The artistic use of contour rivalry, in which two or more visual objects share contours, is exemplified by artworks from Chavín and related cultures. In this paper, I analyze contour rivalry in three Chavín-style artworks, identifying in them for the first time the ‘swing effect,’ a related, recently described visual phenomenon. These effects may have been used to encode spiritual information, accessible only to those trained in visual literacy, justifying and preserving a newly emerging religiopolitical order. By recognizing these visual systems and their possible purpose, we can better understand how Chavín-style artworks were inseparable from the social, religious, and political context in which these artworks were created.

The representation of captives is present throughout the whole of the Maya civilization. Defeated warriors are shown stripped of clothing, wealth, jewelry, and headdress. One of the most compelling scenes depicting captives from the Maya world can be found at Bonampak. The murals in Bonampak reference ideas and beliefs of the Maya regarding warfare, capture of captives, and victory over their enemies. This paper focuses on the mural situated in the North Wall of Room 2 in Bonampak, more specifically the representation of captives and sacrifice within Maya culture and art. Captive representation within Maya art emphasizes the physical manner in which they are depicted, including the representation of the body, wealth, and eventual sacrifice, as well as the broader ways in which they are significant within the Maya civilization and in the context of Mesoamerica. This iconography is believed to be a means to emphasize a ruler’s power, strength in subduing other groups, and influence over those who view the artworks, be it in external or internal spaces. It is thought that the artists who built these artworks with captive imagery were not interested in showing realism, as the figures were shown with the characteristic iconography and lack of clothing, but rather a constructed world emphasizing symbols, ideas, and events in the Maya society. These portrayals also serve to immortalize battles and events in art and construct social identities for warriors and members of elite society.

Over the past year, I examined how gender relates to, influences, and controls social structures, this time through the lens of Mesoamerican and South American artworks. I particularly investigated two different women recorded in the historical and archaeological record: Lady Six Monkey, found in the Mixtec Codex Selden, and the grave assemblage belonging to the Señora de Cao. These two women, though separated through space and time, share a similar quality: both women seem to be out of place in relation to modern day preconceptions relating to Mesoamerican and South American gender norms specifically. Lady Six Monkey’s story is recorded in the limited historical record that remains of the Mixtec society. Though not initially thought to be true, the Codex Selden provides historical evidence to suggest that Lady Six Monkey played an important role in shaping politics during her lifetime. The Señora de Cao provides a similar case. Through thorough analysis of her grave assemblage, the objects present in the tomb not only suggest her position of high status but also indicate that gender norms and expectations may be more fluid than initially perceived. The Señora de Cao was found buried with a collection of 42 narigueras, pieces of nose jewelry and other objects that up until the discovery of her tomb were exclusively associated with men and the masculine. Both women, in turn, can provide insight into a more varied perspective in regard to gender norms and expectations relating to power structures in societies originally thought to be exclusively patriarchal.

The provenance of pre-Columbian objects in art museums and collections is currently an understudied field, though it is greatly important to keep track of the locations that objects visit and the people who care for them. The history of collecting pre-Columbian art has intertwined with colonialism for centuries, resulting in the illicit trafficking of some objects, their entry into art markets through auctions and private deals, and their decontextualized exhibition in some institutions. Art institutions have the cultural authority to influence how visitors perceive objects and the cultures they come from in exhibitions, and by providing transparent access to provenance history, they show commitment to preserving and thinking critically about material and social pasts. In this thesis, I explore the provenance of a Maya carved panel in the Art and Art History Collection at the University of Texas at Austin and place it within the broader history of collecting pre-Columbian objects. I first describe the piece’s imagery and textual glyphs and introduce the history of collecting pre-Columbian art as informed by leading scholars in the discipline today. Next, through archival records from the Art and Art History Collection (AAHC), Texas Memorial Museum, and the Denver Art Museum, I trace the provenance of the panel from around 1955 to its present location in the AAHC in 2025. Lastly, I explore the larger context of the people and institutions that stewarded the piece to illustrate the social spheres the collectors were a part of and to investigate to what extent there existed a market for pre-Columbian art in Dallas, Texas in the twentieth century.

This presentation is a part of Conmemorando a la Comunidad: Latinx Experiences at Trinity, a digital humanities project started in the summer of 2023 through a collaboration with the Mexico, Americas, and Spain (MAS) program and the University Archives. During the 1970s and 1980s, Trinity University experienced a groundswell of change and creativity, especially within the visual arts community. Chicanx and Latinx students comprised a small percentage of the art department during this period. Yet, their impact is immeasurable, as many have become nationally renowned artists, community activists, and educators. These students created their own spaces to showcase their unique work across campus. They found places to exhibit in San Antonio, defying the city’s fine art and museum culture, which historically rejected minority voices and expression. Furthermore, each artist uniquely responded to the complex relationship between politics and art within their work. The Chicanx and Latinx students featured in this project supported the foundation for contemporary visual arts in San Antonio as we know it today.

This presentation will utilize oral histories conducted with artists and archival research to highlight how these individuals maintained their identities as Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x through diverse artistic practices that broke traditional understandings of Chicanx and Latinx art. Many of the Trinity alumni subverted expectations placed on artists of Mexican descent through the exploration of abstract and conceptual art, pioneering performance art, and experimentation with music. Yet, these artists stayed in touch with their cultural background by implementing indigenous imagery, addressing problems unique to their personal experiences, and staying engaged in their communities. This presentation highlights the importance of a more nuanced understanding of Chicanx and Latinx art production during the last half of the twentieth century and into our present day.

Interpreting Self: A Collection of Contemporary Oral Histories Exploring Generational Latine/x Identity & Narrative expands upon generational Latine/xAmerican identity through a holistic lens by reclaiming the narrative through the documentation and interpretation of contemporary oral histories. The multidisciplinary project combines the academic, sociological, curatorial, artistic, and experiential to recover meaning and counter the canon of hegemonic initiatives and representation of Latine/x-American identity.

Interpreting Self acts as an intervention in the ongoing prejudiced interactions and exclusion of Latine/x-Americans in the sociocultural landscape. Through collecting oral histories from Latine/x-Americans who identify as first and second-generation a platform is developed for a more complex understanding of what it means to be Latine/x-American and disengage from monolithic conceptions of the minority experience which both marginalize and homogenize identity through gendered rhetoric, discrimination, racism, assimilation, and the disconnect between imposed or projected identity.

A translation of visual culture then occurs. This project mirrors experience and thus requires alternative forms for the information to live. Utilizing decolonized practices of community-engaged research, participants will communicate how they want to be represented in illustrated portraits. Color and imagery work together to express the identity of the participant and are given importance. A digital exhibition is then curated, engaging in practices of curatorial activism, giving a voice to identity expression through the exercise in portraiture, which makes visible those who, throughout the history of art, would not have been represented in this format. A catalog will contextualize the diasporic first and second-generation Latinx-American experience through dialogue that interconnects the paralleling worlds of the hyphenated identity, Latine/x-American.

Acting as a writer, ethnographer, art historian, artist, researcher, and the subject of the research, I am a first-generation US-born Latine/x-American from Generation Y whose own journey of redefining and understanding the multiplicity of Latine/x-Americans’ identities is reflected and held accountable within the project.

In a unique postmodernist language, artist Félix González-Torres produced highly conceptual work that form intimate expressions of identity politics. In my scholarship, I have explored how his work encapsulates the tension between activism, private reconciliation and an intersectional identity as art became combative during the AIDS crisis. Diverging from a bulk of past scholarship which views his work as inherently political, I argue the role of emotion has been downplayed at the expense of Barthesian ideals. As his work confronts public and private realms of art, scholars have mistaken private identity as means for public activism. This line of thinking tends to diminish individual experiences of mourning queer artists endured during the AIDS crisis. For the basis of my argument, I applied art historian Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, “Mourning and Militancy” (1989) which allows me to examine the importance of mourning rather than mobilization as queer people were often pressured to act when experiencing extreme loss. Further, I expand this argument by investigating González-Torres’s intersectional identity as a queer, Latino and immigrant artist. Because González-Torres has been examined in the scope of North American conceptualism, relationships between his work and his identity have been subject to erasure in academic discourse. For this, inclusion of theories outside of established conceptual framework and from gender and sexuality studies are crucial. Examining González-Torres’s work through a lens of biographical reflection also situates the scholarship within the discourse of Care. The notion of “Radical Care” has become incredibly relevant to contemporary art in social practice. Yet, this same treatment has not been applied to González-Torres and his contemporaries. By employing this lens, González-Torres becomes an early adopter of radical self care. His experience as a Latino and immigrant also give way to radical care scholarship that decentralizes care from a white, North American perspective.

This paper examines how the artist Alexander Volkov’s representations of agricultural labor in early Soviet Central Asia, particularly within the context of cotton production, depict the entire region as being defined by labor and production. Considering how the foremost painter of the Uzbek avant-garde chose to showcase the region’s primary export reveals how the cotton industry infiltrated Central Asian life beginning in the 1920s. The Soviet Union framed the rapidly growing Uzbek cotton industry as the force that would bring Uzbekistan from ‘backwardness’ into modernity. I use Langston Hughes’ 1934 memoir A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia to explore the perception of this socialist promise. Hughes compares the two systems of cotton production that he has witnessed: in America, cotton production was the system that forced Black people into a cycle of slavery, poverty, and pain, but in Central Asia, cotton was a beacon of hope that guided the everyday person towards a new, enlightened, and modern future. I explore the conflict between the perception of cotton as an instrument of progress, and the actual physical effects of the industry on both land and laboring bodies. Hughes’ memoir foregrounds the idea of how Volkov’s paintings constructed Central Asia as a “landscape of labor” where cotton production defined peasants’ everyday lives. The paper then provides visual analysis of several Volkov paintings from 1926-1945 that I viewed in person at the Nukus Museum of Art in Uzbekistan. Paying close attention to facture and color choice, I analyze how Volkov represented human, land, and commodities as increasingly interchangeable and dissolved into one another. I examine how Volkov’s works, while offering a utopian portrayal of labor under socialism, ultimately obscured the harsh realities of collectivization in Soviet Central Asia, where cotton production was a symbol of both hope and environmental devastation.

This paper focuses on folk imagery in Hungarian art and architecture, as both a means to promote nationalism and preserve cultural identity throughout the twentieth century, beginning with the art nouveau movement at the turn of the century. I center my analysis around Margit Kovacs (1902-1977), a modern ceramic artist active throughout the interwar period and into the communist regime. Using her works as a case study, I address the question of how folk art was successfully utilized to promote nationalist ideology at the expense of the artist’s freedom of self-expression. I specifically look at how Kovacs’ public works, most often commissioned by the state, compare with her domestic, more familial works. While Kovacs censored many parts of herself, likely as a means of survival, her smaller sculptural works do give some insight into her personal life, despite much of it being unknown. I compare her domestic sculptures with publicly commissioned works, in order to emphasize the tension between the artist and the state and ask how much control did she really have as an artist? By looking at her entire body of work, I aim to address these questions of meaning and better situate Kovacs within the greater context of socialist nationalism and Hungarian folk tradition.

Where the Western canon may have categorized the arts of the ‘Eastern region’ of Europe, shadowed by the strict ideologies of communist Soviet Union, as ‘controlled’, ‘propagandist’, ‘collectivist’, ‘unpolitical’ and so forth, construing these spaces for artists as repressive spaces that discouraged and prevented any pursuit for individual creativity, much less differing political agendas, the Eastern bloc valued these spaces for its creative ingenuity. For what the Western world saw as a ‘controlled’ minimal space, the Eastern bloc viewed as a place for hidden exchanges and subtle meanings: a space that required one to be familiar with surveillance and censorship–a space that thrived in the shadows, or in other words, a place that was abundant in individual and abstract levels of thinking.

Despite the artworks, ranging between realist paintings to the performative arts, appearing to be non-political in nature, various examples reveal that these hidden artists, such as Sanja Ivekovic from ex-Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakian Julius Koller and Lutz Dammbeck during what was once East Germany, utilized a multitude of different mediums and styles that dug deep into subtextual and symbolical meaning – injecting non-political gestures rooted in historical, political and culturally understood meaning that commentates on the individual experiences that were shared in this, singular, reality.

Hence, this paper argues that in this portrayal of the Eastern Bloc, of which the dominating Western canon constructs, as ‘collectivist’ and non-political spaces that lacked any creative individualist thought or expression, a re-evaluation of these artworks and their contexts leads to an alternative perspective, where artworks are thought of not as collectivist or as lacking in political and artistic expression, but rather as a resistance to surveillance and censorship where artists would thrive in subtext and hidden motifs to promote their political beliefs, individual identities and artistic styles. In this way, although these ‘controlled’ spaces appear to lack individuality–a trait highly valued among their Western neighbors–these spaces were largely the opposite as Eastern European artists would dedicate their hidden efforts toward Individualism, with the censoring of dissident art and advocating for collectivist ideologies generating a vast network of creativity that sparked a myriad of artworks and performances–those which, unlike the Western arts, thrive in the quiet moments where subtle gestures and disguised meanings comprised of passionate artists and genius minds.

Yugoslavia, a former multi-ethnic republic consisting of seven now-independent nations, collapsed in 1989, its state-operated propagandist film industry falling with it. This industry functioned under the State Committee of Cinematography and intended to idealize the military strength of Yugoslavia while implementing complete censorship of cinematographic criticism of the republic’s socialist model. Genocide, poverty, and displacement among numerous other crises for civilians were unable to be portrayed in film. Once this strict cinematic system characterized by filtered, unitary narrative ceased to exist, the seven nations of Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia were left to determine what they wished to show in their films and who these films would be meant for. This paper discusses the common cinematographic content of these countries, shaped by shared sociological issues and ethno-religious backgrounds forming narrative patterns addressed amongst these self-asserting hyper-nationalist nations. Individualistic manners of interpreting Yugoslavia’s issues and Balkan identity often also pandered to Western audiences by utilizing self-exoticism, dark tourism, and Euro-Atlantic integration (Jaugaitė, Jovanović, Edward). These cinematic methodologies warped Balkan identity by conforming characters to stereotypes of Eastern European identity, as is explored in Underground (Kusturica) while also depicting war crimes and human rights violations as a means of invoking foreign sympathy for the tragedy within these developing nations. An emerging trend amongst these nations is cinematographic commentary of socialism’s pitfalls, contemporary systematic issues deriving of the formerly corrupt Yugoslavia, and issues of disjointed identity following this collapse. However, the role each nation played in the Yugoslav War altered their perception and recognition of where the fault lied or how certain ethno-religious entities across these nations should be portrayed in emerging post-Yugoslav cinema.