Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Art Inquiries, Vol. 21, Oct. 15, 2026 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Robert Indiana, Love, Biblical Authority, And American Art In The 1960s, David Mccarthy

Art Inquiries

Years before Robert Indiana suggested that his canonical LOVE paintings and sculptures carried erotic connotations, he was explicit in indicating that the series was to be understood as spiritual. In 1973, as the United States Postal Service issued some three hundred and thirty million stamps with his design, he specifically explained that the genesis of LOVE should be traced to his childhood training in Christian Science. Although scholars have certainly acknowledged this background, none, so far, have sufficiently addressed the actual foundational text of the faith, nor have they adequately addressed the evidence of Christian references found in the artist’s …

On Loss And Absence: Textiles Of Mourning And Survival, Art Institute Of Chicago, Chicago, Il, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Floating World: A.A. Murakami, Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston, Tx, Yumi Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Marie Taylor Barton And Southern Modernism, Cynthia Fowler

Art Inquiries

This paper examines the efforts by Southern artist Marie Taylor Barton (1904-1992) of Nashville, Tennessee to spread the principles of modern art to her community through her art practice and her advocacy for modern art. Barton emerged as an artist in the first half of the twentieth century. She studied with New York modern artist Ralph Pearson (1883-1958), an underrecognized but highly influential art teacher, at his summer school in Gloucester, Massachusetts. While in Gloucester, she also heard lectures by artist Hans Hofmann and visited Dartmouth College to see José Clemente Orozco’s mural The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34) that …

Front Matter, Art Inquiries, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Harry Boone: From Entropy To Renewal, Gertrude Herbert Institute Of Art, Augusta, Ga, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

On Canvas: The Origins And Implications Of A Common Phrase, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

Why do modern art historians and conservators describe paintings executed on cloth in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as works on canvas, when late medieval and early Renaissance sources never do the same? This article answers that question by tracing and analyzing the evolution of canvas as a term in the history of painting. Until the late 1400s, it will be argued, the term canvas and its regional variants connoted coarse woven fabrics made of hemp that were associated with rugged, utilitarian needs and rural poverty—but not with painting. By contrast, artists and related texts relied on …

Alison Place, Ed., Feminist Designer: On The Personal And The Political In Design, Anmol Shrivastava

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Encoded, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Ny, Tamara Smithers

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Electronic Literature In Ai Data Work, Mihai Bacaran

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This paper is based on my personal experience of working as a transcriber for AI projects between 2023 and 2025 in a Business Process Outsourcing company located in Eastern Europe. The job of transcribers is to listen to audio recordings provided by The Client (a major tech company whose name cannot be mentioned due to nondisclosure agreements) and either transcribe them from scratch or correct an AI generated transcription. The recordings are gathered from users of digital devices, many of whom appear unaware of being recorded.

During the transcription work, probably due to the excruciating boredom of performing the same …

Radiance After Exile: Visionism And The Art Of M, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This essay introduces and critically examines Visionism, the artistic philosophy developed by contemporary Australian painter M. Emerging from a practice shaped by early success, prolonged creative exile, and eventual return, Visionism is presented not as a stylistic movement but as a visual philosophy concerned with atmosphere, symbolism, transcendence, and the persistence of intensity after critique. Situating Visionism within contemporary debates surrounding postmodernism and metamodernism, the essay argues that M's work occupies a distinctive position within a broader cultural shift toward renewed engagements with meaning, affect, and sincerity.

Drawing on the artist’s own reflections, alongside theoretical perspectives from David Sudnow, Timotheus …

A Pot Of Gold At The End Of The Assembly Line: Jewelry, Facture, And Alienation, Jonathon A. Zalakos

Masters Theses

A Pot of Gold at the End of the Assembly Line integrates icons of mass-manufacturing with signifiers of joyful work, stimulating a dialogue between industrial and craft labour. Visible traces of the making process left on these works conjure a spectral ‘maker’, implied by the fingerprints, toolmarks, assembly, and conspicuous decision making of an ‘other’. As we relate to these signifiers as opportunities for our own bodily action, this spectre speaks in our own voice. Possessed by this ghost, viewers are vicariously thrust into an imaginary context and made sensitive to the nature of this work — whether it validates …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Temporal Ubiquity, Brittni Mosby

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis examines looking as a sacred and relational practice rooted in familial memory, storytelling, and the photographic archive. Drawing from early experiences of engaging family photographs alongside my mother and great-grandmother, I conceptualize these encounters as the formation of “temporal altars”: living vessels that activate space, memory, and multiplicity. These intimate acts of looking and listening position the home as a critical site where Black subjectivity is held with care and complexity.

By casting these modes of perception into domestic spaces, my thesis not only resists reductive external gazes but interrogates the archive as a colonial apparatus structured by …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

The Southwest Black Artists Collective: Afro-Modern Ecology, Kinship, And Collectivity In The Desert Southwest, Bradley L. Petty

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the Southwest Black Artists Collective (SBAC) as a site of

Afro-diasporic kinship, artistic production, and spatial intervention within the Desert

Southwest. Operating within a region where Black populations are comparatively small

and institutional support is diffuse, SBAC emerges as both a response to and a

reconfiguration of the regional artistic landscape. The Collective constructs an affirming

community through shared artistic practice, exhibitions, and the maintenance of The

Projects/Space in Tucson, Arizona, where public engagement and private creative

exchange coexist.

Drawing on theories of human ecology, this study expands existing frameworks

by introducing the concept of Afro-modern ecology, …

Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus

Theses and Dissertations

What kinds of objects can still think when the self-contained aesthetic object can no longer be taken for granted? The historical ruptures that have placed painting under crisis have also brought into view the fallacy of artistic autonomy, raising questions about how value, contemplation, and meaning persist under conditions of deconstruction.

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

The Weight, Hammet Reavis

Theses and Dissertations

What follows drifts between out to under, argument to object, learned to unlearned, and then back again, for now. What remains is not erased, but held in tension - pressed forward by an unspoken weight. However, let's go on record and retrace this gesture, not by means of crossthru, but as underline.

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Review: The Visionary Art Of Minnie Evans, Cynthia Fowler

Art Inquiries

The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans was a small exhibition of 16 drawings and paintings by Minnie Evans (1892-1987) on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, which holds a significant collection of her work. Evans was born in North Carolina and spent most of her life in Wilmington. Her artworks are colorful compositions rich with decorative details that illustrate her dreams and visions. But the exhibition attempted to expand our understanding of Evans’s work beyond them. Divided into three categories — “Wilmington Landscapes,” “Spiritual Nature,” and “Visual Culture” …

Review: 60th October Salon - What’S Left?, Rachel Klipa

Art Inquiries

Spread across nine venues and public spaces in Belgrade, Serbia, the 60th October Salon’s concept posed a pressing question: What’s Left? In a moment marked by oppressive capitalism, cultural erasure, and the slow dismantling of socialist ideals, this year’s biennial resisted nostalgia and nationalism. Instead, it probed the emotional and political residues of systems in flux, examining how art can sustain memory, provoke continuity, and imagine new futures in uncertain times.

Conjuring Elizabeth Fulhame: Using Ai To Depict The Invisible Woman From The Dawn Of Photography., Yvette Hamilton

Art Inquiries

Histories of the origins of photography are dominated by men, but the lesser-known contributions of women, such as the British chemist Elizabeth Fulhame, were fundamental to its success. Fulhame’s eighteenth-century chemical experiments directly contributed to the birth of photography, however, she is either totally obscured, or only briefly footnoted, in foundational texts on the history of photography. Her obscuration is heightened by the complete absence of any surviving images of her - she is, quite literally, invisible within a medium whose history privileges the visible.

This paper charts my practice-led research that used AI generative imaging to create speculative portraits …

Front Matter, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

A Formidable Female Network: The Role Of Women In William Henry Fox Talbot’S Establishment Of Early Photography, Rose Teanby Phd

Art Inquiries

This paper explores how women assisted William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) to establish his Photogenic Drawing and Calotype photographic processes in Great Britain and Europe. Utilising preserved contemporary correspondence as a primary source of unedited transcribed conversations, the genesis of photography can be revisited from an alternative viewpoint of extensive familial collaboration. Letters between Talbot and his female relatives exposed a sophisticated network of interconnected mid 19^th century social elite, providing multiple opportunities for informal advocacy and timely dissemination of the new scientific art.

Epistolary exchanges from 1839 to 1858 provide new insights into women’s subtle, less visible influence …

Review - Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Annie Dell'aria

Art Inquiries

Shahzia Sikander’s work spans traditions from multiple continents, eras, and media. Trained in the traditional miniature painting of South Asia and Persia, yet creating monumental pieces that command space both inside and outside the gallery, this artistic polymath maintains a signature style rooted in sumptuous detail and motifs that drip with layers of meaning. In Collective Behavior, a multi-part, career-spanning traveling museum exhibition of works made over the past 35 years, Sikander’s full array of talent and artistic evolution is on display.

Art Inquiries Volume Xx No 1 2025 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.