Contemporary Art Commons^™

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow

Honors Theses

“Art & AIDS: Viral Strategies for Visibility” examines the complex relationships between social stigma, healthcare, homophobia, and mortality, and how these impacted the lives of Western artists and manifested in their works. Most of the art discussed in this thesis was produced during the height of the AIDS crisis (late-1980s to mid-1990s). During this period, gay artists and their allies employed new strategies in their work to inspire activism, and convey intense emotions –– predominantly frustration, grief, and anxiety –– associated with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., the inaction of the Reagan administration was largely due to widespread homophobia kindled by …

These Are My People: An Ethnography Of Quiltcon, Kristin Barrus

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents the first ethnography of QuiltCon, the annual fan and artist convention for quiltmakers who identify with and participate in a social phenomenon called the Modern Quilt Movement (MQM) within the 21st century quilt world. QuiltCon (QC) is one product of this movement. This study considers the following questions: What kinds of people attend QC, and what types of experiences and encounters do they expect at the convention? What needs are met at QC for this subset of quiltmakers who attend and for the greater community of Modern quiltmakers? What role does QC play in cementing the identity …

Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art After Dark: Economies of Performance, New York City 1978-1988 examines the interwoven social and economic histories of New York City and performance in the late 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation traces the growth and visibility of performance art, moving from the recession of the 1970s and early years of public funding for the arts, to the downtown nightclub scene of the 1980s, the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and artistic experiments with television in the 1980s.Looking closely at the economic conditions under which performance occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dissertation …

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 …

Being In The Place Of Possibility, Laura Domencic

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper explores my art practice as a phenomenological search for understanding how to be in the world. It begins with a description of my practice as a way to access the place of possibility that exists between faith and doubt. I examine materiality in art making to encourage consideration of both the physical and temporal nature of experience and to find balance with the increasingly incorporeal experience of the digital world. I discuss the materials and processes of drawing, sewing, and printmaking within their historical contexts. This paper connects my practice with artists who consider the act of perception …

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 …

Stills Of Passage: Photography And Migration In The Us-Mexico Borderlands, 1978-1992, Nadiah Rivera Fellah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates documentary photography at a critical juncture in the history of the US-Mexico borderlands. Following a period of rapid industrialization and growth in Mexico, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by moments of economic and political crisis, which simultaneously spurred a massive wave of northward migrants and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. These developments produced a large class of Mexican undocumented workers in the US, which in turn stimulated the formation of a hybrid border culture. At the same moment, a generation of young artists from Mexico and the United States, eager to document these changes, radically …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Rodcon, Program, 2019, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:

--Rodcon: Free and open to the public
--Welcome to Rodcon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That?
--Artist Alley
--Food
--Sponsors
--Autographs

Rodcon, Flier, 2019, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Rodcon
Saturday April 13, 2019
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Rodcon, Flier, 2018, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2018

Saturday, April 7th, 2018

10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2018, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Artist Alley
--Sponsors
--Autographs

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Phenomenology Of Visual Arts In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury And As I Lay Dying, Zeinab Zamani

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The early decades of the 20th century marked drastic changes in philosophy, science, visual arts, literature, and music. In philosophy, this change occurred in the work of Edmund Husserl whose Phenomenology introduced a new “way of knowing” or epistemology. In art, the exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), given its rebellious nature, began an innovative artistic tradition which called for a new “way of seeing.” Phenomenology as theory and Cubism as practice shared a common aim: to re-vision the world—an aim of many Modernist movements. Modernism is an umbrella term for a mélange of artistic schools and …

Rodcon, Flier, 2017, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2017 at the Rod Library

Saturday, April 1

10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2017, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:

--RodCon 2017 at the Rod Library, Saturday April 1, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Sponsors

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Rodcon, Slides, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

RodCon Program Schedule of Events

Rodcon, Program, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:

--RodCon 2016 at the Rod Library, Saturday April 2, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Autographs

Rodcon, Flier, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2016 at the Rod Library
Saturday, April 2
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

A Poetic Poioumenon: Coterie And Ekphrasis In David Lehman's "The Breeders' Cup", Anna Beth Rowe

Master's Theses

David Lehman’s poem “The Breeders’ Cup” uses cross-generational coterie and ekphrasis to create a poetic poioumenon. When read in terms of art criticism, Lehman’s “The Breeders’ Cup” models creative processes from the past and calls for a rehabilitative ethic in postmodern poetics. Lehman follows the ekphrastic form, which associates a poem with a work of visual art, from his New York School predecessor Frank O’Hara. “The Breeders’ Cup” addresses Édouard Manet’s 1865 painting Olympia through ekphrasis, and the painting of a prostitute becomes a patron saint of parody for postmodern poetics. The poem introduces lust as a metaphor for creative …

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.