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Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Museum Studies

Tracing The Collective Endeavors: The Cultural Discourses Of Women Printmakers Throughout History, Ann Henrietta Bittl Jan 2025

Tracing The Collective Endeavors: The Cultural Discourses Of Women Printmakers Throughout History, Ann Henrietta Bittl

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine the women who paved the way for future generations of women printmakers by tracing the influences and practices of women printmakers throughout history within collective workshops. In the West, the concept of a collective endeavor began during the Middle Ages with monasteries and convents, where artisans created religious works of art as a way to teach illiterate audiences and also to adorn churches and cathedrals. However, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the concept of the collective workshop grew out of artist’s studios and ateliers. Artists were trained in the apprentice system, …


From Self-Determination To Decolonization: How American Indian Activism Reshaped Museum Spaces, Daniel A. Gruber Jan 2025

From Self-Determination To Decolonization: How American Indian Activism Reshaped Museum Spaces, Daniel A. Gruber

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The American Indian self-determination movement of the 1960s and 1970s catalyzed fundamental transformations in how museums represent Indigenous cultures, histories, and peoples. Through analyzing the demands for tribal sovereignty, cultural authority, and equitable representation during this pivotal era, I show how these principles were applied in contemporary museum practice through an exhibition analysis of the Autry Museum of the American West. This thesis traces how federal American Indian policy evolved from legal and socio-cultural assimilation toward self-determination while also examining how anthropology and museums historically reinforced colonial and imperial narratives that positioned American Indians as federally dependent, scientific specimens. Through …


Preserving The Stolen: Cultural Appropriation And The Case Of Seattle's Totem Pole, Olga S. Koutroulis Jan 2025

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 …


Of Minutemen And Boomers: Fallout And Doing History In Imagined Space, Marissa Paige Schuling Jan 2024

Of Minutemen And Boomers: Fallout And Doing History In Imagined Space, Marissa Paige Schuling

CGU Theses & Dissertations

On October 23, 2077, the world as known to the average American ends abruptly with the onset of the Great War, transforming the United States into a nuclear wasteland and setting the stage for the Fallout series of role-playing video games by Interplay Entertainment and Bethesda Softworks. Set in a post-apocalyptic future yet steeped in 1950s American ideals, Fallout merges historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy, exploring themes of American exceptionalism, hyper-Capitalism, anti-communism, nuclear anxiety, and militarism through exaggerated symbols of Americana. This thesis posits that Fallout serves as a critique of Cold War America's paradoxical utopianism and paranoia, highlighting the …


Affective Infrastructure And The Chilean Memorial Museum, Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida Jan 2024

Affective Infrastructure And The Chilean Memorial Museum, Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida

Pitzer Senior Theses

The civic-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) represented a period of unprecedented political violence in Chile — a time in which the government of the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody coup d’etat, army and police forces detained and tortured people suspected of affiliation with leftist activism, and hundreds of thousands of people were exiled from national territory. Post-dictatorship transitional governments have materialized a contested apparatus of institutions with the purpose of memorializing the victims of such violence, principal among them being the memorial museum. Based on ethnographic and collections research as a worker in the Museo …


Communal Appropriation: Considerations Of Heritage And Cultural Preservation, Nikia Chaney Jan 2023

Communal Appropriation: Considerations Of Heritage And Cultural Preservation, Nikia Chaney

CGU Theses & Dissertations

While cultural appropriation is widely taken as a negative phenomenon that should be avoided, aspects of cultural appropriation are desirable for cultural preservation and heritage. These aspects can expand upon a museum's function by fostering an authentic connection to the community that would enhance the exhibition of cultural artifacts with authenticity, sustainability, diversity, and accessibility. This paper interprets auto-ethnographical visits to two sites, the Watts Tower Community Center in Los Angeles, CA, and the Fairfield House in Bath, England as a way of understanding community appropriation. Both the Watts Tower Community Center and the Fairfield House are inhabited by black …


The French Conundrum: The Unsettled Relationship Between The Colonial Past, Identity Construction, And Immigration In The Musée National De L’Histoire De L’Immigration, Sierra Ruby Newby-Smith Jan 2022

The French Conundrum: The Unsettled Relationship Between The Colonial Past, Identity Construction, And Immigration In The Musée National De L’Histoire De L’Immigration, Sierra Ruby Newby-Smith

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This paper focuses on the intersection of identity, the colonial past, and immigration in France through the lens of the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. The museum, which opened in 2007 and is currently redesigning its permanent exhibition, has struggled to come to terms with France’s colonial past, a defining aspect of the museum as a result of its location and theme. This paper argues that the museum functions as a microcosm of France’s difficulty to address its colonial past while still maintaining its current national identity construction. Thus, this paper explores how the Immigration Museum is and has …


The Pervert’S Guide To The Museum, Seth Ifor Alt Jan 2022

The Pervert’S Guide To The Museum, Seth Ifor Alt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides a sustained theoretical articulation of core Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts situated within the standing difficulties in the practice and theory of museums. Drawing upon research gathered from site visits, informational interviews, textual analysis, and an extensive engagement with the seminars of Jacques Lacan, I enumerate here a first attempt at what a Lacanian theoretical formation can contribute to museum studies scholarship. Through this research this dissertation shows psychoanalysis to be especially useful for museum studies owing to how the troubles immediately encountered in the everyday material practices of museological work are structurally analogous to the impossibilities experienced on …


Woven By The Grandmothers: The Development Of The National Museum Of The American Indian Throughout The 1990s, Lucy Winokur Jan 2020

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 Jan 2020

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 …


Making Memory, Making Meaning: Memorial Museums And The Participatory Audience, Hillary Kirkham Jan 2020

Making Memory, Making Meaning: Memorial Museums And The Participatory Audience, Hillary Kirkham

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between memorial museums and visitors, reexamining the process of remembering traumatic events in United States history. My work examines this meaning-making dynamic in case studies of four memorial museums: The 9/11 Memorial Museum, The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, Manzanar National Historic Site, and Carthage Jail. By combining textual analysis of museums with data from visitor-produced materials such as guestbooks, letters, periodicals, and Instagram posts, I examine memorial museums' aims and rhetorical strategies while analyzing visitors' roles and contributions, illustrating how both guest and site collaborate to create memory and meaning. Drawing and …


Cataloging Wonder: The Art And Science Of The Collection, Christine Metzger Dec 2017

Cataloging Wonder: The Art And Science Of The Collection, Christine Metzger

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

The Exploring Science in the Studio National Science Foundation grant funded three initiatives at California College of the Arts, a private four-year art and design college in the San Francisco Bay Area. The grant sponsored annual Science-in-the-Studio which embedded scientists into the art and design studio curriculum, the creation of Mobile Units for Scientific Exploration (MUSE) and a new collection of science materials, equipment, and natural specimens, and a national symposium on integrating science into the art and design studio curriculum. Approximately 30 SitS classes have been offered since 2010, and the Exploring Science in the Studio symposium was convened …


Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead Dec 2016

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.


Museum 4.0 As The Future Of Steam In Museums, Mark Walhimer Nov 2016

Museum 4.0 As The Future Of Steam In Museums, Mark Walhimer

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Informal STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) activities (programs) and exhibits are common in science centers, children’s museums and natural history museums. As museums change to Museum 4.0 models (1), the STEAM exhibits and programs in museums also change. Museums 4.0 is the transformation of museums from a monolithic fixed location institution to a nimble community driven event driven organization. The Museum 4.0 becomes personalized to the visitor without fixed outcomes and without the physical restrictions of a single fixed location. As museums evolve to a Museum 4.0 model with visitor lead activities, STEAM activities within museums also change …