Contemporary Art Commons^™

The Gifts Of Respect (Shoes) And Home: Alanis Obomsawin In Conversation With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Alex: You must send me a picture of your blue ones. We just met in Berlin on the occasion of your retrospective, a comprehensive survey of your work as a filmmaker and also as a visual artist: The Children Have to Hear Another Story. Have you ever had a survey of this magnitude?

Alanis: Oh, no. I’ve had exhibitions sometimes of just of my etchings. Over the years, I’ve had a few retrospectives and it was very nice. But this, I’ve never had this kind of attention. And from so far away!

Misled Youth, Mark Tan

Theses and Dissertations

I’m a first-generation Canadian who was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario by Asian immigrants. I have migrated to the United States and lived here for 7 years. Through my work, I express the emotional value of preconceived notions, disconnectedness, and longing in search of finding place and acceptance within a community. Drawing from memory, personal narrative, emotion, and perception, I manipulate data into lines, forms, and materials through a subjective human experience from the lens of a non-citizen. By projecting the migration movement of my family lineage from China and the Philippines to Canada as well as my path …

Cherokee Abstract Artist Leon Polk Smith: A Convergence Of Traditions, Danielle Montanino

Dissertations and Theses

This paper analyzes how Leon Polk Smith's Indigenous roots and upbringing in Indian Country had a significant impact on his artistic practice in a time of discrimination and segregation in the United States. Through examination contextualizing his work within the history and political events of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations it is revealed how Polk Smith developed a formal language that could navigate both worlds and be viewed through a pure abstraction lens or a lens embodying his Indigenous traditions. In addition to his Indigenous philosophies, Mesoamerican Inca Nation’s cultural motifs further ground Polk Smith’s Indigenous aesthetic, and avant-garde …

World Of Water: Betsy Damon’S Ties To Ecofeminism, Colleen Sullivan

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis establishes a critical examination of the evolution of Betsy Damon’s artistic practice as overtime she engages with ecofeminist thought. As a whole, this work extends contemporary scholarship on ecofeminist engaged art to include Damon’s artistic production while amplifying social and critical ecofeminism as necessary ideologies to explore when analyzing art through an ecofeminist lens. Beginning with her first environmentally focused work in the United States the organization of the following chapters reveals Damon’s deepened understanding and exploration of ecofeminist principles and their application to her artistic practice. It goes on to further explore Damon’s pursuit of environmentally sustainable …

The Real And The Digital: Female Agency And Resisting The Male Gaze In Lynn Hershman Leeson’S Works, Kelly Chou

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis focuses on three major feminist works by multimedia artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941), that grapple with the construction and potential of female identity. Considering the works within the context of Laura Mulvey’s seminal text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” this paper will attempt to elucidate how Hershman Leeson’s works have engaged with the male gaze and its social and cultural implications on female identity in visual spheres. This research demonstrates how Hershman Leeson’s efforts to understand the limitations and boundaries for women reflect the same phenomenons observed by Mulvey within “Visual Pleasure.” Rejecting this, Hershman Leeson also …

History Of Fashion Installations As Art Exhibitions And Their Impact On The Public’S Perspective On Culture And Community, Arabella Riley

MA Theses

The current study targeted the problem of the relationship among the notions of fashion, art, and culture. The study aimed to determine the potential role of fashion brands and artists in the transformation of modern culture. Additionally, the study sought to analyze the forms of collaboration between fashion and arts, and their commercial and conceptual value. As to the research methods, qualitative secondary data review using thematic analysis methodology was utilized. The research findings included the recognition of the significant role of modern fashion and arts in the transformation of the public culture. Furthermore, it was revealed that different formats …

Living In The Ruins Of Utopia: The Collapse Of The Soviet Union And The Formation Of Russia's Postcolonial Identity, Erik G. Livingston

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Un Modernisme Méditerranéen? Usages Du Voyage De Klee En Tunisie, Dominique Jarrassé

Artl@s Bulletin

Parler de « modernisme méditerranéen » ne serait-il pas déguiser d’oripeaux bien-pensants le maintien de l’hégémonie dogmatique occidentale, donc « nordique » ? Le Sud revendique un rôle dans l’émergence de la modernité à travers le mythe de l’artiste qui y connaît une révélation, de la couleur ou du primitif. Le voyage de Klee en Tunisie en 1914, contrairement à celui de Kandinsky et Munter dix ans plus tôt, a donné lieu à une mythification (Klee n’y est pas étranger). Son récent centenaire à Tunis le montre : on a même parlé de kleeification. Il ne s’agit pas ici …

Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, And Appearance In Indonesia, Patricia Spyer

Art & Visual Culture

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, …

Intergenerational And Intragenerational Connections Within A University Art Museum Program For People With Dementia, Sujal Manohar, Jessica Kay Ruhle

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

This visual essay highlights the impacts of the Nasher Museum of Art’s Reflections program, which engages people with dementia (PWD) and their care partners through interactive art museum tours. This program’s conversation-based tours with built-in time to socialize are designed to foster intergenerational and intragenerational connections between PWD and museum gallery guides, PWD and care partners, and between PWD. Discussions about artwork are visitor-driven and encourage lifelong learning among participants. Anecdotal feedback from Reflections participants and gallery guides confirms the value of relationship building, improving quality of life for PWD.

By fostering community and strong connections, Reflections programs help reduce …

Analog Video In The Age Of Digital Data: A Case Study Of Shigeko Kubota's "Social Practice", Helena Shaskevich, Lia Robinson

Publications and Research

If Nam June Paik truly is the “father of video art,” as so many scholars claim, then Shigeko Kubota is in many ways its mother, performing the unacknowledged and undervalued labor of managing the “house” of video and taking care of its inhabitants. My digital art history project for Panorama, which performs a data-driven deep dive into Kubota’s networks, argues that Kubota’s legacy must be understood as a lived, “social practice” of care for video art and its communities.

After Abstract Expressionism: Reconsidering The “Death Of Painting” At Midcentury, Natasha Roje

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The “death of painting” is a mantra repeated throughout the twentieth century, at once taken for granted and endlessly debated. This dissertation reconsiders the “death of painting” from the vantage point of the midcentury moment in the U.S. in order to challenge the notion that artists of this time had “killed,” objectified or dissolved painting into 1960s practices like performance and Minimalism. With Abstract Expressionism acting as the fulcrum between a historical paradigm in which painting was dominant, even synonymous with “art,” I focus on the work of three pairs of artists to understand how painting came to be considered …

Painting Outside Of The Lines: How Race Assignment Can Be Rethought Through Art, Giovanni Mella-Velazquez

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

For centuries art has been used to make us think about our own human experiences. Unfortunately, works usually reflect the era which they were painted in; this has led to various artists showing, maintaining, and therefore reinforcing racist thoughts in our cultures. Art can be used to create a new narrative for our race assignments and their meanings. The idea of loving one's roots has been prevalent in many cultures, but in art form a disconnect between history and the everyday experience can arise which could miss the mark in helping us redefine our own race. Therefore, artwork which empowers …

Mammy And Aunt Jemima: Keeping The Old South Alive In Popular Visual Culture, Angela G. Athnasios

Honors College Theses

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, American popular visual culture produced racist portrayals of Black Americans. Literature, illustrations, minstrelsy, film, and television are notorious for promoting such unflattering images. Each of these media typified African Americans as exaggerated caricatures with dark skin, bulging eyes, bright-red lips, and goofy smiles. The creators of these stereotypes project their racist beliefs into popular culture. This in turn heavily influences the way other races view people of African descent, as well as how Black people view themselves. From mammies, to Jezebels, to pickaninnies, and everything in between, the message ultimately conveyed in these …

Age, Ty Barnes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Age is a body of work that uses open ended, multi-directional narrative, economical craft, body positioning, and disorder to create situations for curiosity to take hold and rekindle a sense of naivety. Intentionally pedestrian material choice and playful, curious methodology work in tandem with the visual language of play to create a world building opportunity for the participating viewer. The objects are anchors or starting points with spaces in between for flexible narratives and imagined and reimagined worlds with no prescribed beginning or end point.

The exhibition and written thesis represent a conglomeration of connected-by-association ideas, a Rube Goldberg machine …

2+2=Cake: A Book Of Conversations About Possibilities In Business And Art, Elizabeth Ann Alspach

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

2+2=CAKE is a toolkit for people interested in creating their own economic container to support their livelihood. Calling upon the entrepreneurial experience of artists and creatives who founded or run organizations, the book and accompanying workbook and motivational posters serve as an incubator, buoy, and affirming resource for those looking to build the economic container in which they make their livelihood.

Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia, Alaina Claire Feldman, Clayton Press, Solange Farkas, Gabriel Bogossian

Publications and Research

Bilingual catalogue for the exhibition "Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery.

Constructing A Contemporary Mythology: Zardulu's Viral Art In The Post-Truth Age, Grace Wolfe

University Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the artistic processes of Zardulu the Mythmaker, an anonymous internet figure whose viral art expands upon the language of online hoaxes and media sensationalism to create mythologies that encapsulate the present. Recent scholarship has proposed a shift away from "the contemporary" in art, as its constant efforts toward innovation and detachment from discipline perpetuates the current culture of anxiety. Zardulu's art practice offers a unique separation from the boundaries of contemporary art, which is examined in this thesis through her use of ancient myth-making techniques and the medium of internet virality. Furthermore, this thesis presents Zardulu's methodology …

Compromised Values: Charlotte Posenenske, 1966–Present, Ian Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fabricated in unlimited series and sold at cost, the sculptures produced by Charlotte Posenenske between 1966 and 1967—modular wall reliefs, interactive cubic structures, and tubular geometric units whose installation requires collective decision making—were meant to confront both the artwork’s commodity status and the limitation of its consumption to a privileged elite. Nevertheless, Posenenske’s work has been effectively recuperated by the art system: first, in the 1980s, through a series of exhibitions and publications organized by her estate; and second, with her inclusion in Documenta 12 in 2007, which reintroduced her work to the market. Since the artist’s death in 1985, …

Defining The Diva: Celebrity, Feminism & Performance In Popular Culture, Rachel Glago

Masters Theses

The word ‘diva’ tends to conjure a specific kind of woman. As popular culture has come to recognize ‘diva’ as a more politicized term, it’s essential to acknowledge that the intrinsic meaning of such a term in this context comes from a patriarchal culture that strives to control women’s bodies, identities, and individual narratives as they’re represented in the media.

Through analysis of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Jennifer Lopez’s careers in the music and entertainment industry, this paper explores this notion further while considering the implications of gender, race, ethnicity, and age. These case studies analyze the shifting relationship and …

A Tale Of Two Biennales: How Contemporary Art In Italy Reflects Current European Politics, Hannah Rosabel Capucilli-Shatan

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

No abstract provided.

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 …

Combatting Arts-Led Gentrification: A Case Study Of Slanguage Studio, Julia M. Campbell

Global Tides

This essay examines Slanguage Studio, founded by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr. in 2001, as a case study that illuminates how community-based art spaces can resist arts-led gentrification. The processes of arts-initiated gentrification and displacement of lower-income residents of color are demonstrated through explorations of arts districts in the Lower East Side, SoHo, and Boyle Heights. In response to artist Charles Gaines’ claims that art spaces inevitably lead to gentrification, Slanguage Studio offers an alternative in which community needs are prioritized.

Posthumous Painting: On Pigment And Binder, Jameson G. Magrogan

Theses and Dissertations

Modernism brought about a logical culmination of painting, an epoch where logic and reason can no longer attempt to account for or speculate its behavior. This paper considers the perpetuation of painting from an ontological standpoint, documenting its inherent aporia, its relationship to meaning, and its function in contemporary society.

Art And Environmental Racism In The United States: Through The Works Of Latoya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, And Mel Chin, Veronika Anna Molnár

Theses and Dissertations

Through the works of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, and Mel Chin, this thesis examines the ways in which artists address environmental racism in the United States. Focusing on three locations with majority Black populations and significant toxic hazards, this paper demonstrates artists’ agency to alleviate crises caused by environmental injustice.

Pepón Osorio And Merián Soto: Multidisciplinary Collaborations, From 1985 To 1995, Zuna Maza

Theses and Dissertations

This paper assesses Pepón Osorio and Merián Soto’s collaborative multidisciplinary works created from 1985 to 1995. Underdiscussed in their individual scholarships, these joint works are reexamined through their collaborative approach, multidisciplinary framework, and their thematic explorations of the nuances of culturally specific subject matter.

Yankee Go Home: Roci In Latin America, Vitoria Hadba

Theses and Dissertations

In 1984, at an event hosted by the United Nations, American artist Robert Rauschenberg announced his most ambitious and controversial project to date: the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange—or ROCI. Blending primary source documents with social art history, I retrace the artist’s steps—and missteps—during the first leg of his tour through Mexico, Chile, and Venezuela. This thesis investigates the convoluted political implications of ROCI in Latin America during the transitional period in which binary Cold War politics were ebbing amidst the rise of a global free-market economy.