Art has the power to shape history—not just in what it records, but in how it tells the story. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript, is more than a chronicle of conquest; it is a visual argument that intentionally uses labels, symbolism, and spatial organization to craft a version of history in which Tlaxcala is not merely a supporting player in Spain’s victory over the Aztecs, but a central force in bringing down the Mexica Aztec. Commissioned in 1552, the lienzo is composed of over eighty meticulously arranged scenes, unfolding in a structured grid that guides the viewer’s eye in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom rhythm reminiscent of European print culture. Yet, within this imported framework, indigenous artistic strategies are also present. Glyphs and place signs anchor the narrative in space, ensuring that geography is not just a backdrop but an active force in the conquest’s unfolding. Tlaxcala, positioned at the physical and thematic center of the composition, emerges as the star of the campaign, with its strategic alliances and military contributions given visual prominence through hierarchical scaling, repetition, and emphasis. The lienzo does not simply document movement—it constructs it. Figures step forward with bent knees, horses rear mid-gallop, and winding paths connect key locations, transforming a static cloth into a dynamic war story. Bodies of water serve as both narrative dividers and structuring devices, guiding the eye and reinforcing the spatial organization of the lienzo. Even the placement of Spanish churches and imperial insignia, often read as symbols of colonial domination, subtly work within the lienzo’s narrative to reinforce Tlaxcala’s agency in shaping the new world order. More than a map, more than a manuscript, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala is an assertion of power. Through its deliberate use of labels, symbols, and composition, it cements Tlaxcala’s role as a main player in the conquest of the Aztecs—not just in the past, but in the historical memory that followed.

This paper examines the role of Indigenous artistry during Spanish colonization, focusing on the hybridized feather mosaics and enconchado artworks produced by Indigenous Mexican and Pacific Asian artists. By analyzing visual case studies such as Juan Cuiris’ Weeping Virgin and Miguel González’s Virgin of Guadalupe, the research reveals how Native artists not only appropriated but surpassed European-Christian visual traditions to assert their cultural identities within a colonial context. This paper aims to challenge traditional art historical narratives that portray Indigenous artists as passive participants, highlighting their intentional and skillful manipulation of materials and techniques to resist cultural erasure. The study situates these works within the broader context of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade, a critical conduit connecting Mexico, the Philippines, and Europe. It demonstrates how labor-intensive artistic practices, such as the use of luminous feathers and iridescent mother-of-pearl, served not only as devotional expressions but also as assertions of Indigenous agency. Furthermore, the labor of maritime Indigenous divers, such as the Sama-Bajau, in harvesting raw materials is foregrounded to underscore their contributions to global art history. The findings reveal that despite the Spaniards’ attempts to impose cultural hegemony, Indigenous artists strategically incorporated and transformed colonial artistic programs, creating a unique visual vocabulary that transcended its European origins. This recontextualization of colonial imports enabled the preservation of Indigenous traditions and the construction of a distinct cultural identity. Ultimately, this paper argues that Indigenous artistry during colonization was not merely an act of survival but a dynamic and conscious assertion of power, skill, and cultural resilience.

By discussing the timeline of cultural exchanges from across Europe, Asia, and Latin America in the Early Modern Era, I outline the various influences that ultimately concluded in the formulation of talavera poblana, a tin-glazed earthenware from colonial Mexico. First, by examining cross cultural interactions between European, Islamic, and Chinese cultures along the Silk Road and the later Manila Galleon Trade, this paper emphasizes how the phenomenon of both tin-glazed earthenware and blue-and-white porcelain are products of interactions between each of the individual cultures. In turn, these multinational interactions fostered a two-way street of influence that culminated in the fundamental alteration (and creation) of various ceramic traditions, such as talavera. Moreover, this paper highlights the invaluable contributions of the indigenous populations in the creation of talavera poblana and their subsequent erasure from the narrative due to Spanish imperial pursuits. Through examining this nuanced history, this paper provides insight to a much more connected world than previously thought, pushing past the boundaries such as those of the Global Renaissance and showcasing that, through the lens of ceramic material culture, the globe is much more intertwined than what meets the eye.

Malintzin (also called Malinche), the enslaved indigenous translator to Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés, has resurfaced as a feminist icon in the twenty-first century. The reclamation of her personhood, a step towards a long-overdue humanization, has not only unveiled the perennial mystery of the original woman and her function in a slowly decolonizing world, but also her use as a conceptual justification of colonial violence against indigenous peoples. From the beginning, artists have depended upon the trope of the everyday woman, and its attendance anonymity, to inform their rendering of Malinche, and vice versa.

Although recent exhibitions have attempted to compile a comprehensive visual record of Malinche’s renderings and legacy, current scholarship fails to consider this figure within broader dialogues around the historical framing of the female body as a mechanism for engaging social memory and reinforcing gender normativity. In order to begin remediating this lacuna, my paper questions how Malinche’s body has been transformed across time at the hands of artists to reflect contemporary narratives of womanhood and sexuality as well and remediate colonialist narratives.

Ultimately, Malinche embodies a fluid national hybridity, transcending time and changing with space, always either a performance, an agitator, or reactionary. The multiplicity of representations of Malinche from the nineteenth century onwards allow us to critically consider how both European and Mexican cultures visually code “her” to reflect desired objectives, not only unraveling how empire is engraved onto her body and regurgitated into contemporary spaces, but also how “Malinche” the idea remains forever a sword on the canvas. This paper therefore argues that Malinche as a rhetorical construction came to be intersected with notions of both the divine feminine and the everyday woman- reflective of community ideals and consequently the hybridization of European evangelist values with suppressed indigenous idiosyncrasies.

My paper investigates how Colombian artist Delcy Morelos (b. 1967) employs abstraction and Earth as her primary material to address the social and environmental injustices arising from Colombia’s colonial and neo-extractivist history. I contextualize Morelos’s artistic evolution and the change in her work’s efficacy by tracing the impact of Colombia’s violent past on her shift from mixed-media to earth-based installations. While Morelos subverts colonial hierarchies of race, gender, and land in Colombia by incorporating Indigenous practices and presenting the Earth as a maternal figure, she embodies Jacques Rancière’s understanding of political aesthetics—art that carries the promise of political emancipation—to suggest a break from colonial legacies of oppression.

I define justice through Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology in Spectres of Marx (1993) and employ the lens of spectral realism from Juliana Martinez’s (2020) understanding of hauntology in Colombian art. I first examine Colombia’s history through post- and de-colonial theory. After laying the necessary conceptual and historical groundwork, I overview how Colombian artists working before Morelos, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, Beatriz González, and Doris Salcedo, grappled with Colombia’s violent past. I position Morelos’s oeuvre within this lineage of Colombian artists working in the wake of Colombia’s civil wars, showing how Morelos builds upon the artistic techniques pioneered by these artists. Finally, I unite de-colonial and hauntological theory through a detailed investigation of Morelos’s works created for exhibitions in the West, particularly the 2023-2024 Dia Chelsea exhibition El Abrazo and her 2024-2025 show Profundis at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla. I demonstrate how this phase of her artistry goes beyond those of previous generations of Colombian artists and provides redress for past injustices.

This paper examines the planning, design, and implementation of Millennium Communities, urban housing complexes in the Ecuadorian highlands built by the state near sites of extraction, vis-à-vis the state’s intensification of metal and oil projects in the twenty-first century. Alongside this proliferation was the 2008 passage of a new constitution with the guiding principle of buen vivir, an alternative notion of development that enshrines the rights of nature and emphasizes a harmonious social and ecological interdependence. Structured by the contentious legal frameworks that sustain Ecuador’s resource-extraction networks, this study interrogates the deployment of buen vivir in the architectural style and urban planning of the Millennium Communities as part of longer histories of modernization in Latin America. For Ecuador, state presence in extractive activities has shifted from relatively minimal interventions of the twentieth century, towards state-managed industries for social development—including through architecture and urban planning—that has become characteristic of neo-extractivism. Moving between Spanish colonial settlements to twentieth-century industrial towns to the recent construction of these housing complexes, the dynamics of the spaces of neo-extractivism become evident: the social and political discourses that sustain ecological disruption; the transformation of nature registered in the architecture and urban planning of these residencies; and the local communities’ acts of resistance against the mining-development nexus carved out in formal political, legal, and scientific settings and also in their daily practices within the Millennium Communities. Despite the radical objectives of the Citizens’ Revolution that originated the 2008 constitution, the Ecuadorian project of buen vivir concealed and promoted the subsumption of nature to capital through the architecture of the built Millennium Communities. Operating within this governmentality, the Ecuadorian state deployed an ideological turn that links large-scale mining and drilling to buen vivir—a move that likewise opened room for affected communities to challenge and resist neo-extractivist practices.

In past decades, the field of documentary poetics alongside multimodal contemporary art have presented methods of re-examining, re-constructing, and re-perceiving the histories, narratives, and worlds around us. I examine three contemporary artworks, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014), Wendy Red Star’s 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014), and Jenny Holzer’s He Did Not See Any Americans Blue (2006) as key examples of the range of methods utilized in creating new and tangible worlds from manipulated documents. For Bergvall, documentary poetics becomes a vessel for photographic macro processing toward hyper-visualizing unseen and ignored narratives and memories. Star’s manipulation of Charles Milton Bell’s photographs presents a documentary poetics of layering and re-tracing, hyper-visualizing Native American histories into the active present. Similarly, Holzer’s manipulation of declassified government documents emphasizes the tensions between legibility and illegibility, questioning our notions of truth and falsity. I argue that the methods of hyper-visualization showcased in contemporary art and documentary poetics can be translated into methods of re-examining, re-perceiving, and further understanding lived experiences of trauma. We often view trauma as individually and subjectively contained, experiences deemed illegible and incomprehensible to those outside of the individual experiencing trauma. Yet, an individual’s experience of trauma consists of similar facets to those found in documentary poetics: disconnection, fragmentation, illegibility, and changed or distorted perceptions of the self and external world. The field of multimodal contemporary art and documentary poetics create tangible manifestations of often intangible ideas, histories, memories, and narratives. Thus, I argue that by examining the above methods of perception in contemporary art and documentary poetics, we can construct new and tangible understandings of trauma.

This paper will focus on the “Beetle-wing” Dress designed by Alice Comyns Carr, constructed by Adaline Cort Nettleship, and worn by Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in 1888 for the Lyceum Theater’s production of Macbeth. As one of the most celebrated examples of British Aestheticism, the paper deconstructs the costume’s use of Indian embroidery techniques to illuminate Anglo-Indian relations within the late Victorian Era. This interest lies in the lack of postcolonial analysis on British Aestheticism despite its own popularity spiking during the height of the British Empire. Despite the renewed interest in this costume—as observed in the thousands spent on the dress’s conservation in 2015—a lack of focus on the ways in which the appropriated embellishments recall Orientalist tropes in the Aesthetic Movement haunts our own understanding of late Victorian society. The issue with Aesthetic women and dress comes by their depiction of sickly women of mind and body as infected in their social and moral decay and in perceiving the Orient, in this case India, as backwards, dangerous, and morally corrupted. This presentation begins with formal analysis, deconstructing color, silhouette, and line as to acquaint the main idea with the dress’s narrative of decay. Focus is then divided into three sections, all using visual analysis woven between primary and secondary sources: identifying Aesthetic appropriations of different cultures, relating the Aesthetic movement to specifically Anglo-Indian relations, and reconfiguring Lady Macbeth in the Lyceum Theater’s production within this dress, thereby exemplifying the pathologization of women and race in late-nineteenth century Britain. The culmination of these arguments lies to the issue of Aesthetic Dress and its recalling of the Orient through embellishment from colonized countries as intertwined to social degeneracy, being the “ills” of society that must be cast out.

Wilhelm List’s A Young Woman in Her Undergarments reflects themes of luxury, craftsmanship, and sensuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Created during a period of rapid urbanization and middle-class growth, the painting captures the shifting boundaries between private and public life in Viennese culture. This painting is an excellent example of how much we can learn from the history of fashion, as it reveals cultural attitudes toward gender, propriety, and modernity. This paper examines Wilhelm List’s career during the Vienna Secession and his collaboration with the Wiener Werkstätte, a neighboring textile workshop, to explore how their influence shaped the symbolism and design elements within this work.

Hilma af Klint, a female Swedish abstract artist, was unknown to the modern world for almost twenty years after her death. Klint’s religious and spiritual ventures profoundly transformed her artistic technique, which informed the development of her unique abstract style. Her experiences while living in Stockholm, and her exposure to its artistic, literature, and religious circles, shaped her prolific journey. Throughout her life, Klint joined various spiritualist and esoteric movements that aligned with her ever-changing beliefs depending on specific events. From these movements, Klint gained a comprehensive knowledge of spiritualist practices, prompting her to create her own coven of women later in life. Intending to understand the organic world around her, Klint’s paintings are a stunning example of various realities combined with spiritual direction and intention. Iconology and formalism can be used as frameworks with which to deduce the influence of spirituality, that prompted her to create abstract works long before her male peers were credited with inventing abstraction and surrealism and revealing her intense engagement with spiritualist and occult movements. More specifically her time with The Five, her spiritualist group, as well as the significance of similar artistic communities throughout history, are key to understanding her unique approach. Klint’s capricious change in style throughout her life, starting from botanical drawings to ten-foot abstract works, was the result of internal spiritual transformation and collaboration with her female peers.

The interwar period in Weimar Germany (1918–1933) was marked by profound social, political, and artistic transformation that shaped cultural production and the visual representation of women. This paper examines Otto Dix’s Liegende auf Leopardenfell (Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin, 1927) in the context of Weimar-era artistic movements, including German Expressionism and New Objectivity. These movements rejected traditional values and sought to reflect societal realities, offering a stark departure from idealized depictions of femininity rooted in vitality, joy, and fertility. Focusing on actress Vera Simailova as the subject, the analysis explores how Dix’s hyper-realistic and provocative portrayal of women aligns with the “New Woman” ideal—a symbol of liberation and independence emerging during the Weimar period. This ideal redefined women’s roles in response to urbanization, consumerism, and their increasing presence in professional and public spheres. However, this societal shift also generated patriarchal anxieties, manifesting in the dual archetypes of the liberated “New Woman” and the seductive yet dangerous “femme fatale.”

Dix’s work highlights the tension between feminist ideals and the residual influence of patriarchal norms. While his depiction challenges traditional gender roles, the grotesque realism of his female figures raises questions about whether such portrayals subvert or inadvertently reinforce patriarchal perspectives. By situating Dix’s painting within his lived experiences, particularly his disillusionment from World War I, the paper reveals the nuanced interplay between personal narrative, societal change, and artistic representation. This research paper underscores the complexity of gender roles and visual culture in Weimar Germany, revealing the dual nature of its art as both a progressive force and a product of its patriarchal environment. The discussion invites further inquiry into how feminist art can transcend historical biases and achieve a truly equitable portrayal of women.

Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, lived at a convergence of opposing worlds: she was a Pop Artist, an ardent social activist, and a Catholic nun. Born Frances Elizabeth Kent, she joined the Order of the Immaculate Heart at age 18. Throughout her time as a member, she participated in feminist and civil rights protests and became an art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. She began experimenting with silk-screening, as well as the “democratic mediums” of zines, posters, and screen prints: forms that were key in spreading feminist ideas worldwide. Her art centered on the social issues at the forefront of popular consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, including Second Wave Feminism and the Vietnam War. Bolstered by the progressive changes in the Catholic Church that resulted from the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II), she was allowed and encouraged to participate fully in the broader world. Recent interest in Corita as a Catholic artist is demonstrated by the exhibition of her work at the pavilion of the Holy See at the 2024 Venice Biennale, but her reputation as a feminist and activist artist has been largely overshadowed. This presentation argues that this limited perspective on her legacy captures how she was treated in life; Corita existed at the intersection of post-Vatican II Catholic culture, Second Wave Feminism, and the Pop Art movement, and her eventual exclusion from each can be attributed to her participation in the other two. 

In a picture book, how do illustrations collaborate with words to create visual storytelling? How does an artist guide viewers’ attention and engage children’s imagination? “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” is a metaphoric concept proposed by Rudine Sims Bishop in 1990, and widely used, in an analysis of children’s literature. My paper employs this concept to explore the art of contemporary picture books. I focus on children’s picture books by Claire A. Nivola, a contemporary American illustrator and author, who emphasizes the experience of marginalized groups. In her illustrated world, viewers are drawn into a social and historical landscape, unfolding in minute detail. Bishop’s concept helps me analyze Nivola’s visual strategies, and view books as not only literature to be read but also visual art objects to be experienced. Bishop argues that good books act as mirrors in which minority group readers see their experiences represented. Books also act like windows to provide readers insights into another world and become sliding glass doors that allow readers to step into an unfamiliar world and become part of it. In Nivola, I ask when does a piece of work serve as a mirror, a window, or a door? How do they transform into each other and promote viewers’ understanding? The complementary relationship between words and illustrations fosters the richness of narratives. The interplay between imagination and reality blurs the boundary between the illustrated world and the viewers’ world. Using visual analysis, this paper addresses how Nivola’s book design and artistic method engage these dynamic interactions, allowing viewers of all ages to see their lives as part of a larger human experience and understand different worlds.

Liza Lou’s installation Kitchen (1991-1996) stands as a whimsical and glittering memorial to the feminist confessional works of women artists who came before her, and in turn speaks to her own confession of labor. This research will examine both materiality and craft in the context of Lou’s Kitchen and how these specific elements work in tandem to amplify the work as an act of feminist confessional, that highlights the domestic and emotional labor of women. A common issue that comes up in the study of feminist art is that it tends to only be viewed as autobiographical or self-reflective, and this is a dangerous generalization when it comes to the subjectivity of the works– as it places the individual experiences of women as the focus, and places them outside the public sphere. This results in a direct conflation between women’s position in our culture, and the aesthetic form of feminist art. This research will instead construct a prismatic lens– one that includes Rita Feliski’s literary theory of feminist confessional, implications of the hierarchical notions of craft vs. art, and the artist’s labor as signifying materiality within the work– in order to examine Lou’s choice of materials, Kitchen’s themes of domesticity, as well as the context of Kitchen’s solitary creation to illustrate through analysis that Lou’s installation operates through feminist confession as an assertion of power, and not just a chronicle of patriarchal oppression.

Filmed at the height of riot grrrl, the documentary Dirty Girls presents a microcosm of the scene at a Santa Monica high school as it follows a group of girls ostracized by the student body due to their opposition to and negation of standard models of early 1990s girlhood. This paper aims to situate riot grrrl and the “dirty girls” into the larger context of the historical oppression of women, specially through the sexist depictions and tropes concerning old women as they appeared in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Despite their common conflict with sexist beauty standards, Harper and Amber of Dirty Girls and the hag responded to their marginalization in vastly different ways: where the hag is portrayed as vainly attempting to capitulate to societal conventions, the grrrls see their negation both as a strength and as a means towards political ends. In this paper, I argue that despite their differences and the chronological distance between the two phenomena, the hags and the “dirty girls” and riot grrrl are connected through their relationship to contemporary beauty standards. Specifically, the “dirty girls” function as another kind of hag, the grrrl-hag, one that responds to oppressive beauty standards differently than the old hag through the negation of beauty standards and societal expectations of women and girls, creating their own vision of woman- and girlhood.

This presentation focuses on the work of the street artist Swoon. It explores wider questions about street art, urban surface, globalization and right to the city through the lens of Swoon’s work.  Within the context of a rapidly globalizing world, our understanding of cities is transformed. Previous models and explanations of urban shaping forces must be expanded upon. When we look at contemporary artists, we can see new understandings of the role street art can play in the context of globalized cities as well as cities grappling with the pressures and repercussions of globalization. This is especially clear in the work of the artist Swoon.  I believe that Swoon’s work acts as a catalyst to make spaces public and sites for engagement by reenacting a claim to the surface of the city, and therefore a claim to the right to the city itself. Swoon’s work is, above all, ephemeral, site-specific, and dynamic. It lives and dies through its many different reproductions, bringing activity into blank spaces through its life cycle. Gaining popularity during the late 2000’s, her trajectory is temporally aligned with the changing perceptions of street art that took place around the 2010’s, as well as the global rise in the Creative City paradigm. Ultimately, I will argue that her portraits can be used to understand and reframe theorizations of street art, surface, and the right to the city.