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Contemporary Art Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Contemporary Art

West Coast Workshop To Southwest Institute, Hannah Marie Cerne Jul 2026

West Coast Workshop To Southwest Institute, Hannah Marie Cerne

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis considers Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico (originally established as Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, CA), and its contributions to collaborative printmaking. Originally founded in 1960 by June Wayne with Clinton Adams and Garo Antreasian, Tamarind Lithography Workshop (the precursor to Tamarind Institute) revitalized lithography through structured collaboration between artists and master printers, alongside rigorous training programs. This thesis provides an institutional history of the workshop during its relocation to the University of New Mexico, highlighting its transformation into a university-based institute that integrated education and professional production. Using social and labor-based methodologies, this study analyzes how …


Ghost Highway: De-Touring Albuquerque's Route 66, Madison A. Garay Jul 2025

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 …


Contemporary Alaska Native Identities: Creation And Curation By Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tess Mccoy Apr 2020

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 Apr 2019

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 …


Cultural Imprint: A History Of Northwest Coast Native And First Nations Prints, India Rael Young Nov 2017

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 …


Yinka Shonibare Mbe's Critiques Of Empire And His Reception In Four Transnational Case Studies, Johanna Wild Apr 2017

Yinka Shonibare Mbe's Critiques Of Empire And His Reception In Four Transnational Case Studies, Johanna Wild

Art & Art History ETDs

In the wake of art history’s “global turn”, the installation art of Yinka Shonibare MBE has obtained vast visibility in the established centers of contemporary cultural practice in Europe and beyond. Shonibare is best known for his installations of mannequins that reenact canonized paintings and historical events culled from European modernity. Dressed in deceptively “African” Dutch Wax fabrics, Shonibare’s phenotypically ambiguous and headless mannequins ensnare audiences with a semblance of “exotic” difference, but ultimately resist the fixity of national, cultural, racial and, in some cases, gendered categorization through an incessant semiotic slippage. In his book, The Culture Game (2001), Olu …