and racial inferiority that perpetually pathologizes Black feminine sexuality, I often use and reference my own body to create avenues of power through physical and intellectual pleasure. Through material use of clay, metal, photography, and installation, I emphasize on how contemporary Black social cultures are able to write their own narratives in order to further progressions …

Tracing The Past, Drawing The Present, Sixue Yang

Graduate School of Art Theses

The group of work, Rising Water, Floating Islands is inspired by traditional Chinese scroll landscape paintings. Such landscape paintings combine meticulous technique, compositional complexity, and tension between representation and abstraction to reveal an alternative universe that waits discovery amid our mundane existence. In “Rising Water, Floating Islands,” I explore the political and social ramifications of the ongoing cultural conflict between traditional and emergent contemporary values. By combining traditional Chinese elements and techniques with my own markings and gestural adaptation in my painting, I give the audience the opportunity to contemplate the implications of our present digital condition through traditional esthetic …

The Work Of Art In The Age Of Surveillance: Towards A Society Of Civil Power, Grace Eunhae Cho

Graduate School of Art Theses

State and corporate power have expanded and enforced their dominant territory and influence through the development of visual technology. Art and visual technology are inseparable. Thus, art has been utilized as an essential tool through which power glamorizes and visualizes its authority. Over the course of the modern age, power has increasingly adopted different strategies in order to conceal its appearance. In particular, the development of information and communication technology has enabled power to be not only invisible but also intangible. This thesis, "The Work of Art in The Age of Surveillance: Towards A Society of Civil Power," explores how …

The Complexities Of Intimacy, Brie Henderson

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through my research I have discovered there are many complexities that exist within the topic of intimacy. Of these complexities, I chose to explore the topics attachment and codependency in my final series. Attachment and codependency are deeply rooted in psychology, poetry, and many artist’s practices. The relationship between poetry and my work has become deeply intertwined. I combine poetry with my work as a way to document my feelings and to inspire the titles for my paintings. Through a series of intimate watercolor paintings, I reference bodies, intimate interactions and the ambiguity within the two. This ambiguity asks viewers …

Painting Ephemera In The Age Of Mass Production: American Trompe L’Oeil Painting And Visual Culture In The Late Nineteenth Century, Katherine Brunk Harnish

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a fresh approach to investigating the modernization of visual media, exploring themes of media translation, appropriation, and the fine art and popular art divide. This dissertation focuses on paintings that represent prints and photographs in order to understand the relationships between all three media—relationships that changed drastically in late nineteenth-century America. William Harnett, John Haberle, and John Peto made many trompe l’oeil paintings that depict photographs, newspaper clippings, trade cards, and other ephemera. This project posits that these artists represented new media strategically to attract viewers well versed in these forms and to assert the continued relevance …

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Sarah Adcock

Graduate School of Art Theses

I view my creative process as alchemy, the transformation of materials through experimentation. I use wax as a material that transcends its historical use as a sculptural process for casting and instead, use it for its transmutable qualities to inform content. Because of its plasticity and duality as fragile and resilient, wax is symbolically submissive and assertive. By applying heat, wax can be molded and formed into new shapes. Once it cools, wax reverts back to its natural state; solid and impermeable. I use objects to explore desires of origin and life. Transitional objects, the first “me not me” possession …

Concrete Poetry, Sara Ghazi Asadollahi

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text addresses my work as an artist and defines it in the context of the following subjects: The concept of ruins, which highlights the relationship between architecture and landscape; the formal and metaphorical dialectic between absence and presence in abandoned places; and the idea of dystopia, which emerges from that in-between space where the real dissolves into the imaginary. At the same time, my work is inspired by the visual culture of cinema and literature, principally within the science-fiction genre, and draws upon my observation of abandoned buildings in Tehran, my native city. These urban ruins are products of …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

For Cheryl: The Long And The Short Of It, Rachel Lebo

Graduate School of Art Theses

Short stories are an indirect way of creating a truth by showing instead of telling. They are a way to observe and communicate a single idea. A short story for me is a vehicle for hiding my truth behind a character, exploring myself in the safety of an identity that is not my own. When I read Chunky in Heat, author A.M. Homes and I hide together behind her character, Cheryl, and find solidarity.

The following writings, paintings, and sculptures are collaborations between myself and the women of short story fiction. Those women being the authors, the subjects, and …