The architectural works of John Henry Hopkins are often overlooked in the study of American Gothic Revival. With only four church designs directly attributed to him alongside a single publication, “Essay on Gothic Architecture” (1836), Hopkins’ career in architecture is certainly easy to disregard. Indeed, very little scholarship on Hopkins has been pursued, and those who mention him in relation to studies of the larger Gothic Revival movement, frame his work and his writings as insubstantial, ill-informed on the style, and overshadowed by later publications. However, these analyses hold Hopkins to a standard of accuracy in recreating the medieval gothic style and ignore his positionality in the American architectural landscape. Hopkins was only an amateur architect, a career secondary to his religious pursuits, and though he may have lacked certain insights on the gothic style his writing demonstrates a keen awareness towards the needs of the American church. Both Hopkins’ writing and his architectural designs reflect an American subjectivity in the application of gothic aesthetics, one which spoke not only to cultural concerns but also to practical concerns, topics such as budget and available materials or craftspeople. Thus, his career, as well as the churches that followed in the wake of his writing, offer immense insight into the earliest phase of the American Gothic Revival movement as it tended to manifest in the average American church: as an adapted aesthetic rather than a replication of the original architecture.

Ireland experienced the loss of six million people to emigration in the course of the nineteenth century, due to the effects of economic, colonial, political, and social tensions, and a lack of work security. The Great Famine alone resulted in the departure of two million people between 1845 and 1852. Among those who emigrated were artists like Erskine Nicol (1825-1904) and James Mahoney (1810-1879), whose departure impacted the art market both at home and abroad. While the nation’s Art institutions, such as the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, were imperiled by the drain of artists looking elsewhere for work opportunities, the artists themselves found patronage in places like Britain and France and created works depicting the conditions of nineteenth-century Ireland. The themes that developed – of strife, perseverance, and remembrance – still resonate today, continuing to affect the culture of Ireland’s art market and the works it produces. This paper explores the culmination of these effects and how exactly the diaspora of a people can alter the ideas, themes, and inner workings of a country’s art market.

My talk explores the concept of the “aesthetic experience,” where the art object is defined not only by its physical properties but by the emotions, thoughts, and sensations it elicits within viewers. I recount how certain art movements develop and manifest according to events that occur throughout time, where swells of different artworks share particular characteristics in order to reflect or reject political, economic, and social happenings within the same period. The “aesthetic experience” serves observers of not only the artist’s time, but ours, evoking specific emotions and ideas that have been in prior consideration through the careful deliberations of the artist.

Frederic Leighton’s Cymon and Iphigenia exemplifies this, designed to uplift viewers from the depravity of the Industrial Age by providing an escapist appreciation for beauty and philosophy. Its handling of materials, composition, and symbolism highlights how it sculpts an “aesthetic experience” that reflects Victorian society’s desire for enrichment through surface beauty and academia, rather than submitting to the drudgery of working-class life. James Gillray’s 1796 satirical print of the same title, Cymon and Iphigenia is another work that is constructed deliberately to have an “aesthetic experience” that is vastly different from Leighton’s work, though the subject matter remains identical. This allows me to acutely focus on how changes in material and intention can alter the allegorical messages that are received by viewers, thereby rippling into the emotional impacts that are felt.

While Leighton’s work laments the transformative capabilities of beauty to uplift viewers in their visual experience, Gillray relocates the mythos to be etched within satirical print to engage provocatively with ideas of racial prejudice, inciting a discomforting confrontation to viewers. The two artists, through their distinct media and intentions, create opposing interpretations, allowing viewers to experience divergent emotional impacts that reflect the respective zeitgeists of the British working class.

The ancient Greek phrase kalon kakon (“beautiful evil”) is often associated with women. Desirable and alluring, she is also the harbinger of war, grief, and tragedy that is first embodied in the mythical and divine Helen of Troy, whose loveliness led to the deaths of countless men, women, and children during the Trojan War. The Symbolist artist, Gustave Moreau, is known for his many depictions of Helen, as well as his intense fascination with depicting women of myth and history who embodied this femme fatale trope. This paper explores Moreau’s watercolor Helen on the Walls of Troy (1885) to determine whether this work reflects the broader anxieties about female power, sexuality, and independence that were prevalent in the nineteenth century, as women began to push back against traditional gender roles, or if it offers a different understanding. Today, Moreau’s Helen speaks to the enduring relevance of these cultural issues, which continue to shape our discussions of gender, power, and representation.

Through style, technique, and representation of subject matter, three artists across the second half of the nineteenth century – Millais, Hunt, and Alexander – exemplified the respective contemporary aesthetic tastes in their painted interpretations of Keats’ Isabella and the Pot of Basil. Keats’ poem, inspired by The Decameron, becomes a vehicle to explore the progression of artistic movements. Each of the three paintings depicts a scene from the poem, however, with every interpretation comes vastly distinct formal elements and treatment of subject matter, and it is through this lens that one can consider the evolution and inception of the Aesthetic Movement. Millais’ Isabella, a prime example of the Pre-Raphaelite style, remains most faithful to the poem, with historically accurate dress, a set-like composition, and meticulous attention to detail. A shift occurs in Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil where Hunt presents a significantly more emotive and passionate realization of the protagonist, showing an inclination towards Aestheticism and a departure from the poem it claims to reference, with an emphasis on the treatment of the female body, interest in Oriental décor, and use of intensely saturated jewel-like colors. Finally, Alexander’s interpretation, with its minimalist narrative and focus on mood, light, and form through the atmospheric, cool monochromatic color scheme epitomizes the waning years of Aestheticism, where beauty and emotional resonance eclipsed literal storytelling. Through the exploration of the Isabella paintings, in conjunction with other relevant works, a shift towards Aestheticism is revealed, raising the question about the nature of beauty depicted in art, and whether representing purely “aesthetic” works at the expense of narrative subtext can still be considered beautiful. The evolving interpretations of Keats’ Isabella illustrate the transition from detailed narrative realism to the prioritization of aesthetic beauty, marking the rise and eventual dominance of the Aesthetic Movement in nineteenth century art.

Impressionists across France, Japan, Spain, and the United States were captivated by the transient beauty of natural systems: tidal changes, wind, fog, and mist. These phenomena became central to their exploration of impermanence, using light and color to capture ongoing scientific observations. Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Morning Fog highlights the fleeting yet intentional nature of urban fog; Ivan Aivazovsky’s Rocky Seashore portrays the dynamic forces of wind and tide along the Crimean coast. The French Impressionists’ fascination with locomotion and global time inspired a culture focused on suburban leisure, specifically in coastal environments. New England’s mineral springs and yacht clubs ensured a relaxing getaway for the Bourgeois. The tourism industry, dependent on environmental cycles like tidal changes, prompted boating competitions in the Parisian suburbs. From the algae-stained rocks of Étretat to the wooden deterioration of English Channel piers, Impressionists developed a style that unified diverse regional practices while celebrating the fleeting interactions between humanity and the environment. The depiction of wind greatly varied, seeking to capture the serenity or chaos of the invisible. The freeform cherry blossom petals of Japanese woodblock prints conveyed the delicate surprise of a gust of wind, as thin sheets of linen sway past Sorolla’s figures during a stroll on a Spanish beach. The fleeting not only entails the movement of winds and tides, but the stillness of fog and mist. Mists naturally occurring dissipation from the sun complements the Impressionist’s focus on impermanence, allowing variety in gradation techniques. The various approaches to depicting light and haze, whether through muddied colors or stippling, reflect a global exchange of ideas and influences. These diverse interpretations of natural systems reflect the global exchange of artistic techniques and scientific observations, reshaping transnational Impressionism beyond its traditional Western narrative.

Throughout history, cultures have continuously merged and interacted with one another, leading to the exchange of ideas and art. Such phenomena can occur on both small and large scales, from interactions between nearby cultures to those between entire continents, as seen in the case of Europe and Asia. Even before the advent of modern mass-media platforms like the internet and rapid transportation, we can observe the impact of external cultures on art in any particular location.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, there was a noticeable uptick in artistic diasporas, especially following the opening of Japan’s borders to trade in 1853 after a forceful naval persuasion from the United States military. As a result, artistic movements emerged in both Europe and the United States, such as Japonisme and Impressionism, both of which heavily draw inspiration from Asian culture and the art styles and techniques of the area.

Mary Cassatt, an American artist who spent a significant portion of her life in Europe, serves as a prime example of how traditional Japanese art styles were incorporated into Western works. In this essay, I will examine the profound influence that Japanese wood-block prints had on the European art world and especially Mary Cassatt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the transformative power of cross-cultural artistic exchange.

The Impressionist Era was a time of self-evaluation and direct visual experiences that pushed toward decorative abstraction. The painters of this time strove to break the conventions of the precious academic and traditional styles of paintings and techniques, through the focus of the overall effects of light, movement, and the ever-present nature of living the contemporary life in France during the late 1800s. The societal spheres and associations surrounding the traditional roles of women have been both replicated and challenged through the depictions presented in Impressionist art. The female nude and model for the male artist serves as a mode for the misrepresentation of what it means to be a woman alive in the nineteenth century. However, in a world made to support male critics, patrons and painters, female artists still made their presence known. The additional factors of consumerism and a shift in perspective for the roles of women in the late 1800s also play a key role in the associated stereotypes surrounding the female that remain present in today’s society. Yet, there is an important conversation to be made regarding the roles of gender, social class, and how Impressionist art portrayed these issues. Women artists such as Mary Cassatt, Lilla Cabot Perry, Eva Gonzalés, and Berthe Morisot all contributed to these challenges as they created a new representation of women during the time through the use of Impressionist techniques and the female gaze. The following research will discover how the creativity and change of ideas made by women artists during the time challenged the reception of women in art and complex society for years to come, address concerns regarding the interpretations of class and gender during the nineteenth century and study the techniques and practices of these artists and its impact on Modern art and aesthetics.

In the history of premodern art, the nobility and bourgeoisie play an outsized role as patrons, leading to the overshadowing, caricaturing, and outright erasure of the working class. Throughout the nineteenth century, the authority and relevance of art institutions and traditional forms of patronage were being challenged by artists associated with the Realist movement. Realists were drawn to the contemporary world and often turned their attention towards neglected subjects from everyday society, including the working class. Given his “worker-artist” mentality and urge to observe and represent what is true and witnessed in the world, including contemporary socio-economic issues, Gustave Corbet continually revisited the circumstances of the working class. This sentiment is upheld even in Courbet’s work, The Painter’s Studio; A Real Allegory (1855), despite its inclusion of unreal and fabricated elements. By using Realism and allegories as stylistic and rhetorical devices, Courbet creates a visual space that engages with his personal views on society and art liberation, which can be applied to the entirety of the working class. Courbet visualizes his own practice of artistic liberation in The Painter’s Studio as a metaphorical blueprint for how humanity, especially the working class, can improve its social condition. As such, the artist’s studio stands in for the world, in which the artist and art assume the roles of all other occupations. By demonstrating the success and promise that could result from claiming one’s artistic freedom, Courbet directly allegorizes his actions as the independent worker taking control of their means of labor and attaining greater liberty.

In the 1970s a group of artists in remote central Australia began working in a new medium that had a profound impact on the art world. This discussion argues that the introduction of batik printing on silk and cotton to five Central Desert communities from 1971 onwards was a critical development in contemporary Aboriginal art, transforming ephemeral body painting to permanent mark making and changing the way that the art world thinks about Aboriginal art and culture. This thesis will be demonstrated through an examination of batik’s introduction to the Central Desert community of Ernabella, followed by an analysis of its adoption by neighboring communities and the significance of this for contemporary art. The choice made by the women of Ernabella to make marks using batik created a domino effect that ran through the women’s communities of Australia’s Central Desert and inspired profound art making. This discussion outlines some of the key reasons why this was such an important development, commencing with batik’s enthusiastic reception by the innovative artists at Ernabella. This was followed by the movement of batik to the neighboring Anmatyerr and Alyawarr communities, whose artists included the woman who would become one of Australia’s most successful painters, Emily Kam Kngwarray.

The metamorphosis of Kngwarray’s ceremonial stories, or Awely, from body markings onto batik and then canvas, became the central vision of fluent, Australia’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997, where Kngwarray was exhibited alongside fellow Aboriginal artists Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson. Generations of western male anthropologists had confined Aboriginal women to a minor role in Aboriginal society, which was then perpetuated by the art world that focused on male Aboriginal artists. Undaunted, Aboriginal women artists have created, and continue to create, powerful images drawn from the deep wells of their Anganenty, or Dreaming, to communicate the sophisticated knowledge systems of Aboriginal cultures.

During the Cambodian genocide (1975-79), Khmer Rouge forces engaged in archaeological looting at many sites including the tenth-century temple of Prasat Chen at Koh Ker. Statues depicting scenes from the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana were hacked off their pedestals and made their way Westward to be sold to collectors thrilled to acquire large-scale, flashy pieces comparable to Greek and Roman objects. In the decades that followed, statues from Koh Ker entered American museum collections and were featured in catalogues of Khmer art with no acknowledgement of their suspicious provenance. When a statue of the warrior Duryodhana graced the cover of a Sotheby’s auction catalogue in March 2011, the Cambodian government immediately recognized it as a piece of stolen cultural heritage and sued the auction house for its return, setting off a lengthy and well-publicized legal battle that would not be resolved until the Duryodhana’s repatriation in 2014. While this lawsuit played out in Manhattan federal court, institutions including Christie’s auction house, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Denver Art Museum quickly moved to return looted Koh Ker pieces in their collections, effectively getting out ahead of the controversy before they too could be sued. I argue that the media circus surrounding the Koh Ker repatriations positively influenced art institutions to return stolen objects of their own volition. However, the favorable press coverage of such institutions for doing so tended to lessen the severity of criticism toward them for buying obviously looted pieces in the first place, deemphasizing the harms perpetuated by trafficking in art. In that sense, the legal proceedings surrounding the return of the Duryodhana statue, though lengthy and salacious, did more to educate the public about looting and collecting ethics than the seemingly “voluntary” returns that followed.

Since the Manila Galleon trade was established in 1565, the route from the Philippines to New Spain has significantly contributed to the massive commercial, religious, and artistic exchange between Asia and America. Folding screens (also known as biombos) originating from China constitute an essential part of shipping cargo, which has also been imitated and reproduced in New Spain since the mid-seventeenth-century. As exported artworks, they usually exhibit cultural hybridity among European art, Japanese Kano School style, and Chinese traditions, thus making it difficult to identify their true origins. Therefore, this paper focuses on an eight-fold folding screen and its decorative golden motifs, now stored in the Art Institute of Chicago. By adopting an art history and maritime history approach, this paper contends that Macau could be the most probable place where it was produced in the first half of the seventeenth century. Macau was also the missing point in the transcultural journey of golden motifs from Japan to New Spain, during which the golden patterns were gradually shaped into an Orientalized visual device that significantly contributed to the Mexican local colonial art in the eighteenth century. In the following part, this paper first gives a visual analysis of this folding screen to identify a few controversies regarding its origin and golden motifs. Thereafter, it explores the three phases of the abovementioned dynamic cross-cultural process of decorative golden motifs. After that, a discussion of how different historical and artistic elements entangled in Macau, Manila, and New Spain in the seventeenth century will reveal the most probable attribution of this artifact. Through the discourse of this paper, a clear route of the evolution and migration of decorative golden patterns on folding screens within the seventeenth-century Pacific world will be mapped and presented.

Among many things, the Hindu temple represents the precise location where the world of the gods can meet with the world of humans. Imagined as the home of the divinities they contain, as worshippers enter, they undertake a series of rituals meant to mirror the welcoming of a guest into one’s house—in this case, the house of the divine. This sacred space must be demarcated and broadcasted to visitors in some way in order to indicate that they have moved from the realm of man to the realm of god. To accomplish this, temple builders have made clever use of the threshold. In this presentation, we will see how cave temples such as those in Badami have marked the entrance as a bridge between the mundane and the divine by invoking deities who similarly straddle classificatory boundaries. A trip to Cambodia will reveal how architects have utilized the environment in cosmological symbolism, reconstructing a journey towards the center of the universe using massive moats of water. Finally, we will see how despite the existence of a clear threshold, architects may have wanted these boundaries to be blurred, suggesting greater proximity between men and gods.

Among mainstream animated adaptations of world mythology, depictions of Southeast Asian myths are remarkably few. Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) broke the mold in that regard, but received criticism for its lack of specificity, portraying Southeast Asia as a homogenous culture instead of acknowledging its unique diversity. The mixed results of Raya have perhaps become a warning sign to animators looking to introduce Southeast Asia to mainstream audiences.

Yet, we may look to the region’s distant past to uncover narratives that, while not native to Southeast Asia, have become a shared narrative among the region’s diverse nations. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are both mythological epics deeply embedded into Southeast Asian cultures: notable examples include Javanese shadow puppet performances in Indonesia, the oral poem Hikayat Seri Rama in Malaysia, and parwa (dance-drama) in Bali. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have already been adapted by early animators in Indonesia and Thailand, albeit with relatively simpler styles due to the technology available at the time.

My project aims to explore the possibilities of animating a uniquely Southeast Asian adaptation of the Ramayana. It consists of two parts: the first, a research paper that examines the merits and detriments of using the Ramayana as a source myth, describes the existing Southeast Asian media used to narrate the Ramayana, and then finally review previous animated films in Southeast Asia that have adapted the Ramayana. The subsequent part of my project consists of creating concept art and character designs that utilizes my research, generating possible ideas that an animated film could conceivably be built upon.

In this presentation, I explore the work of Pacita Abad (1946-2004), specifically multimedia textiles and oil paintings—within three methodological lenses: biographical, feminist, and global to draw the conclusion that these methods reveal her ability to be able to use textile as a transformative tool for cultural and social commentary, but to also incorporate her own artistic goals of merging artistic techniques across the world due to her life experiences and travels exhibited in Trapunto.

After some biographical analysis in the context of her upbringing within a political family with public activism against the Marcos regime and martial law, I use two of her artworks, The Death of Ninoy (1983) and Marcos and his Cronies (1985), to show how she was driven by her first-hand experiences under a corrupt government to produce artwork to signify the outcry of the treatment of the people of the Philippines.

The second part of my paper addresses the feminist influences Abad had as a woman of color and immigrant in the United States. Using feminist art history theory regarding the need to incorporate the voices of women of color in a field that has been noted for its favoritism in Caucasian voices. Abad represents this through L.A. Liberty (1992), creating a reimagined representation of the Statue of Liberty to reincorporate the representation of immigrants and women of color in the United States.

The last part of this presentation focuses on the global experiences and influences Abad gained through travels as well as living in the United States and the Philippines. Through exploring Postcolonial theory of reclamation of land and culture, Abad’s works such as European Mask (1990) depicts a way to represent culture with tribal patterns and cultural motifs to re-represent ownership of their culture.

This paper examines the contemporary Chinese artist Yao Lu (b. 1967) and interprets his photography as a response to longstanding anxieties over the “death of painting.” The phrase originated from French painter Paul Delaroche, who declared, “From today, painting is dead!” upon first seeing a photograph in 1839. Since then, the fear has recurred throughout global art history. In China, concerns over painting’s death emerged around the same time, not due to photography but in response to military defeats from the mid-nineteenth century onward, which raised questions about the relevance of the Chinese tradition amid the quest for modernization. Since then, successive generations of Chinese artists have sought ways to revitalize painting amid evolving socio-political landscapes.

Yao Lu actively engages with this discourse in the twenty-first century, appropriating photography – a medium once regarded as a threat to painting’s vitality–to resuscitate traditional Chinese painting. This paper argues that his works illustrate how photography can paradoxically “kill” and “resuscitate” painting by both challenging its relevance and creating new possibilities for its revival. Yao conflates the anxiety of change about the medium in the “death of painting” discourse with the anxiety of change about society in contemporary China. Drawing upon traditional Chinese painting to critique contemporary issues, Yao renews the tradition’s relevance and expressive power.

Using Photoshop, Yao constructs images that initially resemble traditional Chinese paintings but, upon closer examination, reveal contemporary realities of environmental degradation and globalization. This study focuses on two of Yao’s series: New Landscape and Illustrated Treatise of Maritime Kingdoms. While existing scholarship primarily focuses on New Landscape and interprets Yao through an environmental lens, this paper shows that he addresses broader anxieties of change, encompassing environmental, socioeconomic, domestic, and international, while providing a compelling response to the “death of painting” discourse in Chinese and global art history.

The aesthetic “contamination” of contemporary Chinese art and culture surfaces playfully across Wang Qingsong’s oeuvre. Trained as a painter at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, Wang employs elements of documentary photography and photojournalism to underscore the uncertain future of post-socialist China. He attempts to visualize the paranoia surrounding the country’s rapid commercialization and modernization in Chinese society from the 1990s to early 2000s, borrowing from video and performance art. Beyond a critique of the infiltration of consumerist attitudes, Wang’s practice can be considered ephemeral; his staged compositions exude the theatrics of tableau vivant. Material excess and greed overtake the camera’s consciousness. Such photographs capture artificially constructed moments in time that parody reality, subverting the color palettes of socialist realism and Communist propaganda. Manifest in works such as MOMA Studio (2005) and Romantique (2003), Western aesthetics, iconography, and idealized representations of the body are literally superimposed over Chinese bodies to create dissonance. This results in sensationalized landscapes of everyday civilians, illustrating the widespread access to global visual culture, and rendered in monumental scale.

This presentation offers up Wang’s photographs as a lens for deconstructing the fabric of Chinese social reality in flux. They constitute self-portraits as Wang often inserts himself into the composition, cementing his role as both observer and director. Gaudy, cheap colors mirror the disillusionment with turbulent urban life. Drawing upon the understudied history of Chinese staged photography, I propose that Wang’s experimental human landscapes, veiled in satire and hyperbole, are ultimately rooted in optimism. The expansive yet detailed nature of his images—compared to murals or dioramas—yields a kind of secondary spectatorship; we watch the extras watch the world around them. It becomes possible to understand Wang as projecting his own personal apprehensions onto colossal sets, breathing life into visions of the past, present, and future.