Museum Studies Commons^™

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

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

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

Rockhounding, Seafaring, And Other Material Tales For The End Of The World, Noemie Fortin

The Goose

In the face of accelerated environmental degradation and climate instability, the future of the Earth and of all life on earth is difficult to visualize. Therefore, the different mediums through which we consider environmental issues are just as important as the actions we take to address them. Focusing on three projects combining art, science, and activism, this article suggests a compilation of material tales. They tell stories of plastic rocks and aluminum nuggets where the protagonists are partly finely crafted objects, partly waste materials, and sometimes both at once. Artists Kelly Jazvac, Yesenia Thibeault-Picazo, and the collective Studio Swine collaborate …

Memory And Nostalgia In Chow Chin Chuan’S Art, Jia Wen Cheng

Student Works (2020-2029)

The bicycle as a form of wheeled transport appeared to be the main transportation that was used to carry passengers and goods during the old times, has consistently become the subject matter of Chow Chin Chuan’s artworks over 20 years. Chow is an active artist within the Chinese artist community in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Penang area. Currently, there was no well-written research about Chow’s bicycle themed paintings although he has been participated in numerous group art exhibition in oversea countries and also has a total of 8 solo exhibitions in Malaysia as of year 2017. Moreover, currently, there are …

Weaving Forms Of Resistance: The Museo De La Solidaridad And The Museo Internacional De La Resistencia Salvador Allende, Carla Macchiavello Cornejo

Publications and Research

From the starting point of a 1975 artwork made by Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark in Sweden to stop a tennis match in resistance to the Chilean military dictatorship, this article reframes the linear image of networks of solidarity and resistance through the gaps and connectivity of a mesh. It expands the figure of the mesh taken from critical materialism into the affective realm of art, historiography, and art institutions by exploring the cases of the museums Museo de la Solidaridad (1971–1974) and Museo Internacional de la Resistencia “Salvador Allende” (1975–1990). As this article delves into various knots and lacunas of …

The Precolumbian Textiles In The Roemer- And Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Germany, Lena Bjerregaard

Zea E-Books Collection

Along the coast of Peru is one of the driest deserts in the world. Here, under the sand, the ancient Peruvians buried their dead wrapped in gorgeous textiles. As organic material keeps almost forever when stored without humidity, light and oxygen, many of the mummies excavated in the last hundred years are in excellent conditions. And so are the textiles wrapped around them. Their clear colors are still dazzling and the textile fibers in good condition. Textiles were highly valued objects in ancient Peru – used for expressing status and diverse messages in these non-literate but highly organized and very …

Medicine And The Museum: An Experiential Case Study In Art History Pedagogy And Practice, Marcia Brennan

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This article brings three scholarly and professional perspectives to bear on museum-based learning experiences for undergraduate pre-medical and STEM students. In the first section, Marcia Brennan describes the seminar on “Medicine and the Museum: Clinical Aesthetics and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston” that she teaches at Rice University. Brennan is a modernist art historian, and her discussion focuses on the ways in which classes such as this can contribute meaningfully to undergraduate pre-medical and STEM education. Brennan collaborated with Joshua Eyler, who served as Executive Director of Rice University’s Center for Teaching Excellence. In the second section, Eyler discusses …

Women At The Dawn Of History, Agnete Wisti Lassen, Klaus Wagensonner

Occasional Publications

This lavishly illustrated volume gives a voice to women who lived millennia ago in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and explores their roles, representations and contributions to society.

Tens of thousands of cuneiform texts, monumental sculptures, and images on terracotta reliefs and cylinder seals cast light on the fates of women at the dawn of history, from queens to female slaves. In the patriarchal world of ancient Mesopotamia, women were often represented in their relation to men—as mothers, daughters, or wives—giving the impression that a woman’s place was in the home. But, as we explore in this volume, they …

A Political Perch: A Historical Analysis And Online Exhibit Of The U.S. Senate Clerk's Desk, Olivia Bowers

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience aims to highlight the importance of the historical object and accurately document the complete history of the former United States Senate Clerk’s Desk, placed in the newly built chamber in 1859 and removed in 1951. The desk’s first and last occupants were Kentucky natives and civil servants, and its current resting place is in Western Kentucky University’s Kentucky Museum. Through research that began in the nation’s capital, and a journey to follow the desk’s paper trail, the object’s massive historical legacy and close ties to the state of Kentucky may live on. Along with …

From Spectacle To Collectible : A Reappraisal Of Katherine Dreier And Juliana Force's Pioneering Impact To Bolster The Ascendancy Of Modern Art In America, Caroline Holt Yarbrough

MA Theses

My thesis analyzes the critical and pioneering role that Katherine Dreier, Juliana Force, and other New York-based female cultural promoters played in advancing the education, acceptance, and appreciation of modern art in America. By illuminating the strategies these women used to accomplish their objectives to support contemporary artists and demystify modern art to the public, as well as elucidating the barriers they overcame as women driving for change in a male-dominated society, I seek to answer the fundamental questions of how and why women were able to play such a central role in creating the canon of modern art in …

Front Matter

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

S. R. Koehler And The Etching Revival In The United States: Toward An “American” Tradition Of Printmaking, Katie Larson

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Drop Sinister: Harry Wilson Watrous’ Visualization Of The One-Drop Rule, Mey-Yen Moriuchi

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

When William T. Wiley And Bruce Nauman Wrote To H.C. Westermann, David Mccarthy

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Kim Gordon: The Bonfire, Annie Dell’Aria

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau / Nouvelle Femme, Matthew Finn

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Pissed On Or Pissed Off: Andy Warhol’S Oxidized Portrait Of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anthony J. Morris

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma In American Art Since 1970, Andrew D. Hottle

Art Inquiries

Book review of Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, by Vivien Green Fryd.

An Interview With Adrian Rhodes, Kerr Houston

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquiries, Xviii:1, Full Issue

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Bertoldo Di Giovanni: The Renaissance Of Sculpture In Medici Florence, Roberto G. Peredo

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Avant-Garde Networks Of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, And Peru In The 1920s, Michele Greet

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Enid Yandell: Kentucky’S Pioneer Sculptor, Caterina Y. Pierre

Art Inquiries

Book review of Enid Yandell: Kentucky’s Pioneer Sculptor, by Juilee Decker.

Age Old Cities: A Virtual Journey From Palmyra To Mosul, Hyunjin Cho

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Original Bauhaus: The Centenary Exhibition, Morgan Ridler

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Back Matter

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Museums As Realms Of (Dis)Enchantment, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"On the night of September 2, 2018, a blaze swept through Brazil's national museum, Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, destroying not only the colonial building, portions of which dated to the sixteenth century, but roughly 92 percent of the 20 million objects in its holdings. This was Brazil's greatest encyclopedic museum, incorporating (among many others) collections of natural history, anthropology, archaeology, and art, thus forming the most comprehensive museum collection in the nation. Along with its many unique and irreplaceable collections, the Museu Nacional was also home to the country's oldest Indigenous Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian materials (fig. 1)."

Woven By The Grandmothers: The Development Of The National Museum Of The American Indian Throughout The 1990s, Lucy Winokur

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1994, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the first of what would be three campuses. Ten years later, in 2004, the NMAI opened its main campus in Washington, D.C., already having cemented their place as leaders in a movement to center indigenous voices within museums housing indigenous material culture. By examining the history of the NMAI from the first acquisition of George Gustav Heye to its earliest approaches to exhibition design and collections management policy in the 1990s, it is possible to track the development of the …

How Contemporary Curatorial Practice Co-Opts Participatory Art, Caroline S. Eastburn

CMC Senior Theses

Instagram users post photos in art exhibitions all of the time. Contemporary art curators and museums have a role to play in this new phenomenon. Programming and curating participatory art exhibitions allows for the perfect art selfie which draws in visitors from around the world. But, how do curators and museums affect the significance of these artworks by placing them within the Instagram age? This thesis uses the three exhibitions as case studies: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, Take Me (I'm Yours) at the Jewish Museum in New York, and "Hélio Oiticica: To Organize …

Review: Natalie Selden Barnes's Honor The Precariat, Annah Krieg

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (2017-2022 archives)

This review details the fall 2017 exhibition of Natalie Selden Barnes's installation, Honor the Precariat, which took place in the Directions Gallery in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University. By combining data with plexiglass figures in an immersive artwork, Selden Barnes compels the viewer to engage with the complex reality of the majority of university educators, those who are adjunct instructors.

The Canon As Provocation: Partnering With Museums For The Future Of Art History, Jennifer P. Kingsley

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

Understanding the art-historical canon as socially embedded and historically negotiated is a threshold concept for art history but there is a paucity of research on how to position students to examine the formation of the academic disciplines and negotiate the performance of their canons in academic and public space. Art history has an advantage over other disciplines in this regard due to the close relationship it enjoys with art museums, which make the discipline and its history present in space. This article presents two case studies in support of partnering with museums to move histories of the discipline to the …