African American Studies Commons^™

Fragmented Bodies, Lauren Careese Alexander

Art Theses and Dissertations

Through Memory Webs and fragmented ceramic vessels, I express what it feels like to grow up living in a biracial body. I utilize mixed media to emulate a mixed-race experience. My Memory Webs are fashioned by painting on scraps of canvas and attaching them with crocheted wire and ribbon to speak to how my memory has impacted my identity. My fragmented ceramic vessels are cut up and stitched back together to represent disjointedness and un-belonging. All of my work is contextualized through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and what the Monster may represent for people of color. I also …

Cliffhanger, Micah Mickles

MFA in Visual Art

I am Micah Mickles, a mixed-media visual artist in St. Louis, Missouri. My artwork is deeply rooted in my personal experiences and serves as a memorial and monument to counteract the enduring effects of grief and loss. What sets my work apart is the transformative impact of my everyday encounters, inspired by my 14 years of experience working at Trader Joe's. These encounters have led me to reflect on my profound connections with diverse communities. By delving into the hidden narratives of mundane materials encountered in the workplace, I prompt a reexamination of convenience and supply chain origins. Inspired by …

4:44, Matthew Meyer

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

As a multimedia artist, I create using practices of painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and digital methods. The conceptual basis of my work explores the specific relationship between material, process, and idea. 4:44, the title of my thesis exhibition, refers to Jay-Z’s 2017 critically acclaimed album. This album has a lot of influential moments within it; however, one song embodied the ideas that I was researching while at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. “The Story of O.J.” contains different aspects of Blackness, whether how we treat each other, think about the future or just the different skin tones within the …

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 …

Qualia, Maxwell Henderson

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

In this thesis, I examine the transformative potential of pottery through the lens of "qualia," the subjective experiences, emotions, and perceptions that shape our conscious lives. Stemming from my personal journey, which includes a childhood of poverty in Arizona and a biracial identity, I advocate for inclusivity and diversity in art and society by challenging material hierarchies and conventional artistic practices.

I delve into the vibrant aesthetics of Japanese Kutani porcelain, the fluidity and balance in ceramic vessels, and the impact of my background on my artistic approach. My experiences foster a rejection of painterly language and arbitrary hierarchies, prompting …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Atlantic Legacies: Free Women Of Color And The Changing Notions Of Womanhood In The Long Nineteenth Century, Marie Stephanie Chancy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on three free-born African-descended women who defied expectations and prejudices to live previously unthinkable lives in the nineteenth century. The project uses their biographies to illustrate how, as black and mixed-ancestry émigrés from the Americas living in Europe, they adopted and adapted the evolving notions of ideal womanhood. As a result they expanded who could be identified as a true, redemptive or new woman. The project shows how they used the tenets of these ideals to live life on their terms. The dissertation is set in an era dominated by white males, and defined by the enslavement …

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.

The Rupture Repeats, Jennifer Everett

Graduate School of Art Theses

Rupture repeats without regard. Occurring on macro and micro scales, these historical, financial, and social upheavals continue throughout our lives, remaking our worlds and leaving us to respond as best we can. Rupture is a condition of human existence. For marginalized communities and Black Americans specifically, rupture is familiar and precarious. Historically, Black people respond to the space that rupture makes through a rigorous, interdisciplinary, creative tradition which serves as a strategy for survival and a way to produce and transmit knowledge. These methods of knowledge production exist in excess of formal training and are evident of quiet and expansive …

Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women who made notable accomplishments are underrepresented in commemoration. Some American cities have brought women to the forefront of becoming visible through commemoration in statues. This thesis compares the commemoration of historical women in four different American cities. Stakeholders hold the key to implementing and changing public policy to increase the visibility of women and people of color in public monuments. Cities which lack representation of women and people of color may learn from and follow the efforts of a leading city to achieve lasting and effective change in representing those who historically been underrepresented.

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …

Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female …

A (Dis)Assemblage Of The Gallery-Growlery, Levester R. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

A (dis)Assemblage of the Gallery-Growlery exhibition and writing presents itself as a site of a morphological exploration of language, sound, and objects in tandem with the irreducibly venting black expression. Venting, the black expression never seeks wholeness within objects or language itself for it is a thing-in-itself. Its presence affords critical reception to a residue of delimiting forms. All growls eschew verbal objects for the manifestation of pure phonetics. A growl in a gallery is the growl. The growl resounds through the physicality of the objects and gallery. Also, it unwinds the object-among-objects as the phono-present stretches the discursive …

Ua12/2/2 Xposure - Rites Of Passage, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

1995 Xposure yearbook.

• Contributors
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1996
• Frazier, Andy. My Cup Is the Cup of Life – Coffee
• Hinkebein, Dana. Behind the Curtains – Theatre & Dance
• Thomas, Kim. Rites of Passage – Mark Nethery, Jessica Nethery
• Cunnoe, James. College: Land of the Free & Home of Instant Pasta
• Thomas, Kim. The Search for Truth – Religion, Paul Miller, Native Americans, Clay Coleman, Candi Cabaniss, Atheism
• Meese, Ray. Confirmed in the Faith – Pam Page, Catholicism
• Broadbent, Stephanie. The Stigma Unearned: Virginity in College
• Davis, Amanda. Nontraditional Values – Nontraditional Students
• Spears, Brian. Turn On, Tune …