In 1923, following the upheaval and social transformation of the Irish War of Independence, Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) painted Morning After Rain (oil on canvas, 30 x 41.5 inches, Tate Modern). It is a work that epitomizes Yeats’s output at the time and embodies the tension and unsettlement that came with the still-fresh scars of English colonialism and the uncertainty of the years ahead. This reading of Morning After Rain and other paintings from Yeats’s middle period is present in Irish critical and scholarly responses, but from artistic apparatuses outside of Ireland, Yeats’s work has been viewed only in formal relation to the European canon of modern art. I argue that this comparison flattens the unique place of Ireland in the early twentieth century and routinely leaves Yeats confined to labels of “derivative” and “behind the times”. This sidelining stems from a fundamental misreading of his art as personal and expressionistic rather than the socially engaged, and viewer-focused work that it truly is. I also argue that this misreading is by no means accidental, after Yeats’s death, English museums and the English art market rebranded Yeats as a “UK artist” and as part of a shared artistic heritage while beginning to purchase large sections of his oeuvre from Irish sources. This acquisition necessitated a shifting of the story of Yeats’s work to the defanged conception it has today. A shift that erases and whitewashes not only the aspects of Yeats’s work that are radical and anti-colonial but also, in doing so, loses the unique, pioneering, and subtle ways Yeats transmitted those themes.

This paper examines how August Sander’s photomontage series, Studies, Man, illuminates tensions between individuality and mass culture in Weimar-era Germany. Sander constructed the photomontage series out of photographs from his expansive, roughly 600-photograph series, People of the Twentieth Century, which he positioned as an example of how to use photography as a new language descriptive of humans. Through close analysis of form and contextualization with contemporaneous German sociology, phenomenology, and art criticism, this paper argues that People of the Twentieth Century does not consistently communicate categorical definitions of human types and Studies, Man challenges this very categorical endeavor. Regardless of Sander’s intent with the project, the non-definitive nature of his photographic language preserves the dignity of unique individual identities and establishes photography (a new medium at the time) as a uniquely expansive language. By situating Sander’s project in the rise of deindividuation and emphasis on mass culture in Weimar era Germany, this paper establishes his unique impact and suggests broader claims for the role of individual validation in the face of political and social mass movements.

Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting, Nighthawks, has always been admired for its simple, yet powerful composition. The painting draws you in and stays with you long after you have looked away. Heavily inspired by the quiet, isolated environment of New York City during World War II, Hopper presented a window onto a dark street that contains a brightly lit diner. The diner and its inhabitants act as a beacon on a blacked-out night for those who pass by. When Hopper wasn’t painting, he would often seek solace in cinema, taking great inspiration from movies, and subsequently inspiring filmmakers during his lifetime and into the present. This paper begins with a brief formal analysis of Nighthawks, then discusses the reciprocal relationship between Edward Hopper and cinema, and ends by using formal and art historical parallels between painting and cinematography to introduce a theory that the cinematographer may be the new painter.

Known for his abstract forms, Cubism, and blue and pink periods, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) remains one of the most important figures in art history. Starting in 1907 Picasso found a new interest in Vanitas still lifes. Picasso appropriated and reimagined the Vanitas genre—more typically associated with seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. His production of Vanitas still lifes greatly increased during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and continued throughout the Second World War (1939-1945). Picasso’s Vanitas works not only reflect the global devastation and political unrest of this period but also align with the personal losses in his life. The artworks sway between personal reflection and political commentary, drawing from both his personal experiences and broader social conditions. This research will examine the circumstances under which Picasso created each of these works and how these circumstances are reflected in the artworks themselves. Picasso once described art as an instrument of war; he consciously or subconsciously shaped his Vanitas to embody this idea. Through more than twenty memento moris, Picasso pays homage both to the broader struggles of his Spanish and French communities and to those close to him such as Gertrude Stein, Paul Cézanne and Robert Desnos.

In the 1950s, after the destruction of World War II and in light of the contentious political climate of the Cold War, state-funded cultural programs mobilized to establish an international art program and assert a Western cultural position. Art exhibitions across Western Europe were used as a mode to frame abstract art as a universal world language, attempting to assert the dominance and superiority of cultural production in the West. Through exhibition catalogs and associated critique and commentary, a network of scholars and academics emerged as the leading directors in this effort towards a Western, democratic art form. Modern abstract art was often stripped bare of any artistic motives that were political and asserted as if forged purely from the innovation of the artist in the interest of form, color, and line. This ability to shape modern aesthetics to fit a model of individualism and freedom allowed for the exhibitions to formulate a politically motivated position of a Western aesthetic, one that stood opposite those of the Nazi regime and of Communism. This erasure of the context within which modern abstract art was produced asserted this art as autonomous and self-referential, yet these abstractions often appropriated indigenous art making. In asserting abstract art as a cultural power by the West and for the West, exhibitionary modes participated in the erasure of the influence of indigenous art on modern abstract art in favor of elevating these works to fit Western political interests. Through a close examination of artist statements, along with analysis of the strategies employed by curators and subsequent publications by museums and associated critics, we can begin to trace the incongruities and struggles between artists’ intentions and the political means towards which their works were mobilized to position the West, and specifically the United States, as an influential cultural and political power during the Cold War.

American photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) is not often considered as an individual. He is typically grouped in with the institutions and photographic trends that brought him to attention, in particular the Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 New Documents exhibit, which introduced the personal turn in documentary photography. Exploring Friedlander’s Jewishness is one way to consider this photographer outside of the depersonalizing lenses of movements and institutions. What little has been written about Friedlander’s Jewishness, however, has edged dangerously close to what Alan Trachtenberg identified as the problematic lens of “the Jewish eye.” Friedlander’s nation-spanning self-portraits and driver’s side landscapes have earned him the label of a “Wandering Jew.” His compositionally oblique images of monuments and the American West have deemed him an “idol-buster.” Explicit Jewishness rarely appears in Friedlander’s photographs, but the rare cases it does have been ignored in favor of these problematic readings. My paper seeks to concretely examine Friedlander’s Jewishness by analyzing his photographs of and friendship with the outspoken Jewish painter, R. B. Kitaj. I will be looking at Kitaj, a 2002 photobook consisting of portraits of the painter, along with writings by Kitaj, in which Friedlander’s photographs illustrate Kitaj’s radical writing on Jewish art and diaspora. I argue that Friedlander, although rarely talking about his own Jewishness, engages with Jewishness by creating dozens of portraits of Kitaj. Kitaj, in turn, places Friedlander within a tradition of Jewish photography in his own writing. Taking into account Lee Friedlander’s Jewishness reveals a continuity of a Jewish social experience that has been hiding in plain sight. Jewish relationships and networks underlie his photographic practice, in his portraits of R. B. Kitaj and beyond.

In this paper, I argue that photographer Nan Goldin (b. 1953) utilizes the specific of her Lower East Side (New York) queer community to understand a universal experience. Goldin’s appropriation of domestic, traditional family photography coupled with her technical approach create an oeuvre that connects the audience to the subjects by making the viewer feel uncomfortably familiar, therefore urging personal introspection. In Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC, 1991 the mundanity of the scene coupled with the striking presence of two drag queens forces the audience to confront them from the same perspective as Goldin’s. Scholar Harrison Adams, argues that Goldin destabilizes and challenges assumptions about the identity of the viewer, writing that by utilizing her own relationships, Goldin is forcing the audience to constantly vacillate between partial and impartial viewpoints. By looking at the artists Sally Mann (b. 1951) Weegee (1899-1968), and Diane Arbus (1923-1971), I compare Goldin’s portfolio and showcase the ways in which her oeuvre differentiates from and parallels these other artists. Goldin and Weegee operate under the same desire for capturing reality but work with opposing means to capture that reality. Mann also appropriates tropes common in family photography by utilizing her subject/artist relationship to encourage introspection. Lastly by utilizing similar subject matter but highly different technical styles, Arbus and Goldin evoke discourse surrounding the power of Goldin’s subjective point of view.

Albert Einstein concluded that time is an illusion. Yet, time rules our world, including art. I argue that contemporary installation art has a uniquely complex relationship with time. First, installation art takes on the quality of time, or the human experience of past, present, and future; second, it interrupts this typically passive experience of linear time. I explore contemporary installation’s idiosyncratic relationship with time through four case studies: Dmitri Vrubel’s My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love (1990), a mural on the Berlin Wall’s East Side Gallery; Xu Bing’s Where Does the Dust Itself Collect (2004), in which dust from the collapse of the Twin Towers displays a Zen Buddhist quote; Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (first exhibited in 1985), an evolving slideshow of nearly 700 alternating photographs of the artist and the people close to her; and Félix González-Torres’s parenthetically titled Portrait of Ross in L.A. (1991), a mound of colorfully wrapped hard candy weighing about 175 pounds, or the average weight of a healthy man. From my analysis, I conclude that installation art’s ability to embody time and interrupt our passive experience of it aligns with its ability to communicate many levels of trauma. Each of these contemporary installations express time and/or interrupt it and they each portray a certain kind of trauma, whether personal, interpersonal, or social. Thus, contemporary installations are a unique vessel for time and as such have a heightened ability to create meaning from trauma.

With increasingly diverse forms of cultural heritage being accepted into the World Heritage canon, it has become apparent how approaches to heritage conservation lag in their application to colonial heritage in the Global South. This paper first assesses how Portuguese colonial-era cultural policies have been transferred into contemporary heritage management of the Island of Mozambique. It then addresses how the two visual planes of built cultural heritage preservation and its photographic representation mutually reinforce the narratives they construct, as found in archival material relating to this time and contemporary literature in Portugal and Mozambique. Materials analyzed are, amongst others, magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues from the mid- to late-twentieth-century; various photographs and published reports by UNESCO, as well as interviews with individuals who have or are currently living or working on the island. This project operates within an intersection of studies of heritage, tourism, and photography in its analysis of the visual discourse around the Island of Mozambique, which is compared with testimonies of people living and working on the island. It argues that through interlinked practices of cosmetic conservation and decontextualized photography of the island’s Macuti Town, the island’s colonial legacy is reinforced, instead of memorialized. Photographs documenting heritage management falsely suggest the inclusion of residents as stakeholders in the development of the island as a World Heritage Site and ensuing tourist destination. Staged resident stakeholder involvement risks an incomplete version of the history of the Island of Mozambique being preserved and communicated to tourists, heritage professionals, and future generations. It concludes that a more comprehensive understanding of the Outstanding Universal Value the site represents should be included in the dissemination of visual discourse surrounding the island, also mediated by resident stakeholders.

The Bengal Famine of 1943, a result of British colonial mismanagement, left millions of Bengal’s rural poor to starve. Wartime requisitioning, exploitative economic policies, and insufficient relief measures exacerbated food scarcity, creating a man-made crisis. The event also spurred a cultural response, particularly through Bengal’s anti-fascist art movement, where artists documented the famine’s devastating human toll and challenged colonial narratives. This presentation will examine how the famine catalyzed anti-colonial movements, which criticized imperial exploitation and mobilized resistance in South Asia. Central to this study are Zainul Abedin’s Famine Sketches, which captured the stark realities of hunger and displacement. These works transcended traditional art venues, circulating widely as affordable prints to reach diverse audiences. By visually exposing the suffering of the rural poor, Abedin’s art galvanized public awareness and solidarity, positioning creativity as a tool for social and political critique. Despite their significance, previous scholarship has overlooked Abedin’s Famine Sketches in favor of literary or political analyses of the famine, sidelining the role of the visual arts in shaping public discourse. By situating Abedin’s work at the center of the discourse of anti-coloniality, this paper underscores its critical importance in understanding how art functioned as a powerful medium for resistance and documentation during this crisis. This paper explores how Abedin’s Famine Sketches functioned as both a humanitarian statement and a political act. The stark, unflinching portrayals of human suffering were instrumental in confronting colonial apathy while also fostering a collective sense of urgency and resilience. These works reflect a broader cultural effort in Bengal to use art as a means of resistance, connecting the famine to systemic colonial oppression. The Famine Sketches stand as enduring examples of how art can serve as a catalyst for change during moments of profound crisis, linking Bengal’s experience to universal narratives of resilience and justice.

As a pioneering Singaporean performance artist of Chinese descent, Lee Wen’s (李文; 1957–2019) works destabilize identity, ethnicity, and freedom through yellow, a hyper-racialized symbol of Chineseness. This essay investigates Lee’s Journey of a Yellow Man (hereafter, A Yellow Man), in which the artist painted his entire body a bright yellow and walked out in public in several countries: England, Singapore, India, Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Australia, and China. This iconic series of performances is as much a critique of the homogenizing effect of Orientalism as a meditation on topics such as freedom, climate change, and humility. I explore how Lee called into question identity and what it means to be Chinese for individuals living in Singapore, as a postcolonial space, by probing into the country’s colonial past and history of migration. Even after the nation gained independence in 1965, Singaporean “Chinese,” who no longer felt particularly associated with China, struggled in identifying a satisfactory label or conceptual distinction to distance themselves from their Chineseness. Through his use of bright yellow paint over his body, and, in certain performances, washing off this paint, Lee Wen constantly reformulated what it means to be Asian and how others perceive his ethnicity. I argue that Lee Wen negotiated the diasporic Singaporean-Chinese identity through his embodiment of a hyper-racialized symbol of “yellow” skin. His performances establish a simultaneous stereotyping and exoticizing framework to problematize postcolonial identity and subvert Orientalist thinking.

Love’s Vision, a novel by poet and philosopher Troy Jollimore, outlines how being in love changes the way one sees the world. Love’s Vision is experienced when the Beloved becomes central in the Lover’s mind. Their special attention towards each other unites the two Lover’s perspectives and creates an experience that blurs the world surrounding their Beloved – a blurring which makes anything that is not their love irrelevant and brings what is into focus. This shift unites both the lives and identities of the Lover and the Beloved. Art is no stranger to depictions of love. The mediums of photography and performance art are unique in that they remove a layer of subjectivity by providing a more familiar representation – that of the physical body. For some artists, their creations can be firmly grounded within the framework of Love’s Vision. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe presented his perspective of love through precise and intimate portraits. He provided a clear, crystalline view of his subjects which captured their personhood. Each person he photographed was transformed into the Beloved, thereby providing the viewer with the Lover’s gaze. Performance duo Marina Abramovic and Ulay have created similarly profound experiences in which they intentionally placed their viewers in a voyeuristic role, allowing them a third-party’s observation of Love’s Vision at work. Utilizing their bodies, the partners provided audiences with the unique experience of studying two lovers entrenched in complete intimacy. This paper will use several Mapplethorpe portraits and selected works performed by Abramovic and Ulay to highlight the particular beauty of Love’s Vision.

Performance artists do not focus on creating a physical piece of work, instead they focus on how to use physical interactions as a method of communication, and a way to test the audience’s limits and understanding of the forces that govern their world. Renowned performance artist Joseph Beuys takes note on how every single person uses the same interactions as performance artists, just structured under the expectations of society. According to Beuys, these interactions create “social sculpture,” a piece of art that every single person builds upon by further subliminally reinforcing or actively questioning the ideals of their society.  Actions that intentionally seek to alter society, especially group actions, include protests. Protests are important as not all people involved in shaping society are given equal weight, and often those with the most power will shape it against others’ best interest for personal gain. This paper will analyze some of the major political works of performance art by Beuys and others, to demonstrate how it aligns with the history of protest and civil rights movements. I will suggest a pattern may emerge in how people can best influence their social sculpture as a community. From this pattern, communities can reclaim control of their social sculpture more effectively than considering either history alone. How can we combine strategies of performance art and political activism to create a generation that moves toward a more equitable society for all?

The first decade of the twenty-first century marked significant advancements in surveillance technologies, fostering a heightened focus on state and corporate control. New Media performance artists, such as The Surveillance Camera Players, Steve Mann, and Big Art Group, have critically engaged with surveillance technologies—CCTV cameras, wearable devices, and live-feed projections—reimagining their oppressive functions into tools for sociopolitical critique. This paper examines how these artists employ surveillance technologies to challenge governmental and capitalist structures while exploring the implications for bodily autonomy in the digital age.

Building on Michel Foucault’s theories of panopticism and self-regulation, the paper argues that these artists transform the surveilled body into a site of resistance and agency. It highlights concepts like disruptive exhibitionism, a methodology for countering surveillance with performative acts of self-representation, as articulated by Julia Chan and Stéfy McKnight. The analysis also incorporates Elise Morrison’s insights into the remediative power of performance art, revealing how surveillance tools can critique privacy violations and catalyze ethical witnessing.

Case studies include The Surveillance Camera Players’ theatrical interventions in public surveillance spaces, Steve Mann’s wearable camera experiments exposing surveillance’s reciprocal absurdities, and Big Art Group’s Flicker, which fragments the body through live video to interrogate digital embodiment. Together, these examples illustrate how artists navigate surveillance culture’s ethical terrain, fostering new conceptions of the body as both digital and political. By recontextualizing surveillance technologies, these works invite critical reflection on power dynamics, privacy, and autonomy, offering audiences fresh perspectives on resistance in the surveillance age.

The paper discusses the ramifications of Dr. Seuss’s career as a political cartoonist, the use of propaganda in the United States, and how it reflects the nation’s war tactics to control its population. Often only remembered as a children’s book author, Dr. Seuss created comics depicting racial stereotypes about Japanese militarists during WWII for the United States Government to publish. While war propaganda was not new in the Western world, the United States and Dr. Seuss utilized it to ostracize Japanese Americans as un-American despite their citizenship. The paper uses analytical tools such as comparison, iconography, and socio-historical context to dissect the artist’s intentions, the meaning of individual pieces, and what the comics reflect on society. While many can argue Dr. Seuss’ comics were particular to the United States, the paper identifies similarities between Dr. Seuss’s and German cartoonists’ works during the same era. It also reflects on those affected by the comics and how they became victims of public perception changed by propagandistic media. Discussing propaganda and those affected by propaganda further illustrates the moral dilemma of racially motivated works in media.

Black Square, a monochromatic oil painting from 1915 by Kazamir Malevich, embodies the near-religious commitment to “art for its own sake” that is a pillar of Modern Art but, scientific analysis today has undercut the serious aura cultivated by the painter, revealing that the painting incorporates, at its conception and in its material existence, a racist joke. Monochrome painting in the early twentieth-century avant-garde has been treated with a dual regard by culture, both as a caricature of Modern Art and as a logical conclusion. Considered a first of its kind, Black Square set a massive precedent, intended to be the harbinger of an era of the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling” over visual accoutrement. Malevich was a well-known pamphleteer and considered by his peers to be a near zealot in his commitment to his philosophy of Suprematism. A fundamental component of his belief system was a denial of the frippery of art and a move toward what he called a “zero point” (a goal of reducing painting to the non-objective, literally and philosophically; a new beginning.) The declaration of Black Square epitomizes this, as well as his earnest determination. However, in 2015, x-rays of the painting found under the foremost veil of paint, Malevich is explicitly referencing a popular French joke book, writing “Negroes battling in a dark cave.” Since the initial x-ray, art historians at large have seemingly ignored this discovery or addressed it as an inconvenient gaffe, reducing it to an element of the painting’s “enigmatic” character. The joke embedded in Black Square and the lack of critical analysis in response shows a hesitation to criticize symptomatic of an unwillingness to recognize the un-serious, sometimes difficult side of Modern Art.