Contemporary Art Commons^™

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.

Scars Of War, Corinna Martell, Camille Hanna, Brandon Bauer

Student Creative and Scholarly Works

Scars of War: The Psychological and Physical Traumas of War Depicted through Art.

War is shattering, leaving behind gaping wounds in need of healing. Some require bandages, other wounds are psychological and not visible. Both leave a scar. These scars are an inevitable part of the human experience. The psychological and physical ramifications of war exist as long as strife pervades. This collection of works, depicting war from the French Revolution to present day Iraq, illustrates the scarring impact war has on the people and places within its grasp. New technology and art styles have transformed the way we see …

All Creative Being: Interview With Anna Bella Geiger, Sarah Poppel

Artl@s Bulletin

In the following interview with Anna Bella Geiger, the Brazilian artist talks about her trajectory and various influences, which have always been deeply marked by the lived situation in Brazil, especially during the dictatorship (1964-1985). Starting with the beginnings of her artistic practice in the early 1950s, she details her affiliation with abstract art, her view of the Brazilian art scene during the 1950s and 1960s and reveals the roots of her topographic works and the importance of her pedagogical experiences.

Contrabienal: Latin American Art, Politics And Identity In New York, 1969-1971, Aimé Iglesias Lukin

Artl@s Bulletin

This article focuses on a community of Latin American artists living in New York and the influence of regionalism and politics in their identification as a group, taking up the case of the Contrabienal, an art book published in 1971 as a call to boycott the XI São Paulo Biennial in protest of censorship and torture in dictatorial Brazil. The book was aesthetically eclectic and included artists from different generations. Still, its organizers were all part of the strong shift towards Conceptualism then taking place. In light of the current revision of the Latin American Conceptualism canon, this article …

Minnie Adkins: Against The Grain, Minnie Adkins, Kentucky Folk Art Center

Kentucky Folk Art Center Exhibition Catalogs

2015 Kentucky Folk Art Center exhibition catalog of artist Minnie Adkins.

Rodcon, Program, 2015, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

Saturday, March 28, 2015 - 11:00am to 4:00pm

Program distributed at the event.

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Rod Library Mini Comic Con. The event is free and open to the public. Our goal is to provide an open forum for discussion about the theme of a networked society focused on popular culture, comics, and gaming. Our panel presentations are also focused on providing a forum for discussion about the complex issues of race, gender, class and social justice in popular entertainment. To see your entry, use the hashtag #RodCon15

The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko At Moah, Kathleen Stewart Howe, Carole Ann Klonarides, Stephen Nowlin, Nancy Macko

Pomona Faculty Books

“The Fragile Bee” was exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and is an outcry to the plight of the bees in relationship to the environment. This accompanying catalog critically examines the work in the exhibition beginning with a foreword by Andi Campognone, museum manager and curator at MOAH. Artist Nancy Macko established a garden for native bee-attracting plants in order to document them throughout the year. The resulting series of photographs, "Botanical Portraits", are the subject of the essay by museum director Kathleen Stewart Howe. Contemporary art writer and curator Carole Ann Klonarides writes in …

Ejecta, Anthony Cervino, Shannon Egan

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Co-authored with artist Anthony Cervino, this book was produced on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at CulturalDC's Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, DC. The book is comprised of several curatorial essays as well as fictional and personal reflections, and an in-depth interview to examine issues of parenthood, professional successes, personal tragedies, and larger art-historical contexts.

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Historicity, Achronicity, And The Materiality Of Cultures In Colonial Brazil, Amy J. Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this essay, I use three nontraditional forms from the visual culture of colonial Brazil—Tupinambá featherwork, Portuguese Atlantic mandinga pouches, and azulejos (tilework)— in order to meditate upon materiality and temporality as methodological problems with which our discipline should engage. Each of these art forms has historical trajectories that span cultures, continents, and centuries, a circumstance that raises questions as to how such diverse and stubbornly nonhistoricizable genres can be melded into a coherent historical narrative of the visual and material cultures specific to 'Brazil,' especially when two of them — the mandinga bags and azulejos — are not intrinsically …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives On Landscape, N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Kenta Murakami

Exhibition Catalogs

Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape

Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art University of Richmond Museums, VA
January 15 to March 6, 2015

Anti-Grand: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape features 24 contemporary, international artists, artists’ collectives and game developers who examine, challenge, and re-define the concept of landscape while simultaneously drawing attention to humanity’s hubristic attempts to relate to, preserve, and manage the natural environment. Anti-Grand includes 33 works of art, with video, installation, video games, and traditional two- and three-dimensional work.

All of the works in the exhibition were created since 2000 to focus on art made well after the …

Voz Alta: The Sound Of A Collective Memory, Sarah E. Kleinman

Graduate Research Posters

Voz Alta is a participatory, voice-activated public light installation designed by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer as a memorial for the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico. In the Plaza, Lozano-Hemmer has synchronized a megaphone with a 10 kW Xenon robotic searchlight. As each participant speaks into the megaphone, the searchlight shines to the uppermost floor of the towering Centro Cultural Tlatelolco (CCT) building where three additional searchlights instantaneously strobe, dim, and brighten, illuminating the nocturnal landscape in horizontally fixed, tangential beams. Although the aesthetic, social, historical, and political aspects of …

Rodcon, Flier, 2015, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

Saturday, March 28, 2015 - 11:00am to 4:00pm

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Interpretative Ingredients: Formulating Art And Natural History In Early Modern Brazil, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"In this article I look at two early modern texts that pertain to the natural history of Brazil and its usage for medicinal purposes. These texts present an informative contrast in terms of information density and organization, raising important methodological considerations about the ways that inventories and catalogues become sources for colonial scholarship in general and art history in particular."

Expanding Art's Audience, Tony Connors

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

This paper investigates the need for contemporary art museums to expand their audience to fit their role as educational institutions. It is based on research that looks at ways museums have typically been operated in the past and then focuses on newer modes of operation, using the Brooklyn Museum as an example of a museum that educates and reaches a greater audience. Lastly, the paper looks at how particular artists have broken the mold of presenting art in order to interact with and relate to audiences in new ways. This research explains ways that art can be made accessible to …

Mona Hatoum And The Biographical Influence On Cross-Cultural Exchange, Nicole Shelton

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Artist Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut and educated in London, has experienced the boundaries and displacement of exile. These have become influential in her work and are implied within some of her statements. Compared are the external experiences of a double-exile directly to her subjectivity, culminating in a discussion of works of art such as Light Sentence (Fig. 3) and Homebound (Fig. 7), and highlighting the issue of cross-cultural exchange. This artist is one of many exhibiting cultural exchange within art as a manifestation of hybridization of different cultures, even if the artist does not acknowledge this multiplicity. …

To Drip Or To Pop? The European Triumph Of American Art, Catherine Dossin

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper considers the so-called triumph of American art from the perspective of what Western Europeans could actually see and know of American art at the time. Relying on a database of exhibitions, purchases, and publications of American art in Western Europe from 1945 to 1970 created in the framework of Artl@s, it reconstructs the precise chain of events and circulations that marked the dissemination and reception of American art in Europe. It consequently draws a more refined and complex understanding of postwar artistic exchanges out of the entangled historical perspectives of the European peripheries, which challenges the retrospectively dominating …

Italian Art In Yugoslavia From 1961 To 1967: An Overlooked Chronicle, Giovanni Rubino

Artl@s Bulletin

In the 1950s and 1960s, the relationship between Italy and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia improved despite the Cold War. For the Italian artists involved in the New Tendencies, this new situation provided opportunities for recognition as an alternative to Art Informel, the dominant style in the international art market. Getulio Alviani, Enzo Mari and Eugenio Carmi, are three of the key Italian artists in this period who exhibited in Yugoslavian museums and galleries. Using new archival material, this paper sheds light on a unique postwar revival of Constructivism within a peripheral artist network far from New York and …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

Reading Foucault After Modern Painting: From Object To System’, Tim Stott

Conference Papers

By his own admission, Foucault wrote with great pleasure about painting, feeling little need for polemics or strategic interpretation (DE II, 707). But he also thought through paintings, taking them to be exemplary objects of knowledge, uniquely indicative of transformations and discontinuities in discursive and non-discursive orders. This mixture of pleasure, preference, and analysis leaves us with a diverse body of work that might still assist in our understanding of the development of modern painting. Of particular interest is that during the period in which Foucault wrote, what counted as painting was radically questioned, leading to an expansion that …

The Biomorphic Grotesque In Modernist And Contemporary Painting, Audrey Howell

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper looks at the concepts of the biomorphic and grotesque in art from the start of the 20^th century to the present with a focus on painting and drawing. Included in the discussion of the grotesque throughout history are the works of Dadaist Otto Dix, painter Georg Baselitz, and feminist artists Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. Each used grotesque imagery to comment or react to a larger sociopolitical issue. Biomorphic artworks from the 20^th century are mentioned as well, with specific examples of work by Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, and Hans Bellmer. These artists together …

Something Gained: Translation As Process, Amanda V. Rothschild

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

This statement examines translation as a way to explore the act of painting. Drawing from theories of literary translation as discussed by Walter Benjamin, this essay looks at the ways in which the process of translating an image from a photograph into a painting echoes many ideas that come from the approach of translating between languages. The theme of translation is discussed first through an examination of the role of the photograph in determining the content of the paintings, using Gerhard Richter as a reference. The role of material and the physicality of paint in the translation of a space …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

Peripheral Recognition, Jason C. Childers

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Perception greatly affects the way we experience and understand the world. Using self-reflective research processes and data collection, I explore how art can subjectively re-present data and what this means for research and knowledge. The artworks through which I discuss these notions are Self Checkout 2013, Bibliography of Virtual Consciousness: Uniform Resource Locator Volumes 1-12 (BOVC:URL 1-12), and Observation Box. Self Checkout 2013 is composed of all of my receipts from 2013. They not only record my transactions, but also re-present data from which one can make inferences regarding my life—my consumer identity, my needs, my …

Toward A Transnational Queer Futurity: The Photography Of Catherine Opie, Zanele Muholi, And Jean Brundrit, Camille Erickson

Art and Art History Honors Projects

North American photographer Catherine Opie and South African photographers Zanele Muholi and Jean Brundrit create art that documents the lived experiences of queer and LGBTI-identified individuals and communities. Although their varying geographic and cultural specificities contribute to diverse representations, this research applies a queer transnational methodology to analyze how each artist uses the body as a site for re-visualizing queer identities. Employing cultural theorist, José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of a queer futurity reveals how these artistic projects resist the majoritarian politics of the present and envision potential utopian spaces of transformation. By embracing collectivity, belonging, and difference, the photographs enact …

Constructions Of Black Identity In The Work Of Glenn Ligon And Kara Walker, Shadé R. Ayorinde

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In this thesis I reference artworks and installations by Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, as well as contemporary mass media images, to offer a reading of various constructions of black identity in the 1990s and into the 21^st century. I specifically note the continuation of social biases against black bodies, which in large part stems from historical conditions of 19^th century America and the lingering legacy of slavery. I also address how the absence or implied absence of the black male body, as referenced in works by both Ligon and Walker, relates to contemporary social conditions in which …

A New Approach To The Restoration Of Cimabue’S Santa Croce Crucifix, Isaac Messina

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

On November 4, 1966 floodwaters submerged Cimabue’s late thirteenth-century Santa Croce Crucifix in Florence and stripped off nearly half of its original paint. Soon regarded as a key symbol of the flood’s catastrophic effects on the city’s rich artistic legacy, the crucifix was carefully conserved, but no attempts were made to hide the extensive scars left by the disaster. Instead, lead conservators Umberto Baldini and Ornella Casazza adopted an abstract approach to filling the work’s loss that claimed to honor the flood while providing a seamless viewing experience for the contemporary audience. This thesis shows that their theory and practice …

Brian Fay Contribution To The Lismore Castle Arts Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25th Of April, 2014, Brian Fay

Other resources

Brian Fay contribution to the Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25^th of April, 2014

Art And Literacy, Tara Hemelgarn, Sherrie Henderson, Patricia Thompson

P-12 Lesson Plans

This lesson prepares students for a visit, virtually or in person, to the Zuckerman Museum of Art. Using art images from the ZMA permanent collection as displayed in the See Through Walls exhibition, students practice skills in language arts and visual arts.