This talk examines the evolution of British painting traditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where art necessarily reflects shifts in modern social, political, and cultural values. We will start with the dominating aristocratic art trend, marked by classical portraiture and conversation pieces, and its role in reinforcing social hierarchies and power structures, as seen in the works of Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. With the rise of the Enlightenment came the emergence of new art forms that reflected ideals of reason and liberty. William Hogarth and Joseph Wright of Derby are key examples of artists engaging with the changing social order, with Hogarth’s satirical works criticizing aristocratic moral failings and Wright’s depictions of scientific discovery reflecting the era’s intellectual priorities. Though there appears to be a growing embrace of progressive social and political ideas, the subsequent Romantic movement rejects the Enlightenment’s rationalism and industrialization to offer a more emotional and individualistic point of view. Through an analysis of artists like Henry Fuseli and J.M.W. Turner, it is evident that Romantic art nevertheless subconsciously reflects its contemporary political climate, which was characterized by an unprecedented increase in Parliamentary reforms. The art of this period reflects political fear, such as the anxiety surrounding the French Revolution, and a growing concern with social issues like labor and slavery. Overall, by examining shifting styles and subjects, it is evident that British art mirrors the broader social and political landscape of its time, complicating the idea of a linear historical progression and highlighting the interplay between art, power, and reform.

Renowned German Expressionist artist Max Beckmann is known for a career filled with praise and critique. A large part of his art historical identity is his classification as an Expressionist painter. However, during his career, Beckmann made known his disapproval of the Expressionist movement, or what his contemporary artist Franz Marc called the “new art.” Although he disagreed with the sentiments of Expressionism, his paintings follow a similar idea of expressing the artists’ subjective mental states through paintings. Despite being labeled as member of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement in the 1920s, Beckmann continued to paint subjective themes in a highly Expressionistic style. The development of his style was affected by his experiences, especially his role as a volunteer in the Medical Corps during World War I, resulting in a nervous breakdown. Through these psychological challenges, what remained steady was his gravitation toward content reflecting a combination of his subjective experiences and the real social upheaval surrounding him. Using the methodologies of formalism and Marxism, I will analyze the shift in Beckmann’s choice in subject matter and interpretation of contemporary events over time to support the argument that, despite his own criticism of the movement, that he is rightfully described as a German Expressionist artist. These elements will then be analyzed in the overall composition and are used to describe how Beckmann uses his developing style to present his troubled society through Expressionism. To defend this thesis, the following works will be used: Young Men by The Sea (1905), in the Weimar Museum, Scenes from the Destruction of Messina (1909) and the print series Die Holle (Hell) (1919), both in a permanent collection in the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Resurrection (unfinished) (1916-18) held in the Staatsgalerie.

This paper explores the transatlantic history of minimalist art and unpacks its multivariable sociological relationship with key political revolutions during the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The aesthetic’s mythologization following World War I effectively constructed it to be an emblem of modern cultural renewal, and the seemingly innocuous power it exudes manifests as a brutal upheaval of cycles of reception/production and general psychosocial disorder. It is minimalism’s inherent subjectivity that rendered the movement an effective tool for the twentieth century German fascists, engaging in a phenomenon known as “reactionary modernism” – as coined by historian Jeffrey Herf – wherein the Nazis reconciled anti-rationalism with modern industry to physically and ideologically construct the Third Reich. This paper examines the psychological and sociological violence embedded within minimalist art as it relates to fascist mythmaking within and beyond Nazi Germany, and it argues that such violence extends to the contemporary United States. By drawing upon Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s theories of art under modern capitalism paired with an analysis of modern technocratic and plutocratic trends as they compare to twentieth-century fascisms, I illustrate minimalism’s pivotal role in defining historical as well as modern portraits of American success and Western aesthetic imperialism. These findings illustrate not only how political power is embedded in artistic movements but also the continuous role minimalism plays in cultural preservation/erasure on an international scale.

Donald E. Gordon (1931-1984) was a German Expressionist art historian and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. During his career, he published several books and essays pertaining to modern art and expressionism, especially the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Along with Thomas Maythem of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and James Demetrion of the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), Gordon was the main advocate and planner for an exhibition of Kirchner’s art in 1968 and 1969. This was the first touring exhibit of his work in the United States. With the financial support of the German government, the exhibition included over 100 artworks and made a significant impact on art critics, cultural connoisseurs, and the general public. But how did this exhibit build Kirchner’s, and more broadly German Expressionism’s, reputation in America? How did Gordon’s expertise help build Kirchner’s reputation, and vice versa? The selection of Kirchner over other German artists was, in at least one way, a safe choice, especially for the German government. Kirchner’s imagery was decidedly anti-war in its content, but his death before the start of World War II also allowed accounts of his work to avoid associations with the rise of the Nazi regime.

In her 1965 performance Cut Piece, Yoko Ono invited audience members to come up on stage, cut off pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors, and take the fabric with them. While the performance elicited varying levels of participation, reaction, and rejection, the audience became increasingly bolder and excited as it progressed, cutting larger pieces of clothing and ultimately displaying aggression. In 1970, Adrian Piper performed Catalysis III, in which she wore a long-sleeved shirt covered in wet, sticky paint with a sign that read, “Wet Paint.” As she walked through midtown Manhattan, passersby gave her suspicious and uneasy stares, forced into the role of bystanders. This interaction challenged their implicit biases and assumptions about societal norms for Black women’s public presentation.

Ono’s Cut Piece (1965) and Piper’s Catalysis III (1970) exemplify the post-1960s participatory art movement, in which artists reimagined art as a collaborative and transformative act that invites viewers to become part of the artwork. In these participatory performances, the two artists employ—or perhaps objectify—their bodies as mediums to deliberately provoke discomfort and aggression in the viewer. In my presentation, I compare the two works to explore how both artists strategically objectify their bodies in and through participatory art, transforming the objectification of the body into a form of resistance. In “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Anne Anlin Cheng defines ornamentalism as “the forging of the sense of personness through artificial and prosthetic extension.” Drawing on Cheng’s notion of ornamentalism, my presentation examines how Ono and Piper navigate the politics of race and gender in the construction of personhood. I argue that their participatory performances use their bodies to critique and subvert dominant social narratives about race, gender, and identity and offer new ways of thinking about personhood for women of color.

Agnès Varda ends her documentary film Daguerréotypes (1975) with a series of questions about its ambiguous form. “Does it all form a report?” she asks, “An homage? An essay? A regret, a reproach? An approach?” She comes to no conclusion, only certain that she has made her film as a “daguerréotypesse”: as a woman with a camera and as a woman who lives on Rue Daguerre in Paris. Varda takes this street, its inhabitants, and the camera’s prosthetic eye as the tripartite subject of her film, dissecting the deterioration of a city and the individual within the still and moving image. My essay proposes that this self-reflexive, triangulated gaze makes material the layers of mediation that the camera builds and deconstructs simultaneously. I mobilize Walter Benjamin’s writing on photography and the modern city, arguing that Varda fulfills his belief in the “revolutionary energies” embedded in the outdated and the obsolete objects of modernity. Varda’s camera trawls through the ruins of an older Paris, recalling the elegiac street photographs of Eugene Atget at the turn of the twentieth century; like Atget, and in the spirit of Benjamin, Varda makes visible the material frailty of the photographic image and its subjects, finding a revolutionary potential in the layered surfaces of lens and street. The soul of the street, filtered through the camera, remains unfixed to any form or object; it is an unreadable expression, a pane of glass, a blurred figure rushing past the camera. Daguerréotypes, then, functions as a temporal palimpsest, every surface a site of convergence between a preserved moment of the past and the continuous movement of the present. This revolutionary reanimation of a fading world renders Varda’s film a prism of reflective surfaces, a filmic realization of the daguerreotype’s ability to appear and disappear before our very eyes.

The “natural world” is a term conventionally used to describe the nonhuman world within which humans live, depend upon, and indeed are part and parcel of. In our current moment of ecological crisis, I found it necessary to reflect upon what this term really meant to a society whose overly extractive relationship to the ‘natural world’ has largely contributed to this crisis. This thesis aims to examine the extent that visual culture has played a role in constructing objectifying views of ‘nature’ in the west, and how art in the contemporary period can present new ways of thinking about our role within the ‘natural’ world. The bulk of this project centers around a historical comparison between Peter Claesz’s Still Life with Turkey Pie, an early modern Dutch still life, and Chris Jordan’s Midway, CF000313, a contemporary photograph belonging to a larger series which depicts deceased albatrosses cut open to reveal insides full of plastic. Looking at a bird who was intentionally removed from its habitat and valued specifically in its dead/commodified state side by side with another bird laying dead in its own habitat due to manmade products represents a full circle moment in which extraction has transformed into ingestion, and it becomes abundantly clear that our production and consumption is a cyclical action with drastic consequences. By viewing other life as a resource, we not only falsely assume control and hierarchy over a world in which we are merely participating, we are suffocating ourselves along with everything in it.

Before the cardiological recording technical advancements from the nineteenth century, the heart was not understood as a vital organ, but rather the center of one’s selfhood. It was the bridge between mind and soul and a symbol of human emotion. At this time, no one knew what the heartbeat looked like. Just like the cosmos, the human heart was once an unobservable universe, one that existed beyond the limitations of human observation. In the 2023 exhibition The Heart’s Knowledge, contemporary artist Dario Robleto creates a multisensory encounter between art and science in works centered around the human heart and the waveforms observed from it. Robleto views these heartbeat waveforms as proof of human life and existence. By creating a newfound perspective on heartbeat waveforms from the nineteenth century, Robleto seeks to immortalize the emotions of the deceased through material, sound, and with the aid of the viewer, through memory. Robleto considers humanity’s endless pursuit to record and explore beyond the limitations of human observation and invites the viewer to reshape the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the past and the present. Through his works, Robleto reimagines the human heartbeat through an empathetic lens that transcends time, space, and identity.

This paper examines the display of Islamic relics at Topkapı Palace’s Mukaddes Emanetler Dairesi (Chamber of the Islamic Holy Relics) and argues that these objects are unified not by their status as art or religious artifacts, but as memorials of Ottoman imperial power. The display of these relics, particularly during times of national or political insecurity, serves to legitimize the ruling AKP’s political authority. The relics exhibition conflates Islamic art and religious practice by juxtaposing corporeal relics—such as tomb dust or strands of the Prophet Muhammad’s beard—with their reliquaries, which hold both curatorial and art historical significance. Such a curatorial strategy aims to evoke the Chamber’s original function as a site of worship, thereby challenging the secular reforms implemented during the transition of Topkapı Museum from 1924 to 1937. Through an analysis of the exhibit’s spatial design, textual labels, and the presence of live Quran recitations, this paper explores how the Turkish government utilizes these relics to assert both religious and political authority. Additionally, it traces the evolution of museological and administrative approaches to the relics from their removal during the early Republican period to their restoration under the AKP, revealing how these shifting strategies reflect and reinforce Turkey’s ethno-religious nationalism while shaping public perception of the relics and their historical significance.

This research evaluates how museums contextualize art and the longstanding impact that contextualization can have on the creation and perpetuation of social differences and stereotypes. Through an examination of the work of artist-activists, this paper argues that the continued emphasis placed on the cultural value of artwork depicting minorities in a harmful way without acknowledging these issues actively perpetuates inequality within our society. This analysis focuses primarily on American museums, referencing current exhibits at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which provide examples of positive change and the need for ongoing updates. Museums have a responsibility to acknowledge their impact on the perpetuation of harmful social structures and need to restructure their collection and description practices to reflect this.

The art world needs a tremendous change when considering how art and artifacts are collected and shown to the world. Museums and institutions are deeply rooted in colonization, bartering off the fact that they are “preserving history,” while ignoring the societies that plea for their sacred monuments to be returned to them. What if art and artifacts could reside in a place built upon mutual respect? A museum where the object is surrounded by those of its own, all justly displayed. An institution that is not built on the foundation of colonization but is established with reverence and honor of the original creators. How can reparations be met to colonized societies while still creating an environment of learning for our melting pot culture? Casts and replicas provide an intriguing answer to our many questions. Using specific examples of artistic reproductions throughout history, I provide a thorough argument explaining how museums can change to fit our more modernized, anticolonial, multicultural world. I highlight architectural casts and institutions like the Ska Noñh Center of Peace, a museum created by Native American people that showcases replicas and original objects of their beautiful culture. I specifically focus on art created in a place where multiple cultures intersect. I use examples like the Santo Domingo de Silos Monastery in Spain, where Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, and French influences developed together. To understand human’s path through history, it is imperative to remember the genius that flourishes when multiple cultures coexist in one environment, allowing for a whole new form of art to emerge. We must protect this new form by honoring the past sustainably: omitting stolen objects and working together to build a mutual understanding and appreciation of the combined beauty of our multicultural world.

National parks toe a difficult line between museum and theme park, presenting persistent design challenges to architects and planners who must navigate the intersecting goals of entertainment and education. From 1905 to 1935, Mary Colter designed six major buildings at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Intending to blend the buildings into the landscape as much as possible, Colter often imitated the architectural style of the Hopi tribe native to the area. This sparked the rise of “parkitecture,” or “National Park Service Rustic,” where parks design their infrastructure to mirror the natural features surrounding them, often implementing indigenous architectural practices to do so. Previous scholarship on Colter has examined the themes of imperialist nostalgia and appropriation within her work; however, there is little focus on the effects of Hopi involvement at the Grand Canyon and their resulting exploitation. Furthermore, studies on Hopi architecture and art have largely been categorized as anthropological rather than art historical, leading to a delegitimization of their work as intentional style. In the 1990s, the Hopi Tribe put a halt to all further research on Hopi culture without permission from the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. I suggest this to be, in part, a result of Colter’s work. I utilize a postcolonial and decolonial lens in my work, applying Gayatri Spivak’s definition of the “subaltern” to frame my interpretation of the complex relationship between Mary Colter and the Native Americans she worked with. By researching further into Colter and her interactions with Native Americans, I contextualize her work through her intentions at the time and their reverberations today. I also look into Native American scholarship on design, copyright, and ownership in order to better understand an indigenous perspective on National Park Service Rustic.

Cultural heritage, one of the crucial components of collective identity and historical continuity, has long been a target, alongside art, during times of conflict. From the destruction of ancient monuments to the looting of invaluable paintings, these crimes profoundly affect global history and identity. This presentation examines the historical context of cultural warfare, focusing on the destruction and displacement of art in times of conflict and the international community’s evolving efforts to safeguard at-risk cultural assets.

The discussion will center on the potential and pitfalls of leveraging advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence to address these challenges. Topics include the use of AI in reconstruction and restoration efforts, such as 3D modeling for digital reconstruction, machine learning for predicting artifact degradation, and satellite imagery analysis for damage assessment. The presentation will also explore the role of technology in disaster recovery, documentation, conservation, and fostering public engagement through immersive tools like virtual and augmented reality. While these innovations hold great promise, they also raise ethical questions that demand critical examination. How should cultural heritage be prioritized in politically charged contexts? Who has the authority to reconstruct and reinterpret lost artifacts, especially when these objects are deeply tied to contested national narratives? 

Through a practical lens, this presentation will weigh the technical and artistic implications of using technology to navigate the inherently political terrain of cultural warfare, ultimately seeking to balance innovation with sensitivity to the social and historical complexities of art protection.

A prevalent issue for museums in rural areas is a lack of reliable registration methods. This occurs for a number of reasons whether it be a lack of resources (human, financial, spatial, etc.) or the erosion of knowledge overtime due to cultural reliance on generational knowledge. Additionally, different registrars often develop new methods for inventory without leaving behind instructions, leading subsequent registrars to devise their own methods. These gaps in the registration process frequently result in “registration problems”, objects that don’t get properly inventoried and thus have little to no context for their origins. This thesis aims to fill in some of these missing gaps by studying two paintings from DePauw University’s collections. These paintings were marked as registration problems, with scarcely a known title. To create a background for these two paintings, I explored various techniques used by art conservationists and art historians. Studying the material culture of a painting can tell you where a painting was made, with what materials, and possibly why. In this project, techniques such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, ultraviolet fluorescence (UVF), and scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDS) were used to understand the material composition of both paintings. This information was used to conduct archival research through local and state archives to determine the origins of the material and attempt to identify the artist’s and their backgrounds. This research underscores the inherent interdisciplinary quality of art conservation and emphasizes the importance of considering both scientific and art historical information when studying an object. Adopting a multi-faceted approach to both the physical and historical pieces of an object aids in the complete preservation of an object’s entity.

This paper examines Dr. Leon Banks’ collecting career and his lasting impact during the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles. As one of the first Black art collectors in the city, Dr. Banks emerged at a time when Black contemporary artists faced systemic exclusion from major art institutions. From the 1950s onward, he navigated an era of government censorship and racial segregation that severely restricted the visibility of contemporary art. To gain credibility within mainstream institutions, he strategically acquired works by prominent white artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, ultimately securing a position on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) board in 1965—the first Black individual to do so. Dr. Banks’ close friendship with David Hockney played a crucial role in his artistic and social influence. Their relationship led to a series of portraits of Dr. Banks, providing rare representations of Black identity in the 1960s by a world-renowned artist. As Banks gained recognition in white art spaces, he leveraged his status to advocate for Black artists, connecting them with major institutions to increase their visibility. By the 1980s, he served on influential boards, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, and co-founded the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Despite his significant contributions, Banks’ legacy as a pioneering Black art collector remains largely overlooked. However, his support and presence in the art world were instrumental in paving the way for Black artists in Los Angeles, ensuring their visibility within major institutions and shaping the trajectory of contemporary art. His impact is reflected in testimonials from artists such as David Hockney, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Mel Edwards, and Lyle Ashton Harris, who credit him with significant patronage and support.