American Art and Architecture Commons^™

Ghost Highway: De-Touring Albuquerque's Route 66, Madison A. Garay

Art & Art History ETDs

Route 66 was a U.S. Numbered Highway stretching from Chicago, IL to Santa Monica, CA, rising to fame through music and popular culture. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Route 66 has a troublesome twin life as Central Avenue, a highly politicized space where bodies are contested. In this thesis, the function of public arts and architecture of Albuquerque’s main street thoroughfare, Central Avenue, will be analyzed as visual devices of U.S. Highway 66, or known in popular culture as “Route 66.” I employ a critical Derridean framework through Mark Fisher’s theorization of hauntology and Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Ojibwe)’s theory of …

Going Beyond The Margins: Photographs By Ming Smith, Isis A. Serna

Art & Art History ETDs

Ming Smith is a photographer who has been creating images since the early 1970s and trained with the artist collective Kamoinge Workshop. Throughout most of her career, Smith has been marginalized by art historians, critics, and museum curators. Since the early 2000s, Smith has only been included in museum exhibitions highlighting African-American female artists from 1960 to the present. Before this surge of interest in her work, the art world ignored and silenced her. However, Smith’s creative process allowed her to see and experience going beyond the struggle by being consistent in her strategy to do what she wanted on …

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 …

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 …

Compositional Analysis And Cross-Cultural Examination Of Blue And Blue-Green Post-Fire Colorants On Tolita-Tumaco Ceramics, Breanna Fae 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, …

Gold Disks From The Sacred Cenote At Chichen Itza, Yucatán: Stylistic Analysis And Ethnohistorical Interpretation, Merideth Daniel Paxton

Art & Art History ETDs

During 1904-1911, Edward H. Thompson recovered some gold disks which have repousse designs showing military encounters from the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza. In addition, there have survived numerous carvings and frescoes at the site which depict scenes of armed conflict and surrender. The disks, frescoes, and carvings have been interpreted as events pertaining to the conquest of the Chichen Mayans by invading forces from the Toltec city of Tula in central Mexico. However, in recent years, influences from Mesoamerican sites other than Tula have been recognized in the art style of Chichen, and it is known that Toltec features …

American Family Memorial Imagery, The Photograph, And The Search For Immortality, Daniel Gyger Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation I trace the development of family (as opposed to public) memorial imagery and note the unique contribution of photography. I examine attitudes toward photography during its early years. These attitudes reveal that the medium was uniquely appropriate for the continuation and extension of the tradition of memorial imagery in America.

I suggest that America holds expectations for the Machine and for the power of Science that have at various times (the mid-nineteenth century and today) led some to assume that death is not inevitable and that physical Immortality is possible. From Puritan times, when death was accepted, …

Iconographic Complexes Of American Art In Relation To Current Art Education, Arthur J. Schneider

Art & Art History ETDs

The problem of this study is to locate the principal images employed in the art of the New World with the purpose of reestablishing the function of such elements integral to a modern realism in American art.