Museum Studies Commons^™

Building Artistic Identity, Visual Heritage, And Contemporaneity Of The Arab World: Case Studies Of The 1974 Arab Art Biennale And 'Calligraphy In Contemporary Arab Painting' At The 1989 Havana Biennial, Amanda Msallem

Theses and Dissertations

The 1974 Arab Art Biennale held in Baghdad, Iraq, and the exhibition Calligraphy in Contemporary Arab Painting of the 1989 Havana Biennial in Cuba are unique biennial initiatives that represent a decisive transitional period of modern art of the Arab world, during which Arab artists moved from the aspirations of the Pan-Arab collective and toward increasingly individualized, experimental practices with local cultural specificity.

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 …

Front Matter, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

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.

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” …

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: 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.

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

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Review: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Jessica J. Stephenson

Art Inquiries

In 1987, Luna Luna, a fairground/immersive art installation, opened in Hamburg, Germany. A decades-long project in the making, it was conceived and realized by André Heller, a Vienna-based avant-garde artist, musician, film-maker, and author favoring multimedia work including circuses, parades, variety shows, firework displays and poetic gardens. Over the course of three months, about 300,000 attendees traversed Heller’s Luna Luna’s exuberant space with performances, music, and rides on art works that took the form of Ferris wheels, carousals, infinity mirror rooms, puppet shows and other theatrics. The works were created by more than 30 artists including notable 20 …

Exhibition Review - Sung Tieu: 1992, 2025, Lina Alam

Art Inquiries

Over the last decade, we have witnessed the ascendancy, consolidation and mobilization of far-right movements around the world – not least in Germany. The Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu lives there and produces mixed-media work on recent histories of state violence, racism, migration and surveillance. In her solo show 1992, 2025 at the KW (Kunst Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Tieu expanded on her previous projects about the 1980 labor recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that resulted in nearly 70,000 Vietnamese workers relocating to Germany. Her new body of work …

The Tests Of Time: An Examination Of Contemporary Indigenous Artwork On Display In Southern Museums, Gwendolyn R. Pfrenger

Honors Theses

This paper examines current practices in three Southern museums of varying sizes and missions as they relate to the curation and display of Indigenous art. Specifically, the paper aims to investigate the place of contemporary Native art in art and anthropology museums: How does display vary across the two disciplines? What is its role, now that cultural institutions are becoming more progressive and making a stronger push toward representing artists from minority groups? This is a fairly new area of study, especially for art history, so much of what is discussed here is drawn from art historians, anthropologists, and museum …

Towards The Non-Spectacle: Responses To Necropolitics In The Artwork Of Teresa Margolles And Maya Watanabe, Leslie Anne Condon

Masters Theses

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of …

Review: The Shape Of Power: Stories Of Race And American Sculpture, Jiaying (Gloria) Dai

Art Inquiries

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, co-curated by Karen Lemmey,

Tobias Wofford, and Grace Yasumura, ambitiously asked: How does American sculpture

intersect with the history of race in the United States?1 Positioning itself as the first major survey

exhibition of American sculpture in decades, this exhibition featured 82 sculptures created by 70

artists spanning from 1792 to 2023.

Preserving The Stolen: Cultural Appropriation And The Case Of Seattle's Totem Pole, Olga S. Koutroulis

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the cultural appropriation and conservation of the Chief-of-All-Women totem pole, originally stolen by Seattle businessmen from the Tlingit village of Tongass in 1899 and later reinstalled in Pioneer Square as a symbol of the city. By framing the totem pole as a site of both physical and cultural displacement, I trace its journey from sacred object to public monument, and ultimately to federally funded replica. Drawing on conservation theory, oral history, archival research, and an interview with Haida artist Sondra Segundo, I argue that the pole’s removal, replication, and continued display reflect broader patterns of settler colonialism …

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Front Matter, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

An Interview With Sharon Lee Hart, Mysoon Rizk, Sharon Lee Hart

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Spirit And Invention: Drawings By Giambattista And Domenico Tiepolo, Roberto G. Peredo

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Speculations On Brunelleschi’S Pazzi Chapel, Howard A. Risatti Professor Emeritus, Donald Schrader

Art Inquiries

Why speculate on Filippo Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel? As Giorgio Vasari wrote, many of Brunelleschi’s projects were not finished in his lifetime and not as he wished. The lesson to be drawn, says Vasari, who was writing a century after Brunelleschi’s death, is that “anyone who wishes to leave a memorial of his existence should complete it in his own lifetime and not put faith in anyone else.” Since Brunelleschi died well before the chapel was completed, issues have been raised for over a century about its inconsistencies regarding the open loggia, the barrel-vaulted portico, and the façade. This paper addresses …

Corsets Off. Camille Claudel And Polish Women Sculptors Of The 19th Century, Beata Niedzialkowska

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, And Self-Determination Since 1969, Shannon Bewley

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Art Inquiries, Xix:1, Full Issue, Mysoon Rizk

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Black Artists In America: From Civil Rights To The Bicentennial, Mallory Sharp

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

The Shape Of Time: Korean Art After 1989, Saehim Park

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Conservation Through Art: Saving Alabama Hemlocks, Kelly A. Wacker

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Napoleon’S Corpse And The Subversion Of Historical And Political Authority, Alissa Rachel Adams

Art Inquiries

This article examines printed depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exhumed corpse in conjunction with Romantic historical practice in nineteenth-century France. Current studies on history in the Romantic age emphasize Romantic historicism’s link to a widespread and frustrated yearning for direct access to the past that will settle the upheavals of the revolutionary period. This study considers how the corpse and its representations fulfill the desire for direct access to the past but, in doing so, also contributes to a proliferation of individual understandings of the past—and future. Through an analysis of representations of the corpse, their sources, and their connection to …

A Home For Literature, Elizabeth Kapsch

SPARK Symposium Presentations

1813 was a big year for Chatsworth, although no one living there knew it. In theory, it was a year like any other. William George Spencer Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, had inherited the estate from his father two years prior, and just a year ago had made an impressive purchase of the entirety of the Bishop of Ely’s library–his book-adoring mother, of course, would be proud. William had no marital prospects, nor would he ever. In thirteen years, he would begin work with famous architect Joseph Paxton. Unbeknownst to twenty-three-year-old William, this partnership would result in some of …

Origin Stories., Danielle Deeley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an investigation into the Peruvian pre-Columbian collection at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. The Speed Art Museum acquired this collection in 1934 and it has largely remained unresearched for nearly a century after acquisition into the museum’s collection. This investigation is not an attempt to make broad characterizations of pre-Columbian ceramics. Nor is its goal to fill in all the gaps of the collection’s history. Instead, this thesis follows the evidence the collection presents: the physical attributes of the ceramics, the donor’s history, U.S. history, and information from the collection file provided by the Speed …

Woven Symphony: Exploring The Parallels Between Weaving And Music, Qianwen Yu

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Weaving and music are art forms often perceived as unrelated but actually share deep connections and fascinating similarities. In this presentation, I will first briefly introduce the impact of the 19th-century Jacquard loom on the invention of the Player Piano, a musical technology that evolved into the modern "MIDI" computer audio notation system. Second, I will explore the similarities found in both weaving and musical composition by presenting some of my own media installation art works. These works translate musical scores into woven textures, and vice versa, creating symphonies and revealing new sensory ways to appreciate textiles and music. I …

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

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

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

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.