Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Laurie Anderson: The Weather, Annie Dell'aria

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Jamie Robertson: Make For Higher Ground, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Troy Thomas, Poussin’S Women: Sex And Gender In The Artist’S Works, James R. Jewitt

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquries Vol Xviii No 4 2023 Front Matter, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Date Of The Allegory Of Mercy At The Misericordia In Florence...Again: Some Clarifications Regarding The Historical Setting, William R. Levin

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Images Of Maps And Connotative Tendencies In Early Republican America, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

An Interview With Jennida Chase, Sunny Spillane, Jennida Chase

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

An Interview With Brianna Harlan, Mysoon Rizk, Brianna Harlan

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel; And Modigliani Up Close, K. A. Mcfadden

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquiries Vol Xviii No 4 2023 Full Issue, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Jacqueline Jung, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, And The Human Figure In Gothic Sculpture, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Diana S. Greenwald, Painting By Numbers: Data-Driven Histories Of Nineteenth-Century Art, Sara Woodbury

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

El Vínculo Entre El Arte, La Política Y El Espacio Público: Una Investigación De Colectivo El Muro Cusco Y Su Resistencia Contra Poder Estatal Y La Censura Del Espacio, Stella Gould

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

El Colectivo El Muro Cusco es un colectivo libertario y autogestionado dedicado al apoyo a las luchas sociales y al intercambio de información alternativa. Activo durante los últimos 20 años, El Muro,1 como se le conoce coloquialmente, ha sido un proveedor de la verdad en Cusco, utilizando el arte y la protesta para expresar descontento con las injusticias perpetuadas por el gobierno peruano. Utilizando el muro del Paraninfo Universitario de la UNSAAC ubicado en la Plaza de Armas de Cusco como su centro focal, el Colectivo utiliza el espacio como galería de arte y lugar de exposición, pero también como …

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon

Criticism

What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Postindustrial Playbook++, Maxwell Fertik

Masters Theses

There is no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem. Every inch of the planet is impacted by industrial development and its chemical legacy has mutated the soil and water. As a response, this thesis is designed to promote abundant over extractive resources and visualize a post-industrial reality. It consists of a series of objects, writing and design research on the relationship of industry and ecosystem.

In many ways it is a playbook++, laying out possible strategies or “plays’’ for making do with what exists around us amid collapse.

Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica)(ي'ڑ*), a plant that grows in the most degraded …

A Part Apart, Spenser Atlas

Masters Theses

I am fascinated by connections. Things that click, snap, slide, and hold. I care about the ways in which objects meet, looking for answers in the space between. What binds one thing to another?

I believe the world is presented to us in pieces. It’s hard to say how it all comes together. It's easy to believe things are shapeless and detached from each other. Connection is a bridge, a way of linking one thing to another that reveals interdependence, and eventually moves outwards to express a correlation between pieces, once assumed to be discrete and isolated.

This work is …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Both Human And Holy: A Veneration Of Personhood Through Mythic Means, Abigail Porter

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

Mythology acts as a reflection of humanity, a connection of personhood and storytelling that spans through history. This essay covers how the ideas of myth, personhood, archetype, and portraiture remain central to my work. The nature of mythology is innately human in all aspects, centering on ideas being both fictitious and truthful - which allows the ideas of the dualistic aspects between the personhood and mythos with the figures worked with. My work is about people; I elevate the figure into mythic while using those myths to discuss the aspects of identity. My work leans heavily upon my own fixation …

Becoming George Lucas: From Avant-Garde, Auteur, Independent Artist To Studio Executive, Ryan Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the unprecedented popularity of Star Wars, George Lucas, the creator of the multi-media franchise, is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. What makes Lucas’s relationship with Star Wars unique is that because the franchise has continually been exploited rather than left as a single unchanging, static text, its artistic value, along with Lucas’s legacy, is in constant flux and is often misunderstood. In other words, depending on Star Wars’s position in the public zeitgeist at a given time, Lucas is either revered, detested, or considered incompetent as a filmmaker. While there is no denying …

Beyond Romanization: An Indigenous Study Of Cultural Change In Classical Britain, Brooke Prevedel

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The Roman Empire is among the best-known empires in the world, renowned for unifying vastly different peoples and lands. The process of these unifications was, at times, something resembling peaceful, but was at other times much more violent. Regardless of the method of acquisition, peoples brought into the Roman Empire always experienced some degree of cultural change. The modern study of this cultural change has most often been examined through the lens of Romanization, a mostly one-way transfer of Roman cultural practices onto the conquered territory and culture. Romanization, however, presents too narrow and too historically imperialist an approach to …

Whose Art Museum? Immersive Gaming As Irruption, Jason M. Cox, Lillian Lewis

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This paper introduces Mantles in the Museum, an immersive game that helps ameliorate student discomfort in art museums and to support discourse in, through, and around art museums. Within the game the students take on the roles of critics who use one of five interpretive frameworks, often differing from the student’s own, to select works from a real museum to go to an international exhibition. Assuming these roles empowers students to be in the museum and to assess the works, students are given leave to engage in a vigorous critique process and to examine the art-world from a new perspective.

The Hospitality Of Doubt, Ian Grieve

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper discusses the last two years of research toward a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art. I mainly address my painting practice, but while in the program, I have worked in collage, ceramics, intaglio printmaking, and sculpture. My paintings are thick, multilayered, and often contain ambiguous narratives. The pictures develop through engagement, openness, and response within the work. I seek and embrace connection with viewers of the work. The spectator ‘completes’ the art and enhances or alters the artworks meaning by observing it and applying their individual perspectives. I seek to incorporate a sense of nostalgia and familiarity. …

Speak Now To Forever Hold Your Piece: On Aesthetic Ownership And Interpretation, Spencer Heitman

Honors Theses

The primary objectives of this research are to describe ways in the interpretation of art-objects is shaped by their ownership and to endorse fan culture participation as a mechanism through which people might be led to aesthetic value. This analysis shall be grounded in an understanding of trust and shall point the reader toward care, noting that these phenomena positively correlate and help interpreters to receive meaning of more abundance and depth. It will be initially claimed that art interpretation is itself contribution to aesthetic dialogue with artists. This claim is grounded in an understanding of art’s communicative capacities and …

“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …

Archi-Comics, Timothy Gatto

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Humor in architecture is not at the forefront of architect’s minds, this comes from architects need to be deemed serious. This way of thinking is what has backed architects up into a corner banal and stagnant architecture. Architecture is the art of context, everything in architecture is referential. Humor is foundationally the exact same way, the incongruity theory makes humor possible by putting a concept into context with things and finding contradictions in the process, thus developing a joke. Each of these arts, humor and architecture, are that of context and when architecture is delivered like humor, it points out …

(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

Jared Friedman’s work creates monuments out of banal common objects. Through acrylic paintings on- Astroturf, burlap, canvas, and upholstery fabric- he explores the ambiguity of the unremarkable, such as the condenser coils on the back of a refrigerator. In, (Not) Knowing, he parses the difference between knowing and understanding.