This project situates several early works by Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) within the discursive realm of European primitivism. Born in Cuba to a Chinese-Cuban father and an AfroCuban mother, Lam entered the social and artistic circles of the Parisian avant-gardes including Pablo Picasso, Michel Leiris, and André Breton, who frequently reduced both his artistry and his identity to his Blackness. In this context, I analyze Lam’s expressed desire to “act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.” I argue that Lam’s engagement with the legacy of primitivism constituted a central component of this invasive endeavor of the Trojan horse, an active self-fashioning as modernist artist. First, through accounts of Lam’s interactions with Parisian avant-garde circles from his introduction in 1938 to his departure for Martinique in 1941, I will elaborate on Lam’s situation in the European avant-garde’s schemata of race and culture and its necessitation of this modernist self-fashioning. Second, through the reading of two self-portraits from the late 1930s, I will explore how primitivism operated within this self-fashioning during his time in Europe. And finally, an analysis of the recurring figure of the femme cheval will demonstrate this fusion of a formal basis in European primitivism and the modernity of Afro-Caribbean syncretism. In doing so, I will demonstrate how Lam’s primitivism operated as a strategic means to situate himself as an active and coeval participant in the dialogues of European modernists.

Jean-Michel Basquiat has created a body of work which challenges the historical biases against graffiti. Taking a look at Basquiat’s 1983 piece, Defacement, one can see the intersection between social and political, and public and private in the American art world of the 1970s and 1980s. In the face of racism from art critics, a city-wide War on Graffiti, and instances of fatal police brutality against other Black artists, Basquiat still chose to express himself through graffiti. Basquiat’s sustained use of graffiti as a visual style in the face of this social and professional bias offers evidence of graffiti’s ability to communicate resistance.

Basquiat’s use of a graffiti style throughout his whole career speaks to the conditions around him involving race and art. His work was declassed in contemporary media and pushed aside by the market because of public intolerance of his use of graffiti. His refusal to abandon it, though, positions the style as the joint between the worlds of personal and political, success and failure, and public and private – all of which contribute to the understanding of “graffiti” – and are subtextual criteria for popular art. Looking at communication through style in the case of Basquiat’s Defacement points to graffiti as a language of resistance and the most effective translator of his radical ideas, which came to Basquiat through his experiences with discrimination in New York City

This research comparatively analyzes the art of the Black Arts Movement as it manifested in Chicago and Los Angeles. Through reading art historical texts, examining the socio-political and cultural contexts of the areas, and analyzing artworks, I illustrate how and why the movement manifested itself differently in each area and how that affected art-making. The movement in Chicago was quite militaristic and emphasized organization and unity, while the movement in L.A. was designed to build community among Black artists. In Chicago, the art was community-based, collaborative, mutable, and accessible, often depicting prominent Black figures. Both positive and mobilizing messages were emphasized – though artists like William Walker would often create murals displaying the harsh realities of Black life. Art by groups like AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) and OBAC (Organization for Black American Culture) emphasized collective art making while individual artists like Mitchell Caton, William Walker, and Eugene “Eda” Wade worked alone or with others to create murals and public art for Chicago neighborhoods. The spatialization in L.A. created a unique Black arts community. Their focus was mainly to carve out a space for Black artists in that city’s art world; artists would often do so by creating Black-owned galleries or exhibition spaces. The art that was produced was experimental, independently created, and meant for an “art” audience. Artists like John Outterbridge and Betye Saar’s assemblage works conveyed messages of resistance through abstract form, using found objects to ground their work in the community. David Hammons highlighted messages of Black oppression more overtly in his body prints, works created using his own form with political messages. Ultimately, I aim to show the diverse art of this movement and dispel stigmas around Black art being monolithic and synonymous with protest art.

Kara Walker is a contemporary, Black female artist who discusses racial issues in the United States through her shocking artwork. She employs racist stereotypes of Black individuals and imagery from the Antebellum Era to display how racism is systemic in the US. She is criticized by certain Black intellectuals and artists, notably Betye Saar, for portraying such abject and visceral imagery, such as pedophilia and rape. Walker often creates large installation images using silhouette cut outs, hiding the races of each figure in her pieces. She uses stereotypical imagery such as unkempt hair and tattered clothes to depict Black individuals, and white individuals are well dressed, and well kept. A well-known work of hers, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven has been criticized by artists such as Saar for being derogatory and racist in nature. Imagery from slavery, in and of itself, is hard to stomach, furthering the abjection in Walker’s work. Kara Walker is manipulating these violent and demeaning images to force viewers to place themselves within her imagery and understand their own biases and prejudices. Her work sparks debate about depictions of Black trauma and can be related to media of Black individuals today. While Walker’s work is visually disturbing in nature, she successfully implicates the viewers in the horrors depicted. No one is innocent in Kara Walker’s work.

Throughout art history, black representation has been utterly lacking compared to white representation in Western and European art, even still in more contemporary times. The enslavement of Africans has had an adverse effect on black people, stripping them of their identity, denying practice of their spirituality and forcing a religion with no representation of black people upon them. Artist Renee Cox has dealt with these issues and boldly put black people at the table to return the power and sense of divinity and pride to black people. I will discuss how contemporary artist Renee Cox has used her own body and other black bodies to reimagine religious imagery and her artistic development from photographic prints to intricate digitally manipulated designs. I will be highlighting her works through her Soul Culture series, stepping away from much of the controversy and audacity, and instead focusing on black divinity, broadening the consciousness of the soul, and cultivating happiness.

As André 3000 stated, “The South got something to say!” and this sentiment perfectly encapsulates the intention and energy of the powerful exhibition curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. It considers and amplifies the social, cultural, and creative influence of the South. Cassel Oliver attempts to bridge and correlate a historical and modern analysis of the region to further examine the contemporary Black aesthetic within the United States of America. The framework of the show is focused on the integral role of the visual arts and sonic production as primary manifestations of creative expression that have both continued to mold modern culture and reflect the roots of southern geographical functionality and influence. Using supportive documents of the exhibition – including the exhibition catalog, accompanying playlist, and artists talks – I offer a range of arguments that offer a fundamental examination of the region and its global impact, at large. My analysis of the exhibition and curatorial process examines the ways Cassel Oliver addresses the geographical significance, sensory immersion and experience, and indexical nature of this topic.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Black female body became the site of cultural and medical scrutiny which helped to construct the synthetic notion of ‘otherness’ and other hegemonic ideologies. Saartjie Baartman, pejoratively named the “Hottentot Venus,” quite literally became the embodiment of these ideologies as her body was exhibited and economically exploited across England and France. The Black female body, in all but name, was “disabled” through the pathological representations published in anatomical atlases and other texts, such as Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s La Donna Deliquente: La Prostituta e La Donna Normale (1893). These texts presented images of bodily and genital variation in a way that stigmatized the subjects for challenging the predominantly white European able-bodied fantasies of “normalcy”, what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson terms the “normate.” Contemporary Black artists have responded to this history with appropriative gestures that re-appropriate or reclaim, re-contextualize, and invert the discourses embodied in these images. Wangechi Mutu’s collage series Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, and the accompanying history, language, and imagery, is perhaps one of the most noteworthy revisions. Each image invokes a human face, therefore restoring a sense of humanity and subjectivity back to the Black female body represented in the medical illustrations. However, Mutu is careful not to obscure the underpinning image or erase disability and variation altogether from the composition. Thus, genital (medical illustrations), bodily (collage clippings), and facial variation (composite image) are all reconciled in a way that subverts normalcy, ennobles disability, and inverts discourses of stigmatization and degradation. In a dialectical maneuver, Mutu deconstructs the synthetic notion of “otherness” and other hegemonic ideologies surrounding the Black female body. An interdisciplinary approach combining feminist and critical theories, as well as disability studies perspectives will frame an analysis of Mutu’s collage series.

In 1774, amidst unrest in the United States, John Singleton Copley left his family in Boston to embark on a Grand Tour of Italy, as had long been recommended to him by Royal Academicians Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds. After his travels, Copley commemorated his reunion with his family in London, as well as showed off his newly acquired knowledge of the Old Masters, by painting The Copley Family in 1777. This talk examines one detail in that well-known painting, a detail that art historians have overlooked: the doll that lies discarded on the floor by its owner, Copley’s eldest daughter. By depicting the six-year-old abandoning the doll, Copley breaks a longstanding and consistent pictorial convention of young girls reverently cradling their dolls. The doll itself, a Queen Anne doll with a custom-made dress matching its owner, was an extremely expensive object. It, or its fashionable ensemble, might have populated one of Copley’s portraits in the Colonies. I suggest that this unusual motif indicates Copley is discarding the materialist style popular in the Colonies in favor of reinventing himself for aristocratic patrons.

Architecture has the power to facilitate a profound understanding of its creators, with the example of The Round Stone Barn at the Shaker Village in Hancock, Massachusetts as no exception.  This structure has long been examined for its unique design and insight into the life and beliefs of the members of the nearly extinct religion.  Within the field of Art History, this barn has been taught as the perfect personification of the beliefs of The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, more commonly known as “The Shakers.”  History, across nearly all disciplines, seems to have simplified not only this particular structure, but the entire Shaker faith down to a few distinguishing characteristics.  These include: their name, their belief of their founder being the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and their isolated villages.  However, the complexities of the religious beliefs and history of the Shakers are much more complex than the current teachings and understandings. Consequently, this oversimplification is reflected in the interpretation of the Round Stone Barn. Shaker doctrine was recorded, and thus, modified after founder, Ann Lee, died.  With her history rewritten and the original doctrine radically changed, the writings, stories, and understanding of architecture that is taught today is not the intentions of the creator herself.  In this paper I will argue that the accurate interpretation of this structure must start with reexamination of Shaker history and doctrine, rewriting the narrative that this barn is not a personification of Shaker beliefs and rather a personification of the patriarchal shift that took place after the death of Ann Lee.

So often is the sublime viewed as a relic of nineteenth century art, an idealistic notion of the wilderness as something to be held in fearful respect. Indeed, American landscape painters, particularly those of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are often heralded for their near-fantastical renderings of the American terrain as one of natural grandeur and vast possibility. A distinctly American brand of rugged adventurism is often manifest in these paintings, as artists sought to depict a rapidly evolving national aesthetic identity rooted in the notions of nation-building and victory over natural obstacles. These themes were especially pertinent in a post-Revolutionary era, wherein Americans were newly independent from imperial tyranny yet fiercely hungry for expansion deeper into the continent. However, the desire to understand humanity’s relationship with nature remained pertinent in art through the twentieth and even into the twenty-first centuries, at times coming off the canvas and interacting directly with the world that it tried to comprehend. As history has fundamentally changed man’s relationship with the natural world, particularly in the United States, artists have engaged with the sublime both through submission and subversion. Artists both employed and, perhaps even more importantly, rejected the sublime to construct representations of reality.

Rather than approach the development of the sublime strictly chronologically, I examine different strategies in either asserting human dominance over the natural world, or frustrating that dominance. Regional differences in the American sublime, as well as the sociopolitical conditions underpinning them, are also examined. The presence of sublimity in American landscape painting is certainly no new topic to art historians; I hope that my exploration specifically of different strategies of the sublime predicated on different lived regional experiences, representing the continued difficulty of developing a cohesive national aesthetic ethos, provides richer complexity to this scholarship.

This paper addresses National Park System (NPS) promotional materials from 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order that formed the scattered national parks into the singular National Park System, to the 1960s expansion of the mission and scope of the park system. This artistic era of the National Parks aimed to connect sprawling and vastly different national parks into a cohesive system. As the Great Depression took hold in the United States, the American government promoted nationwide travel, especially to the national parks, as a low-cost vacation option for struggling Americans. To aid this mission, the government commissioned artists through the Federal Arts Project to create promotional materials to draw visitors into the parks. In doing so, the government was able to provide artists struggling during the Great Depression with steady paychecks while also increasing revenue for highways and the National Park System. The Poster Division of the Federal Arts Project jumpstarted a new design movement that elevated National Park promotional materials from primarily photographs to contemporary designs that reflected the identity each national park was trying to create. In the years following Roosevelt’s executive order, NPS promotional materials had a cohesive theme and visual style. These styles began to diverge in the early 1940s, with stylized typography and photo editing styles emerging as each park began to define its individual characteristics. As the National Park System did not have to justify its value – or spread word of its existence – promotional materials became more stylized, leading to ephemera that reflected changing art movements in America.

Located on Dakota and Ojibwe land, St. Paul, Minnesota is a unique hub of arts, enterprise, and history. The city’s landscape has been shaped by racial covenants, economic hardships, and migration to surrounding suburbs. Today, community members, developers, and government officials are involved in ongoing discussions about how to best enhance infrastructure and businesses throughout the city, especially in urban areas, while protecting residents and each neighborhood’s identity and culture. One way of doing this is through creative placemaking. For my research, creative placemaking refers to the use of art-based solutions to enhance public spaces to support sustainable communities. My research is a comparative study of community mural projects in St. Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone (CEZ) and Frogtown neighborhood with the goal of understanding how both areas deploy creative placemaking to shape identities, support economic growth, and strengthen communities.

In our image-filled world, perhaps the most common picture we encounter is the landscape. The history of landscape is vast and begins with landscape painting: taking off in the Italian Renaissance, landscape painting gathered widespread appreciation throughout Western society by the nineteenth century. By this time, the Romantic movement taking place in the arts and humanities had reached the United States and capturing the sublimity of the American West had become an exercise in expressing national heritage. However, an important part of this American history has had little opportunity to be recognized. While artists depicted the beauty of American scenery, the systematic colonization of the continent was under way; settlers and the US government went about overtaking Indigenous nations’ land through acts of forced removal, war, and the spread of unfamiliar diseases, among other more subtle means of dispossession. Sentiments aimed at claiming land and resources grew strong amongst individuals at all levels of American society and were backed by myths of Manifest Destiny: the European-American (white) attitude-turned-quest, -policy, and -military-action of settlers and the US Government to justify the overtaking and extraction of land and resources from the original inhabitants of the continent. These sentiments played a major role in shaping the visual language of the American Romantic movement and landscape painting as we know it today. This talk is an attempt to reexamine the ways in which land is valued in the United States by drawing upon the visual culture of colonialism during the American Romantic period and contrasting it against art made by contemporary Indigenous artists. The approach I take seeks to centralize the work of Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and artists and to draw attention to “settler colonial structuring and Indigenous critiques of that structuring,” (Decolonization is not a metaphor, 3) particularly in art history. While being in the position of a settler, I hope to follow in the footsteps of Mishuana Goeman (From Place to Territories and Back Again, 2008), to deconstruct “the discourse of property and [reformulate] the political vitality of a storied land,” which involves “reaching back across generations, critically examining our use of the word land,” and its visual culture, “in the present, and reaching forward to create a healthier relationship for future generations” (24).

Wendy Red Star (b. 1981 in Billings, Montana) is a contemporary Crow (Apsáalooke) photographer and multimedia artist. The artist’s work embodies both her generation in today’s art world and her method of art via her crossing identities: an art school-taught artist, a child of a Crow father and an Irish mother, and a woman. Many of Red Star’s works are self-portraits in which she applies humor to encounter glorified representations perpetuated by photographers like Edward S. Curtis, who portrayed Native Americans to satisfy the cultural archetype of the vanishing Indian. Since the 1820’s, Curtis’s construct successfully reproduced the equivocal racism of Anglo-Americans, who suppressed Native spirituality and traditional practices; however, they created cultural space for romantic appeal. While Curtis was on the move, trekking with heavy camera gear, U.S. and Canadian authorities were engaged, attempting to deracinate the continent’s surviving Indigenous population. Curtis did not bring attention to the forced removal of Natives; he spent over thirty years solely documenting North American tribes—about eighty of them—and their cultures. Curtis had produced well over forty thousand photographs. His work was—and still is—appreciated by many. Since Curtis took these photos over a century ago, many have believed these images to be true depictions of Natives, even today. These images, which have created a false authenticity, have trapped many contemporary Indigenous artists in stereotypes they struggle to break free from. Red Star, however, attempts to remove herself from these images by bringing the details of her cultural traditions into the Technicolor present by using humor in her self-portraiture. By rewriting common narratives surrounding Natives and establishing female agency in her self-portraiture, Red Star successfully contests cultural and metaphorical inequities faced by Indigenous peoples.

By excluding contemporary Native American art from collections and exhibitions, contemporary American art museums devalue Native American art and identities within the art historical canon and genre of American art. As critical museum theory develops, American art museums are slowly recognizing that their lack of representation of Native American artists perpetuates harmful stereotypes that Native American communities are neither contemporary nor active participants in American art history. To begin reckoning with their colonial histories, contemporary American art museums must work to dismantle their oppressive institutional power structures to develop relationships with Native artists based on mutual respect. The following paper offers recommendations for contemporary American art museums to work towards reconciling their relationships or lack thereof with contemporary Native American artists. By looking to museums working to decolonize the display of Indigenous art both within and outside of the United States, contemporary American art museums can develop strategies that amplify Indigenous voices. Through the redistribution of power and the promotion of Indigenous sovereignty, contemporary American art museums can nurture change that reflects the value of Indigenous perspectives, identities, and aesthetics.

Located on the Greek island of Crete, the ancient Minoans were constantly exposed to the Aegean Sea and its vast marine life. Unsurprisingly, this led to a myriad of painted pottery highlighting the flora and fauna of the sea, now widely known as “Marine Style.” The octopus distinguishes itself, amongst its marine companions, as one of the most significant and popular decorative motifs of Minoan ceramicware. In this essay, I seek to explore the possible reasons as to why Minoan potters and painters so frequently chose this motif. Through a close study of Marine Style vases and vase fragments from the islands of Crete, Naxos, and mainland Greece, the magnitude of the octopus, as a decorative motif, exceeds past its visually striking anatomy and its practical function of taking up space and creating less work for Minoan vase painters. The octopus has also appeared on terracotta funerary chests, known as Larnakes. One notable Larnax depicts an abstract decorative octopus carrying a ship of soldiers, possibly bringing them to the afterlife. This funerary connection could also be attributed to the animal’s ability to regenerate any severed tentacles. The symbolic theme(s) and decorative choices stretch beyond the Minoans, as the mainland Myceneans had their own unique examples of jewelry, decorative tile, and ceramicware that feature an octopus. 

Although Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) did not become an official diagnosis until 1980, wartime trauma and the impacts that it can have on the psyche have been explored in the visual arts for centuries. For example, numerous artists who served in World War I, such as Otto Dix, created artwork that dealt with PTSD from the war. Nevertheless, this issue goes back even further than World War I. A growing body of scholarship draws on surviving Greek literature to document that PTSD, as a result of war trauma, existed as far back as the 6th century BCE. An example cited from the 5^th century BCE is the story of the Spartan general Clearchus in Xenophon’s play, Anabasis. The topic of wartime trauma as manifested in Greek artistic imagery, however, remains unexplored. In my paper, I will first demonstrate that the Greeks were aware of the concept of PTSD through an analysis of the portrayal of Ajax, one of the heroes of the Trojan war, by vase painters in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. I will also show that Greek men engaged with and confronted the concept directly at the symposium, the principal context wherein these images of Ajax appeared. It is important to understand today that even though the diagnosis of PTSD is relatively new, this condition was present and affected soldiers in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Male homosexuality and pederasty are common themes among our known body of works from Ancient Greece, particularly Attic vase-paintings dating between 570 and 470 BCE. Still, many questions remain regarding the nature of these works and their relation to similar themes in Greek literature. Further complicating matters, ancient Roman artists often copied and imitated Greek originals, and the incomplete nature of our collections in modernity present challenges in distinguishing between Greek originals and Greek-inspired Roman adaptations. This paper contributes to the existing discourse on homosexual and pederastic depictions by analyzing examples across multiple media, both Greek and Roman, in relation to the more abundant evidence we have from vase-paintings.

I take the story of Zeus and Ganymede, one of the most popular myths with regards to pederasty, as a case study. Ganymede was the representation of the ideal Greek sense of beauty, enthralling even the gods; Zeus, in the form of an eagle, kidnaps Ganymede and takes the young boy to Olympus to serve as cupbearer. Multiple sculptures of the pair exist, dating back to imperial Rome, though the existence of a Greek original remains contested. Specifically, I examine the high imperial Ganymede and the Eagle in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy, to evaluate the evidence for and against the existence of a Greek original by comparing this piece to other Zeus-Ganymede sculptures and vase-paintings. In particular, how is the traditional myth portrayed differently in each example? How do pederastic relations vary by their mortal or divine nature, and what does this tell us about the debate on originality? Finally, how does the contemporary discourse on pedophilia influence the study of ancient pederasty, and what contextualizations must be made to examine ancient works with objectivity?

This paper examines domestic archeological evidence from Pompeii to examine the lives of enslaved people. This field is often understudied due to a lack of evidence, focusing on the lives of elites within the house. While evidence is scarce, it is still possible to guess at the lives of enslaved people and other servants within the house and it is important to do so because it offers diversity to the much-studied field of Pompeian houses. This paper proposes that a combination of sleep related items and work-related items could indicate the presence of an enslaved person within an elite house. Through examining material evidence from three Pompeian houses and evidence from Laura Nisin’s paper “Sleeping Culture in Roman Literary Sources”, this paper shows that enslaved people are likely to have inhabited spaces where both sleeping and working occurred, since this goes directly against elite ideas about sleep. This paper discusses a range of materials, from the House of the Menander, which has an enormous amount of scholarship, to more recent archeological finds, like the House of Civita Giuliana. While evidence for this topic is still scarce, this paper is intended to serve as a basis for easily identifying spaces where the presence of enslaved people is likely, that can then be researched further. As this field grows and more artifact assemblages from surrounding areas are uncovered and digitized, hopefully this theory can help shed some light on a previously under researched field.

Diet, drugs, and surgery—these were considered the three main medical practices of Greco-Roman doctors. The first two areas have been well-researched and documented, but there is remarkably little scholarship on surgery and the lives of doctors. An examination of the surgical finds from the Casa del Medico Nuovo (II) from Pompeii reveals a wealth of knowledge. Specifically, the embryo hooks (used in cases of difficult births) and physician’s carrying cases reveal that much of a doctor’s surgical practice occurred outside the location of the stored instruments. Embryo hooks were uniquely employed in the delivery process, which ancient descriptions confirm occurred in the house of the mother. This well-documented form of surgery provides the foundation that the presumed home of the doctor was not always the location of their medical treatment. Furthermore, the presence of carrying cases indicates a need for mobility for the surgeon’s instruments and therefore his practice. A further investigation into literary and archeological references to doctors outside of Pompeii reveals that their social status was much akin to a craftsman. They acted as a client in the patron-client system, visiting the homes of the patient rather than having the patient visit them. This notion is further confirmed through the similarity of finds between doctors and other craftsmen. By examining additional literary sources, I intend to reveal that while we might try to identify a home of a surgeon by the surgical instruments left behind, doctors were by necessity mobile and would typically practice in the home of the patients they were attending.

In my presentation, I discuss the Mithraeum of Dura-Europos, a temple dedicated to the ancient Roman god Mithras in the east of modern day Syria. I researched this topic through the College of William & Mary Charles Center during summer of 2022. I undertook my project to determine how closely the mithraic community in the city of Dura-Europos conformed to the norms of the mystery religion in centers of worship such as Rome and the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire. I chose the example from Dura-Europos because it is the farthest mithraeum from the capital known to present day researchers, and thus provides the best counterpoint to the more numerous examples from the center of the Empire. In order to conduct my study, I visited mithraea in Rome and Ostia and examined the Dura-Europos Mithraeum, preserved and reconstructed at the Yale University Art Gallery. My original sketches and illustrations, to be displayed during my address, are products of this firsthand analysis. In my presentation, I explain and examine the decoration and material culture of the temple, paying particular attention to the cult niche of its final iteration in the mid- 3rd century CE. The findings of my research were that the Durene mithraists on the edge of the imperium closely adhered to religious standards found across the Roman Mediterranean. While many aesthetic works of the Dura cult community were localized, their essential understanding of mithraic cosmology, community, and salvation remained consistent and specific in comparison to others. In my presentation, I explain how this evidence provides insight into the development and expression of Mithraism and its remarkable place in the complex Roman world.

Over the past several thousand years, the Andean region has been one of the world’s most volatile climatic and geographic regions that has supported human occupation. The Nasca culture (c. 250 BCE to 750 CE) occupied the southern coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period and produced innovative and unique polychromatic ceramics that transcended the culture’s history. Although typically known for their geoglyphs, the Nasca’s projection of their landscape also became identifiable through ceramics. From agricultural to faunal motifs, naturalism became a prominent iconographic style of their ceramic art. Investigating these naturalistic images can shed light on Nasca cultural identity, which is embedded within its visual and material culture. Embodied within landscapes are the sources that cultures construct into beliefs and perceptions that define their identities. Through iconographic analysis of a selection of Nasca vessels from the University of Texas’ Art and Art History Collection of Pre-Columbian objects, I have examined the impact that climatic shifts and variability have had on iconography because of altering perceptions of landscape. This presentation aims to emphasize the significance of visual and material culture to recover important data representative of ancient indigenous perspectives, and to counter the idea that imagery is just a reaction to or documentation of the variables that construct landscapes. Images are powerful sources of information, that, when analyzed in collaboration with data rooted in empirical science relating to the environment, can offer a greater understanding of the Nasca and their landscape. By employing both art historical and archaeological approaches and methodologies, this thesis considers the presented material in an interdisciplinary manner. Through this paper, I intend to bring more awareness to individuals when considering their landscapes and its affiliations with their identity and ontological beliefs.

The American Southwest is home to a significant number of Ancestral Indigenous American archaeological sites, many of which are open to the public. Places like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, two famous Ancestral Puebloan sites, experience high traffic that simultaneously generates revenue for Indigenous communities and the need for continuous conservation. However, what does it mean to “conserve” and whose definition is this? More recent conservation efforts, notably at the River House in Bears Ends National Monument, Utah, aim to braid Indigenous epistemologies regarding time, architecture, and landscape with Western scientific models of conservation. Lyle Balenquah, a Hopi archaeologist at Bears Ears, advocates that archaeological conservation respects Hopi beliefs in temporal cyclicality. Suggesting that time is cyclical assumes that architectural material came from the earth and eventually must return to the earth, following a universal rhythm of life and death. Reconstruction practices, when part of conservation, disrupt this cycle. If those who built the River House did not intend for the structure to endure for eternity in architectural form, how do we reconcile that with the Western tendency to reconstruct architecture in the interests of promoting tourism? One possible alternative is for site conservators in the American Southwest to implement technology such as that used in Lascaux, France, where, in 2016, a perfect replica of the cave containing prehistoric rock art opened to the public. Does a copy, however, ensure that the experience of the original is “conserved”? In this talk, I suggest that when a site is replicated to conserve its physicality and meaning, the “copy” inherits some of the original identity, while simultaneously beginning a new story. Rather than being simply illustrative of the original, the copy is also a site of power, with the agency to transfer meaning from the original site to contemporary viewers.

Supernatural creatures and inexplicable events have consistently been a part of the cultural imagination in Japan. The earliest records of these creatures are from official documents in the third century C.E. China, but they can be found all over the region in folktales, literature, prints and other forms of media. One of the most prolific varieties was the yōkai, a manifestation of supernatural creatures in Japanese society. They played a prominent role in Edo Period Japan and were so impactful that they persist in contemporary media. The role these creatures had in society has evolved, yet these supernatural beings remain an integral part of the culture of East Asia. This presentation will look at four examples of the yōkai fox in print that support not just their cultural importance, but how their roles and powers have been adapted across time and cultures since their inception.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s latest installation, untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness), is a site-specific work located at the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens in Belgium. The installation features a 20-meter-long metal scaffolding maze, leading visitors to a wooden tea house in the center where performs a tea ceremony. Tiravanija, an influential figure in relational aesthetics, emphasizes human interactions and social experiences rather than individual and object-based experiences in art. By incorporating the tea ceremony, Tiravanija blurs the boundaries between art and everyday activities. The questioning of the tea ceremony extends to the meaning and form of relational aesthetics in terms of viewer experience and site choices. The paper reflects on personal experience of the tea ceremony, particularly from the perspective of someone familiar with tea culture, and raises questions about the potential that the performance reinforces stereotypes and exalts mundane daily activities. The hidden leverage of the remote location in an affluent neighborhood, intended audiences, and limited reservation-based access illustrates the exclusivity of the artwork. The paper ultimately delves into subjectivity in art, not as a means to offer solutions or political commentaries but to showcase diverse possibilities. Tiravanija manifests the function of art as a means of socialization and an opportunity to contemplate interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.

Chitra Ganesh’s Sultana’s Dream (2018) is a series of twenty-seven linocut prints that illustrates the 1905 literary work of the same name by Bengali feminist writer and activist Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. The story describes a feminist utopia named Ladyland filled with technological advancements where women govern and work outside the home while men are forced to stay sequestered inside. Ganesh interprets Hossain’s work over a century later through the lens of an artist of the Indian diaspora, utilizing the text as a starting point from which to launch investigations about the liminalities and hybridities of the diasporic condition. Borrowing language and ideas from scholars working at the intersections of diaspora studies and art history, this paper argues that through Sultana’s Dream, Ganesh posits diasporic vision as a form of seeing that transcends the strict temporal and spatial boundaries of the hegemonic order. Ganesh explores alternative forms of knowledge creation, including an engagement with sensorial and bodily experiences that address the limitations of sight and the objectifications that come with being seen, and the transmission of communal knowledge through women-centered communities that share common histories. In mobilizing history to create an alternative imaginary, Ganesh challenges the hegemonic order of the world that is so often controlled by Western exoticisms of place and space which essentialize certain identities, histories, and geographies, forcing them into the fixed binaries of East versus West, and the contemporary versus the historical. By manipulating space to break down strict borders, and by swirling together different temporal periods and geographies, Ganesh visually encapsulates the ambiguity and openness of Hossain’s text and links them to the conditions of being in diaspora. The world that Ganesh creates in Sultana’s Dream is never quite fixed, finalized, and stable, as she imbues identity, particularly identities of the diaspora, with much more complexity.

Hanbok is the traditional dress of Korea, donned for formal and ceremonial occasions. One would imagine that a traditional garment existing from one of the earliest dynasties of Korea, the Three Kingdom Period (57 BC – 668 AD), to today would have stayed static in design. However, hanbok is facing a resurgence today both within and outside of its home country in its design and use, creating international interest in the garment. It is no longer seen as a “costume,” solely used for special, traditional events in Korea. Rather, it has become an inspiration for modern designers world-wide. They have taken traditional aspects of hanbok and have merged them with contemporary styles, such as: miniskirts, sweats, and cropped tops, creating designs seen today in daily wear, on the runway, and in the media. In comparing garments and designs from designers all over the world, the influence hanbok has had and continues to have on the clothing of today will be seen.

Korean contemporary artists delve into complex aspects of national and cultural identity from emphasis of self to defining tradition through their materials and artistic intentions. Discussing the same dilemmas as previous artist generations such as during the Dansaekhwa and Minjung art movements of the 1970s-80s while utilizing the expanding art scene and art market that continues to grow in South Korea. Korean art holds an intense hyper-development formed from multiple forces such as hypermodernism, colonization, and generational trauma. Even through the development of modern into contemporary art in Korea, a constant discussion has remained around national identity, a search for an answer and give definition on a collective national to personal scale in a postcolonial existence.

Looking at three examples of Korean contemporary art, Minjung Kim, in her series The Room and Mountains, visually discusses hybridity between Korean art and materials such as hanji paper with Western art elements and techniques learned through her academic training in Italy. Visual artist Park Chan Kyong uses the power of film in Citizen’s Forest (2016) and physical involvement of interactive sculpture with Water Mark (2019), using both to explore directly the loss, displacement, and questioning of “tradition” and how tragedy and trauma presents itself in modern day Korean society with the discussion of national and cultural identity. Artist Suh Do Ho explores both in a universal and personal message through traditional materiality of unjoza fabric the concept of home as a space and emotion as well the idea of individuality versus the larger collective in the sculptural installation of Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home (1999), and his developmental piece Who Am We? (2000) and Who Am We? (2013).

Both Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, done in the late 1980s, and Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Characters: Big-Character Posters as a part of the Red Humor series made in 1986, were created during China’s Open Door Policy era shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution–an era characterized by massive influxes of foreign and democratic ideas coupled with fear leftover from the Cultural Revolution. The shared political/cultural environment from which these two works materialized has led to the creation of two 3-dimensional installations that scrutinized the role the Chinese language plays in contemporary Chinese society. With the social history of art as the theoretical framework, my paper conducts a comparative analysis of these two artworks and investigates how language and the display of artworks are utilized in positioning Chinese contemporary art in the difficult political and cultural context of the country. I argue that both Xu and Wu examined the weaponization of language during Mao’s China and utilized Chinese cultural artifacts from both imperial and Communist China to evoke the repressed memory of a particular group of Chinese audience—namely, the generation of Chinese people that had experienced the Cultural Revolution. However, the two artists differ in their approach. While Wu utilized big-character posters to recreate an unadulterated Cultural Revolution experience, Xu mimicked the way that the CCP deconstructed and reconstructed language to manufacture a perfect illusion. The two artworks exemplify how contemporary Chinese artists during the late 1980s examined the relationship between language and politics and reconfigured the harsh cultural policies during Mao’s China into their artistic practices. My presentation addresses the role that calligraphy, language, and big-character posters play in both empirical and Mao’s China and examines the presentation of these two artworks by discussing the organization of the spaces, the choice of color, the usage of lighting, and the forms in which the artworks are presented.

The year 1989 is a critical junction for Chinese contemporary artists: the monumental China Avant-Garde exhibit and its swift closing by authorities; four months later, the police fired shots at student protesters in Tiananmen Square. In the 1996 article, “Post-allegorical art: China’s Choice,” critic and scholar Zhang Yiwu argues that art as embodied by the 1980s has depleted while a new era of the post-allegorical emerges, exemplified by Cynical Realism and Political Pop in the Post-1989 period. Zhang is responding to American literary scholar Frederic Jameson’s theory on the national allegory. In 1985, Jameson visited China and taught at Peking University for a semester. Jameson’s texts and ideas widely circulated amongst Chinese intellectuals increasingly interested in the cosmopolitan world. Jameson argues that all third-world texts should be read as “national allegories.” The cultural distinction of third-world countries is their struggle with first-world imperialism and the processes of modernization thrusted upon them. Zhang adopts Jameson’s idea and interprets Chinese art in the 1980s as allegorical, but further argues that the new era post-1989 ushers in post-allegorical art in China.

Using artists Liu Xiaodong’s 1996 painting Fat Grandson as case study, I argue that Liu uses realism to frame a version of cultural reality that achieves the new era of post-allegorical art. Realism is imported and transformed in China as two distinct terms: 写实主义 (xieshi zhuyi), which is the adoption of classical realism; and 现实主义 (xianshi zhuyi) or socialist realism, which is an idealized reality to convey a socialist agenda. The rejection of the national allegory is achieved through the artists’ subversion of realism to frame a satirical, indifferent vision of cultural reality in China.

Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin (1989-2002) stepped up to the office after the 1989 Tiananmen Protest with a clear and forceful vision to continue Deng Xiaoping’s (1978-1989) economic reforms and four modernizations. During Jiang’s presidency, China experienced its own economic miracle. Averaging at 11.28% annual GDP growth in the decade leading up to 2001, China was under another revolution. Skyscrapers were built, airports were enlarged, and subways were constructed. It was the dawn of modernity in China and people could feel it. Behind the excitement of the 90s, however, people started to worry about what to make of this rapidly changing China, and such was the time when Yao Lu (1967- ) began his career as an artist in his hometown Beijing. Yao experienced the revolution in Beijing firsthand. After he started teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the early 2000s, he noticed something similar between Song (960-1279) landscape paintings and Beijing’s construction sites. My paper examines how Yao Lu used references to the past in his new landscapes to express his concerns about Beijing in-the-making. Some of the issues raised by his photography that I teased out are: the neglection of non-local workers, environmental pollution, and the invasion of Eurocentric culture.

Contemporary performance art has emerged in China as a constant interaction and negotiation with the country’s ever-changing socio-political landscape. Benefited from Deng Xiaoping’s Economic Reforms in the 1980s, performance art soon flourished as a new form of self-expression, critically engaging with political discourses. However, the widespread hopes of artistic freedom evaporated and was replaced by clandestine forms of art-making after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Along with government censorship, China was increasingly driven by market forces: the growing international interest in commercial art, following the trend of pop and cynical realism, further marginalized performance art. Positioned in double jeopardy of economic exploitation and human rights violation, performance artists in the late 1990s felt a strong urge to experiment with their bodies as if those were the only things they could control.

Among these artists, He Chengyao (born 1964) and He Yunchang (born 1967) produced works that represent some of the most radical dissents. In their performances, Chengyao and Yunchang placed their bodies in self-inflicted, extreme, and dangerous conditions to probe the limits of their physical endurance as well as challenge social norms. Specifically, they used their bodies to visualize the personal and collective struggles. Through repeating the everyday actions of walking, breathing, and sitting, Chengyao and Yunchang explored haptic sensations and cultivated a deeper grasp of what it means and how to live under restrictions. Incorporating repetitive peculiarities in subversive gestures, their works voiced unspoken traumas and established a legacy of resilient resistance in Chinese experimental art.

This paper will conduct an inclusive survey of the various votive offerings deposited within the Sanctuary of Hera on the Aegean island of Samos, focusing on those that have been either dedicated by foreign worshippers or brought to the island from faraway nations by Samians. The endless votives present within the sanctuary speak to the socio-economic relationships Samos maintained with foreign entities during the Archaic Period, which marked an era of peak activity for religious pilgrimage both by local and foreign peoples. An array of nations, specifically within the Near East and other Greek islands, are represented within the sanctuary, physically attesting to both the prominence of Hera’s worship abroad and the abilities of Samian seafarers in their global reach. The defined identity of Samos as a sacred island, being the mythological birthplace of Hera, gave the island an influential ability to attract worshippers from overseas as depicted through their dedications, ultimately impacting the culture and economy of the island while establishing an interconnected network between Samos and the rest of the ancient world. The sanctuary remains a significant site, renowned for its diversity of foreign imported offerings, emphasizing the sacred location as a site where a multitude of ancient cultures and religions may synchronize for one joint devotion to the goddess Hera.

For my presentation, I will discuss the correlation between Athenian vase painting from the Archaic Period (ca. 800-480 BCE) and its Etruscan consumer base in Etruria. My aim is to provide new insights/hypotheses into why Etruscan society bought and subsequently emulated Athenian-made pottery and into whether or not their patronage of painted vases reflected purely aesthetic desires amongst the upper echelons of their society or rather an effort to adopt broader Greek cosmology into their own visual culture. Further, I will analyze how more recent archaeological evidence indicates that the Etruscans held more economic influence over the vase trade than previously assumed. For this analysis, I explore how the Etruscans utilized and adapted the visual imagery featured on vessels as well as the functional uses of the vessels themselves for their own purposes. I focus on the most proactive Athenian vase painter in this region, Nikosthenes, who understood the lucrative nature of the pottery market in this part of the Mediterranean as he pioneered decorating Etruscan-inspired shapes with Greek imagery, clearly catering to regional demand. Finally, I attempt to determine if the trends seen in the importation of Attic vases in Etruria are mirrored in Etruscan settlements in Campania and the Po River Valley.

Examining archeological and epigraphic evidence in its historical context, this talk explores the Cult of the Nymphs venerated across ancient Greek poleis. It analyzes the nymphs’ profound cultural and historical impact that is often overlooked in the study of ancient Greece. Female deities thought to embody an ecological site, such as fountains and springs, nymphs became fundamental to polis identity, their locations were often central to city plans, and their faces depicted on coinage became representative of the city itself. In the community, nymphs were integral to rituals for major life events, most often in the lives of women. Their femininity and deification attest to the representation of women in Greek society, who, in particular, cultivated rituals in honor of the nymphs. Typically prominent in bridal, birth, and death ceremonies, the worship of the nymphs offered women rich ways of validating female experience in an intensely patriarchal society. The artistic representations that survive today articulate the deep meaning and symbolism that the nymphs held for the community of women and Greek citizens as a whole. By examining ancient coins, votive offerings, and architectural sites of veneration across the eras, this paper explores the value and significance of the worship of the Cult of the Nymphs in ancient Greece.

The Sarcophagus of Santa Maria Antiqua, an early Christian sarcophagus, displays a motif that has deep-rooted connections to the past in portraying the figure Jonah. The viewer sees the three scenes of Jonah, a story from the Bible of a Jewish man who ran from God, was thrown overboard on a ship, swallowed by a whale, and questioned God when angry. Yet, this story holds symbolism in Christianity of redemption, salvation, and resurrection. Jonah of the Sarcophagus of Santa Maria Antiqua rests upon a shore beneath vines after his trials, taking the form of the Greco-Roman image of Endymion. It is unknown whether this choice was that of the artist or the patron. Endymion’s image symbolizes rest, eternal sleep, youth, and death. This motif is commonly found on sarcophagi as inhumation, the burial of remains, became a more traditional practice instead of cremation in the Roman Empire. Similarly, some surviving sculptures, such as the marble statue of Endymion in the British Museum, have the same iconic sleeping and beautiful manner of the Greco-Roman style. By analyzing motifs of Jonah and Endymion in sarcophagi, mosaic, and sculpture, the reader is presented with the question of whether the Christians who adopted this imagery did so as a possible means of converting the Pagans. Or were the Christians attempting to wipe out Paganism by subsuming its artwork as well as its style? In this paper, I will compare the use of the Endymion motif to portray the biblical prophet Jonah as art transitioned from the traditional Greco-Roman, or Pagan, style into early Christian art, as well as to introduce another motif that was used between the two religious cultures. 

The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore is a Major papal basilica, as well as the largest of all churches dedicated to Mary, Mother of Christ, within the city of Rome. From the initial rebuilding and groundbreaking ceremony in 432 CE, the basilica has been intrinsically linked with the Virgin Mary, whose importance as a Christian figure cannot be understated. The Salus Populi Romani, or the ‘Salvation of the Roman People,’ is a cult image depicting the Virgin and Child dating from the sixth century CE that is housed in the Pauline chapel within Santa Maria Maggiore. While the definitive dating of the miraculous image is the subject of much speculation, the icon is said to have been created by Saint Luke the Evangelist, with divine assistance. This paper will examine how the Salus Populi Romani acutely demonstrates and asserts the role of Mary as both a maternal figure as well as the protectress of the Roman people, in both ancient and modern times. This paper was formulated in conjunction with Loyola Marymount’s 2022 Summer Immersion in Rome: Christian Faith and Visual Culture program, a class dedicated to the studies of Christianity and art history in situ.

In 1994-1995, the tomb of the king of the state of Chu, Liu Wu (d. 154 BC), was discovered in Xuzhou, eastern China. The tomb was large and complex, with chambers oriented horizontally underground, and was filled with everyday items, including terracotta servants to accompany the king in the afterlife. The most striking part of the tomb was the jade armor suit, crafted from small plaques of white jade held together with golden threads, in which Liu Wu was encased. The jade, a longstanding valuable material, was believed to protect Liu Wu’s soul from evil spirits, giving it immortality by shielding him in the afterlife. This paper argues that Liu Wu’s armor reflected a more secular concern. In life, Liu Wu was a leading figure in the Rebellion of the Seven States against the Han empire, the dominant ruling power at the time. By using jade and gold, materials traditionally reserved for the emperor, to make his armor Liu Wu was demonstrating his opposition to the Han empire and intending to out-stage the emperor in the afterlife. Liu Wu’s tomb can thus be considered his final revolt. 

Before Donna Ferrato captured Bengt Hits Elizabeth in 1982, violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, had long been viewed as unphotographable. On an assignment to cover the family lives of swingers for Japanese Playboy, Ferrato unknowingly entered into an abusive relationship between Bengt and Elizabeth, and eventually found herself at the forefront of a domestic abuse awareness campaign. Over the next decade, Ferrato lived with families, visited battered women’s shelters, and spent over 6,000 hours with police on related calls. This work culminated in the publication of Living with the Enemy in 1991, which combined photographs showing the effects of domestic abuse on women and children and provided actionable resources for readers. Since its publication, the penalties for people convicted of domestic violence have been increased, millions of dollars have been donated to battered women’s shelters, and Domestic Violence Awareness Month has been recognized nationally.

In Bengt Hits Elizabeth, Ferrato disrupts the private act of violence that had since been kept away from public view. By insisting on public confrontation through the raw emotion and dynamic forms of her photographs, Donna Ferrato has drawn national attention to domestic violence and its victims, and represented the power of activism photography. While Bengt Hits Elizabeth was captured in a moment of panic, a variety of technical and compositional techniques work together to create a sense of immediacy and turbulence for the viewer. Using Ferrato’s photograph and its compositional elements as a foundation, this paper explores the impact documentary photography has had on the photographer, the victim, and the viewer.

My paper analyzes Kiki Smith’s 2001 bronze sculpture Rapture through ecofeminist theories of the subordination of women and nature under a patriarchal system. By referencing the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the feminist messages in Smith’s work take visual response to the modest, vulnerable female characters in common folklore. In Rapture, a nude woman emerges from a jagged tear in a wolf’s stomach that protrudes outwards as indication that the woman cut herself from within the animal, and she strides forward in triumph. This female nude that Smith created is not posing for the male gaze but is walking past it in reclamation of her freedom as she is no longer bound to a male’s narration of what she should be. Using ecofeminist theories that acknowledge the connection between the historical treatment of women and nature and the tale of Little Red Riding Hood through feminist examination, I underscore how patriarchal practice creates a culture in which the duty of man is to protect and possess the prosperity of women. The woman in Smith’s Rapture is a rejection of the naive Little Red Riding Hood character that is punished for her curious nature, as the woman embraces the strength in her femininity.

This study examines Ana Teresa Fernández’s performance Borrando La Frontera, exploring how it utilizes symbolic gesture and spectacle to reexamine borders as mental barriers to female self-actualization and as artificial divides between physical and nonphysical spaces. At 11:00 AM on a Tuesday in 2011, wearing a black bodycon dress and black high heels and holding either a paint sprayer or a paint brush and paint can, Fernández painted the Tijuana-San Diego border wall a shade of blue meant to match the color of the sky, climbing up a ladder hoisted on the Mexican side of the border. In doing so, she gained the attention of the surrounding people, since the part of the fence she painted seemed to disappear into thin air. The history of this border is rooted in the constant travel between these two cities and the exploitation of its Mexican female employees who work in maquiladoras. Fernández’s outfit is a feminist amalgam that demonstrates how Mexican women can be seen as more than traditional caricatures in art, refuses the acceptance of the Madonna vs. whore stereotype that is meant to define women in two distinct categories, and exposes the tendency of many migrant women to work in unsafe working conditions.

The border wall’s ridiculousness is highlighted in Borrando La Frontera, which conceptually challenges this man-made structure that cuts through nature that looks identical on both sides. Fernández advances a new perspective of borders by utilizing symbolic gesture, the action of painting the border, and spectacle, as she creates the image of empty space where the wall used to inhabit. Thus, this investigation reflects on the ability of Fernández’s performance to reimagine a world where the Mexico-U.S. border does not exist, while it exposes the psychological borderlands that women must experience throughout their existence.

This project interrogates the thematic patterns of violence enacted on Latina bodies through the examination, analysis, and understanding of Cuban American body artist, Ana Mendieta’s work. Ana Mendieta’s work is often written about within the context of her death. There’s a fascination with Mendieta’s story, her alleged murder following a domestic dispute connecting to the themes of gender violence prevalent throughout her work in university. The body outlines used to create her most prolific series, her Silueta series, echo in the protests that follow her husband, Carl Andre’s exhibitions. There’s a mysticism created around her, claiming the foreshadowing of her death through her body of work. Her death haunts her legacy and the interpretations of her artwork.

This project argues instead, not that her death was foreshadowed through her artwork, but that her artwork thematically followed the patterns of violence enacted upon bodies holding similar social identities to hers. The project not only aims to analyze Mendieta’s practice, discerning the ways she identifies and confronts the audiences with this violence, but also puts Mendieta’s practice in conversations with contemporary community arts organizations that continue the thematic conversations that Ana Mendieta grapples within her work. These programs support Latino communities and encourage conversations with youth about their specific experiences. This engagement across time between Ana Mendieta’s artwork and the artists and community arts organizers in 2022, illustrates the significance of centering the works of Latina artists. By communicating the Latina experience visually, these artists are working to develop the underrepresented voices of Latina youth in the art canon to illustrate how art can be used for building community, accessing resources, sharing information, processing experiences, and overall understanding the power of one’s own voice.

On the Internet, specifically on social media surrounding arts and people fascinated by horror, a new microgenre of photography has emerged. It centers around vague, empty spaces lacking signs of human life, bathed in artificial lighting and the shine of linoleum. These places are a depiction of common areas that one would shelf to the back of the mind: chain hotels, shopping malls, school hallways- all under the name “Liminal Space.” Despite its simplicity, the reaction is intense; people comment on the strange emotions evoked as a simultaneous unease and sense of déjà vu. This paper explores the idea of a “malevolent nostalgia,” as these spaces are a sort of child-ghost: a formerly jubilant thing turned abandoned. Despite the newness of the genre, Liminal Spaces have a rich anthropological context, as the idea of the anthropological liminal space posited by Victor Turner, postmodern architecture, Freud’s concept of the uncanny, and the state of consumerism create the instinctual definition of what a Liminal Space “is,” as this paper will explore. What is also fascinating about this shared understanding is the amateur and memetic nature of this community on the Internet. Instead of exploring a deliberate thesis created by a syndicate of artists, malevolent nostalgia is more like an observation of the subconscious of a group of thousands creating their art from a sense of play. My presentation will be a new look into a type of art that is an insight into a generation expressing the unease and lack of place associated with contemporary anxieties through photography, told through a medium wherein its scholarship is still in its exploratory phases.