Erwin Panofsky was one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century. In his Studies in Iconography in 1939 he proposed a scientific method to interpret the various levels of meaning found in a work of art. His method has been very successful and remains important in the field of Art History today. While studying the Panofsky system, I became curious to learn if this method would still be successful when analyzing a painting from the Far East instead of a Western one. The Sixth Patriarch Chopping Bamboo is one of the most renowned Chan (Zen) paintings by the artist Liang Kai of the South Song Dynasty (1127-1279). Chan means “meditation” and is one of the sects of Buddhism which focus on inward communion. The practice of Chan strongly relates to the overall ideology of the Chinese and Japanese cultures, and Liang Kai’s painting is one of the best examples of this ideology. My research makes use of the Panofsky system to interpret step by step The Sixth Patriarch Chopping Bamboo, showing both the advantages and the disadvantages of Panofsky’s method when applied to Far Eastern art.

From 1655 to 1657, the Dutch East India Company commissioned amateur artist and author Johan Nieuhof to accompany the first Dutch diplomatic mission to the Chinese court. Although the mission failed to achieve its desired trade agreement, Nieuhof’s chronicle of the voyage was printed by Amsterdam publisher and engraver Jacob van Meurs in 1665 and titled Het Gezantschap der Neêrlandtsche Oost-Indische Compagnie (The Embassy of the Dutch East India Company).

This paper focuses on one unusual engraving that illustrates Nieuhof’s chapter on the arrival city of Canton, titled Kanton in Platte Grondt (Ground Plan of Canton). One of van Meurs’ own creations, the image merges details from Nieuhof’s eye-witness sketch of Canton’s shoreline with an imagined map of the city. In an attempt to codify the foreign space into a familiar construction, van Meurs draws on the conventions of multiple European genres, including travelogue illustration, maritime art, and cartography. Misleadingly, the messages of each of these genres––all intended to assert Dutch cultural and political supremacy––directly contradict the Dutch perception of their relationship with China, which they optimistically viewed as equal, commercial, and diplomatic. Adding to this tension, van Meurs not only combines multiple conventions, but also parses them into conflicting perspectival systems, encouraging a direct comparison between the space the Dutch ships occupy and the city that China strictly controls.

In this paper, I consider the use of perspective in Het Gezantschap both as an artistic technique for representing observed space and as a metaphor for the Dutch cultural perspective on Chinese civilization. Ultimately, I argue that the two juxtaposed perspectival systems reveal the complexities of the Dutch Republic’s relationship with early Qing China, a relationship that was stunted by the embassy’s limited access to the mainland and distorted by their romanticized preconceptions of the Asian empire.

The profound success of Chinese contemporary artists internationally bears a stark contrast to the reception of Chinese-American artists. In this essay, I will examine artworks by Yue Minjun and Martin Wong to reveal the disparate perceptions of Asian and Asian-American artists internationally. Yue Minjun, a renowned Chinese artist whose works are associated with the cynical realism movement of the late 80s and 90s, offers salient reflections of China’s tumultuous recent past. Minjun’s art is present in some of the most prominent western public and private collections. Martin Wong, a Chinese-American artist working concurrently in the United States, creates paintings that explore the intersection of Chinese and American culture, Chinese- American stereotypes, and his negotiation of racial and sexual identities. Though Wong’s works convey a rich and multi-faceted perspective, he is largely excluded from exhibitions and discourse recalling New York artists of the ’80s and ’90s. The qualitative and quantitative research I’ve conducted in preparation for this work includes pertinent art market data, particularly auction results, Chinese and American art histories, and art world materials, including exhibition catalogs and essays. The theoretical framework for my assertions references Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality and Dr. David L. Eng and Dr. Shinhee Han’s writings based on critical race theory and psychoanalytic theory, which illustrate art market marginalization and psychological struggles endured by Asian-Americans amidst discrimination and stereotypes. An examination of Clement Greenberg’s essays, which have been immensely influential on modern and contemporary art, unveils a prioritization and preference for purity that has persisted. This essay will elucidate the ways Chinese and Chinese-American artists are perceived internationally, divulging the valorization of cultural and racial identities prevalent in the art market today.  

For my ongoing honors thesis research at Bryn Mawr College, I am studying Transformation (變形, 1997), an early work from the oeuvre of Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen. Comprised of 120 discarded roof tiles salvaged by the artist from demolition sites during the major metamorphosis of Beijing, Transformation is a sculptural installation that embodies the memories of a time and place that were rapidly disappearing. As such, I argue that the installation ultimately attests to the artist’s persistent attempt to remember, despite the fragmented remnants in the aftermath of destruction.

I adopt a critical materialist approach in my consideration of Yin’s work as an artistic intervention against time and oblivion in response to the violent erasure and the enforced singular narrative of cultural history and memory. Through an analysis of Yin’s use of cement powder, discarded roof tiles, and documentary photography, I demonstrate that these materials are mobilized as metaphors of time and change. Comparatively I draw upon the works of Song Dong, Xu Bing, and Lin Yilin, examining their employment of materials in relation to Yin’s and exploring the aesthetics of urban renewal in Beijing (and other major Chinese cities) in the 1990s and 2000s—a crucial moment in China’s recent urban history. Transformation, however, distinguishes itself as a tribute to lost buildings, connections, and time, through its embrace of contemporary materiality. Yin manipulates the materials to decry the destructiveness of modernization and to make permanent the ruins and tattered memories left in its wake. As I suggest, it is a conscientious gathering and preserving of an erased past. Although it is not expressively commemorative, it shapes collective memory.

In Looking for Asian America, Wing Young Huie compiles a series of photographs taken across the contiguous Unites States and Hawaii, tracing the whereabouts, lives, and memories of Asian Americans—strangers, who he encountered at the unlikeliest of situations, and whose lives can be briefly glimpsed through Huie’s portraits. The photographs are compiled into a book that transcends medium; simultaneously memoir, exhibition, and map, Looking for Asian America is comprised of sixteen chapters, all which begin with a single page poetic narrative memoir recounting a moment (or collaged moments) from Huie’s trip across the US. Organized non-geographically, these moments are collected from disjunct locations with disjunct motifs—yet, somehow, a feeling of deep resonance is retained between photographs. In the context of the social and psychic predicament of Asian America, which is characterized by a feeling of racial melancholia, dissociation, and disorientation, Huie’s is a project of orientation, of tracing what has been lost and disappeared during the experiences of migration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. Alternately ethnographic and autobiographical, cartographic and portrait, textual and image; Huie’s work carries out an intimate cartographical project to trace the history, memory, and presence of Asian America.  Huie’s project, as is suggested titularly, looks for Asian America. It looks for something that has been simultaneously vanished and cartographically overdetermined. This paper is a phenomenological and historical-materialist reading of Huie’s Looking for Asian America as a counter-cartography of lost, cross-continental intimacies.

Although scholars of art history have largely acknowledged the status of comics as an art form, the relation of comics to a larger graphic arts tradition has not been sufficiently explored. Visual artist and printmaker Fay Ryu’s 2005 self-published minicomic, Hello, engages with Medieval manuscript illumination by virtue of its narrative: the story of the Biblical Fall from Eden. I describe the function of color in Hello as similar to the role Hildegard of Bingen’s iconographical forms play in her illumination of the same story for the Scivias. These works, both created outside conventional norms of artistic production in their respective time periods, not least due to the gender of their creators, use color and distinct graphical elements to convey the pain, specifically head pain, of knowledge. Hildegard’s illustrations emphasize containment and the viewer’s distance from epiphany, while Ryu uses the convention of the “full-page bleed” to affect immediacy on the viewer. By contrasting Ryu’s innovative use of the book form with Hildegard’s, I show the emergence of a distinctly postmodern, absurdist version of the Fall story – one in which pain radiates outwards, rather than remaining tightly constrained. The ideological opposition between Hildegard’s Judeo-Christian values and Ryu’s anti-capitalist values embedded in their respective visual acceptance and rejection of epiphanic pain epitomizes the key difference between contemporary comics and previous iterations of book art. Further research on this topic would likely warrant a more in-depth exploration of underground comics and their relationship to Medieval illumination, specifically with regard to religious content.

How can an artist tell a story without narrative? Using an art history and media studies-integrated approach, I examine Hong Kong contemporary artist Lam Tung Pang’s multimedia installation, The Great Escape, which takes the form of a large-scale magic lantern. The magic lantern projects an image that Lam has repeatedly revisited in multiple prior artworks: the lone figure of a man wearing a fedora, situated within a landscape that often literally shifts before our eyes, as the fedora man often appears in front of a moving image, whether as a still drawing or a three-dimensional figurine, placed in front of the screen. This image provokes countless associations: whether a Chinese ink landscape, Hong Kong’s rich local history of film noir, or Lam’s personal memories. While this recurrent scene might suggest that Lam’s artistic practice is a multi-episodal narrative that unites all these connections, this recurrent image actually breaks down narrative into a free-floating network of inconclusive stories. Lam’s recurrent images makes us realize that narrativization is a violent game of choice, in which one story can consume another. 

I call this breakdown process “story-tinkering,” defined in opposition to storytelling. Story-tinkering de-stabilizes all traditional means of storytelling via stable categories of settings, characters, and political/historical context. Story-tinkering has two functions. First, it enacts the real-time building of the Hong Kong subjectivity: a pressing question not only during one of its darkest political hours, but also a longstanding issue for Hong Kong artists, who are situated at the blindspot of two discourses: global contemporary art and Chinese art. 

Second, story-tinkering is Lam’s inward, self-reckoning with these broader challenges. Lam’s network of inconclusive, self-defeating stories employs a mode of storytelling first introduced to him as a child via Japanese media franchises. Lam thus uses a cognitive return to childhood to crack open the most daunting issues of identity, using one story to question the other. 

I hold memories of specific movements that help me reorganize my understanding of my body within space. These sensory realizations in everyday movements were coming to me at very random times, and I wanted a way to cultivate phenomena with more intention and control in order to examine them closely. Attempts to reconnect with embodied moments became the starting point of my research. I arrived at an investigation of instructional works that range from dance, sound, performance, poetry, theater, martial arts, and meditation. Within these exercises, I was looking for moments of change within my internal physical perception through experiences of movement/non-movement prompted by text or video instructions. They ranged from very prescriptive, precise orders that ask for generative movements to abstract verses that create an open situation. All mediums have helped to reveal what I had always known but never realized and uncovered new bodily sensations by introducing ways of moving. Many of these instructions required an open space and interaction with other participants. I had plenty of open space, but being quarantined at the time, I could not recreate collective experiences in physical space. Though there was a possibility for digital connections of interactions, I focused on works that were entirely staged for self-discovery. Throughout the months of April and May, I took the collected instructions to interpret and perform them through my body in an attempt to take possession of the proposed actions. My focus was not to gain a better technical skill set in movement, but rather to discover new ways of learning through embodiment. I then recorded my experiences in a journal format, describing the fundamental feelings of my body which eventually led to realizations in cognitive processes in performance.

Historians have primarily studied the contributions of ancient Greek women within society through biased literary accounts written by men of privileged ranks; these accounts have been presently understood as valid sources, yet these writings are not necessarily representative for the remainder of society. The present paper explores what constitutes the female topography of a Greek city, focusing on the significance of the archaeological record and the need to look beyond a strictly male viewpoint when interpreting the affairs of women in a society in which they participated in both public and private spheres of life. In order to understand the effect of this bias on our present understanding of the female landscape, one must focus upon the reconstruction of archaeological material. Such a reconstruction reveals that women held significant positions within both the household and greater polis. Excavations of ancient cities such as Olynthos underscore the persistence of male bias affecting the transmission of information regarding the nature and construction of female spaces. These results indicate that archaeologists must continue to push forward their research of women’s spaces while understanding the historical influence of male perspectives within the field, both affecting the excavation of a site and the interpretation of found objects. My analysis of the archaeological evidence from Olynthos together with iconographic and literary sources suggests that women played pivotal roles in shaping Greek society, and that their contributions and interactions within society deserve to be included in scholarly discourse for centuries to come.

Artemisia Gentileschi was a Baroque painter whose accomplishments are often overshadowed by her controversial personal life. However, today, efforts have been made to use Gentileschi’s biography to inform her work rather than popularize her because of it. Her most famous works, Susanna and the Elders and Judith Slaying Holoferenes, depicts women from the Bible actively taking part in their stories. This is a huge departure in how most of the male artists depicted the women with the male gaze during the Baroque period and even in today. The male gaze is a phrase used to define how women were portrayed and viewed in the media. It has been marked as women being objectified or used to enforce the patriarchy. The popular Biblical figures Susanna and Judith were often portrayed as women passively existing within their paintings or being objectified for both the artist and the audience. In contrast, Gentileschi does not incorporate the male gaze into the portrayals in her paintings. Instead of portraying Susanna flirting with the Elders, Gentileschi portrays Susanna as a woman disgusted by the leering of the Elders and turning away from their advances. Instead of distancing Judith from the bloodshed or presenting her as an innocent, she partners with her maidservant to get rid of the tyrant oppressing Judith’s village at any and all cost. Gentileschi’s interpretation at the time was not appreciated during the Baroque period, as her reputation preceded her, and other painters chose to continue using the male gaze in their own work. But today modern art historians look at Gentileschi’s forward-thinking work with awe and appreciation.

Despite her status as one of the early founders of the still life genre, the seventeenth-century Baroque painter Clara Peeters is an enigma.  A native of Antwerp, Clara Peeters was a member of the newly-formed Dutch middle class. Given her familiarity with theological emblems, highly naturalistic painting techniques, and her tendency to paint large banquets, Peeters was probably trained by a father or male peer and found an audience for her paintings among the members of the middle-class. In her most famous painting, the so-called Vanitas, she presents herself as middle-class. 

All around this apparent self-portrait are finely crafted jewelry and trinkets, wilting flowers, and a bubble, all symbolic of mortality. Scholars argue that the woman is Peeters, but she has been misidentified. Finely-detailed reflections on flagons or gold cups of honor in this and other paintings show the painter is brunette and slight-of-frame, unlike the subject, who is blonde and full-figured.

Vanitas is an outlier in Peeters’ works however, as her catalog is primarily still-life. Two of these still lives stand out for biblical allusions: Still Life with Crabs, Shrimps and Lobster and Still Life with Shellfish and Eggs. Both depict Easter banquets with tablecloths depicting tableaus. Crabs depicts the Binding of Isaac, linked to Easter as a type of Christ’s death and resurrection. Shellfish shows John the Baptist identified by his attire and cross-shaped scepter. John the Baptist’s presence links his ascetic lifestyle with Lenten fasts.

Through the interpolation of religious references, Clara Peeters extended the boundaries of still life painting despite its reputation as Low Art.  Limited in her pursuits by Baroque gender roles, Peeters found success as an artist because of her attention to detail and innovative interpretation of still life painting.

The depiction of public leadership is often a precise task, the sitter and the artist balancing reality and the persona of the sitter; this balance becomes trickier when the concept of gender is introduced. Public figures of power and influence become scrutinized and examined by the public at magnified proportions. Important to maintaining the social structure in these hierarchical societies, state portraiture served to assert confidence in the strength and unchallenged power of the usually male leader. The symbolic likeness of a female leader, however, comes with a vastly different social set of expectations. Female leaders, when striving to create public reputation and persona through state portraiture, must navigate the social views of both masculinity and femininity to create the perfect image of unrefuted power equivalent to the standards set by their male counterparts. Keenly aware of expectations regarding likeness and public image, female leaders were and continue to be socially conscious of the public gaze and highly selective in the creation of their portraits. Influenced by the social assumptions regarding femininity, female state portraiture balances the social norms of a strong, intelligent, masculine representation of power with the proper inclusion of current feminine ideals. The closer to the modern era and the further away from the ideas of absolute power, the more accessibility is woven into depictions of the state. In the context of female state portraiture, this results in more modern interpretations of female power, including ideas of personality, identity, and domesticity. This thesis examines the relationship of female leadership and their public depictions in the West from the English Renaissance to contemporary society. The official and state portraits of six major female leaders–Elizabeth I, Marie de’ Medici, Marie Antoinette, Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II, and Michelle Obama– are examined to define the unique public persona created for each.

The feminization of needlework under patriarchal systems of power and oppression have reinforced both long-standing feminine stereotypes and temporal sociocultural ideals. As a tool of patriarchal oppression, needlework has been used to confine women to the domestic sphere by teaching them to stay in the home, be quiet, and follow a pattern; as an educational instrument, needlework reinforced standards of women’s behavior, aptitudes, and conduct. However, women for centuries have silently resisted and subverted these expectations and ideals through the very same means. Women have utilized needlework during times of crisis and collective trauma for centuries as both a practicality and means of expression. Starting in the second wave feminist movement, female artists fought for the recognition of needlework as high art, a category which the craft was explicitly excluded from since 1768 by The Royal Academy in the UK.

From altered Sampler verses of Early Modernity to the present-day Pandemic Embroidery Project, crisis and confinement has resulted in the employment of textile craft to disseminate information, protest, collectivize, aid society, and record history internationally. Especially amidst times of social disruption and emergency, the importance of and reliance upon women’s domestic labors is heightened. By taking a historical approach to analyze the ways in which women have employed needlework during times of social crisis internationally, we can understand the durable, practical, and precious media as political device and high art.

Embroidered samplers existed as a widely practiced art form and reference tool for roughly 400 years in western Europe and the American colonies, but in the last 150 years have disappeared from the realms of art and education. Samplers were created in Europe as early as the 16th century as a record of different stitches and patterns, but ultimately became widely used didactic tools, and a basic artistic format that was infinitely elaborated upon. During the 19th century the Industrial Revolution and the associated introduction of machine-sewing and embroidery decreased the need for hand stitching. The sampler’s didactic purpose had become irrelevant, and their production decreased markedly after 1850. For centuries, though, samplers played a pivotal role in the education of young women, and the opportunity they provided for artistic expression and self-documentation during formative years in a world without other outlets makes these works complex and valuable historical objects. Using samplers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of over 500, this paper examines how samplers functioned as both works of art and didactic tools, and how their creation documented the lives and beliefs of young women at the time. The works examined here include depictions of the human form in a variety of contexts and styles, thereby exploring the ways in which women constructed and documented their own femininity at a time when there were few opportunities to do so. This paper argues that samplers are vital to understanding the lives of young women of the United States during the early 19th century, though academia and major museums have relegated this art form to the domestic and instructional realms. Samplers should be recognized as works of art with purposeful creators, whose artistic decisions and personal conceptions of femininity are shown in the works.

Based on psychoanalytic theories and gendered medical research, the men of the Surrealist movement looked to the “hysterical woman” as both an object of male desire and a vehicle for activating the unconscious mind. The “female madwoman”—often distorted, dismembered, and sexualized—pervaded Surrealist art made by men, creating reciprocity between female mental illness and male pleasure. Following the work of two women artists, Kay Sage and Remedios Varo, this paper analyzes the use of self-portraiture in defying the Surrealist appropriation of the female body. Sage’s barren architectural paintings often depict endless landscapes and elusive figures, reflecting her own feelings of solitude and doubt while simultaneously shrouding them in ambiguity. Varo’s paintings, full of religious and spiritual imagery, feature partially disguised female figures that serve to highlight the absurdities in her male contemporaries’ representations of women. Despite their vastly different painting styles, the artists are a fascinating pair to study together: both withhold the usual revelations of self-portraiture, while embedding themes of female agency, self-identity, and trauma in their work.

This study aims to shed light on two underrepresented female Surrealists and how they reclaimed the agency of the female figure—and subsequently, the woman artist—through their work. A detailed analysis of six paintings is offered in dialogue with feminist, Surrealist, and medical literature, including Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, André Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme, and Jean-Martin Charcot’s work in Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Bringing the narrative of female Surrealists full circle, the analysis of Sage and Varo’s work highlights how they dismantled the image of the “female madwoman.”

The power of most works of art resides in their individuality. When pieces are bound together with purpose and placed in a specific sequence, their narrative and individuality is enhanced to create a story the artist guides us on. Photos put into photobooks have the ability to capture a snapshot of the photographer’s reality and take us into their own world; however, there is not always a narrated story to be told. This is part of the essence that makes photography such a unique medium: the viewer can take away their own impression of the photographer’s reality and, simply put, interpret the artist’s interpretation. I argue that Nan Goldin makes an intervention on this method of photobook construction in her sequencing of images to tell a narrated story of a specific moment in her life. She uses her photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) to create a compelling, chronological documentation of her relationship with longtime boyfriend Brian and their breakup, done by her structuring of images in a classic story format including an introduction, climax and resolution. The book serves as her personal photo diary in which she studies the duality of love and hate, passion and violence and the fine line between the two. This raw exposure of her innate desires and private moments, I believe, is what makes her photobook not only an extremely compelling story, but also an informational one. As a relatively recent medium, there is little discourse and scholarly writing on the topic of photobooks. I hope my research helps to bring both more popularity and scrutiny to this area in the history of art and highlight the uniqueness of photobooks.

The border between the United States and Mexico is a space shared by many and is filled with emotions that often inspire political and creative responses. The Mexican artist, Ana Teresa Fernández, is one of many working in this territory. Her ongoing project, Borrando la frontera –

Erasing the Border – endeavors to bring greater attention to the effects of the border wall and its significance to the histories of both countries. In 2011, Fernández painted the wall at the San Francisco-Tijuana border a powdery blue to make it disappear into the sky, marking the start of her project of painting the wall in different sections of the border. With this particular version of the project, Fernández called attention to current political situation surrounding the closure of nearby Friendship Park and reminded viewers of its initial purpose of unity when it was dedicated by then-First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971. My analysis of her work in this paper addresses the question of whether there were possible effects of her work on the local community, in particular its contributions to the reopening of nearby Friendship Park and public perception surrounding this issue. I argue Fernandez’s project served as a visual reminder of the initial purpose of Friendship Park and changed the perception of the wall from one of fear to that of hope. By literally erasing the border Fernandez’s work served as a representation of social change that intervened in the physical and conceptual presence of the wall. I compare her project to other works by artists on the border that share Fernandez’s goals of transforming perceptions of the border wall and challenge its necessity.

Since its publication, E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler has shaped the popular imagination concerning museums and collecting. Published in 1967, the illustrated chapter book follows the narrative of two children running away from their suburban home to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and stumbling upon a mystery concerning the attribution of a work of Renaissance sculpture. Konigsburg presents a sanitized image of the rarified world of the museum and art connoisseurship, seemingly severed from any social or historical bearings. However, through a close-reading of the book’s early edits, illustrations, and engagement with the Met’s own history, my argument reveals an encounter and negotiation of the role of the art museum to demarcate highly-contested boundaries of race, class, and value. Drawing on the author’s archives held at the University of Pittsburgh and Konigsburg’s own later reflections of the text, my paper recontextualizes the internal narrative that Konigsburg herself understands as the subject of her book is merely the foreground in a broader consideration of social upheaval in urban America during the 1960s.

American conceptual artist, writer, and philosopher Adrian Piper (1948-) creates work across various mediums that encourage self-analysis and reflection in order to examine ostracism and how it relates to politics of identity, such as race, class, sexuality, and gender. One of her more famous series, titled Mythic Being (1973-1975), will be the focus of this paper. The series explores a fictionalized male persona created and performed by Piper in an effort to explore perceptions of gender and intersections of patriarchy and race-based discriminations. By dressing up in drag, Piper would intentionally perform as a black man for specifically chosen audiences throughout New York City, one of the artist’s earlier series that brings to light her true foundations in conceptual and performative art. A great source of inspiration for Piper was conceptual artist and writer Sol LeWitt, whose “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” exposes the world’s obsession with conceptual thought being the most critical aspect of artistic production at the time of the late 1960s to early 1970s. This era will be further explored in an effort to understand the philosophical ideologies that rose in relation to art, ideas of hegelianism and pure reason and how these absorbed Piper and bled into her work (Food for the Spirit, 1971). By exploring the series of Mythic Being this paper will aim to understand the relationship between identity and space—the politics of it, how much can be taken up, and who has the privilege to move through it. What does it mean to shape shift, to adopt an identity different from one’s own, and are there consequences? By looking at other series by Piper such as Catalysis and My Calling Card various binaries will be explored, including the notion of otherness, and conclusions will be made in regards to how much space an individual can carve in a world where none is made for them.

Art is often seen as a representation of the current culture or historical events. However, this historical representation can mask the characteristic of art as a commodity, an object that is exchanged between owners. Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is a 17-foot glass case with a 14-foot dead tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde. “The Shark” is considered Hirst’s breakout piece and is one of his most famous works. The sculpture broke headlines when it debuted in 1991 and then again in 2004 when it sold for around 10 million dollars. This was shocking because “The Shark” is far from the traditional idea of art but still had managed to sell for so much money. Analysis has previously ignored the financial aspects of art and how it can affect public interest. The monetary value has historically been left out of the discussion, most likely because the sale occurred years after the art is created. Hirst’s work is a modern example of art being associated with its production costs as well as its price. I am using cultural economic studies by David Throsby and Stewart Martin to analyze how Hirst’s work is at the most basic level, a commodity. “The Shark” is a principal example to analyze art as a commodity because of the wealth associated with Hirst. “The Shark” is not only representative of modern art but also is directly connected to economics, as the shark is a common symbol to represent the sublimity of wealth generated in the business world.

Kehinde Wiley, a New York-based artist, responds to the exclusion of black bodies in Euro-American, Early Modern art historical representation by substituting these bodies into canonical paintings. The models for his 2012 exhibition An Economy of Grace, which appropriates 18th and 19th century portraits of European society women, were recruited from the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn. The largest artwork, Judith and Holofernes, is one of the latest visual iterations of an Old Testament tale in which a pious widow, Judith, intoxicates and beheads an Assyrian general, Holofernes, to save her town. However, in lieu of Holofernes’ head, Judith holds a decapitated white woman by her ponytail. The general’s bedchamber is collapsed into a non-dimensional floral motif. She trades in her pre-designer duds for new Givenchy. At this convergence of society portraiture, the fashion house, and religious imagery, we also encounter the visual culture of Hip Hop, allegorical portraiture, and Greenbergian Modernism. There is virtually no scholarship on Wiley that extensively examines one of his artworks. It is my hope to see past common generalizations of his oeuvre and demonstrate a breadth of influences in Judith that underscores the unique nature of each of the artist’s paintings. Using Linda Hutcheon’s theory of Postmodern parody, I argue that the constituent histories of Wiley’s Judith and Holofernes serve as the scope through which the artist established a contemporary representation of many of the power struggles that are encountered by black, working-class women. This will be assessed through an exploration of the pictorial and biblical legacies of Judith, the history of the fashion house, and the role the flattened background plays in disempowering yet decolonizing the subject. Finally, through the lens of society portraiture, I conclude by considering if this is a personal reclamation for Judith’s real-life model, Treisha Lowe.

My paper looks at the work of the collective ACT UP and its graphic design affinity group Gran Fury to analyze the goals and visual language of the activist posters created during the AIDS epidemic. During this savage public health crisis, the US government and the general public abandoned the LGBTQ community, leaving this marginalized group without the drugs, policies, or care it so desperately needed. In an effort to survive this plague, activists organized to end the AIDS crisis and the rampant homophobia that explained the mistreatment of people with AIDS and other marginalized groups. Specifically, the posters produced by AIDS activists, such as Gran Fury, sought to bring attention to governmental inaction and public indifference, to provide an alternative narrative to the harmful mainstream media, and to challenge religious bigotry. Scholars such as Douglas Crimp, Simon Watney, and Susan Sontag leveraged postmodern theory to explain the political context of the AIDS epidemic and analyze the potential for activist art to transform culture. I build upon this scholarship with close visual analysis to show how the aesthetics of ACT UP and Gran Fury’s posters mimicked those of mainstream advertising. I argue that although the visual language of 1980s capitalism was legible for the general public, and thus helped make the activists’ messaging clear and comprehensible, its associations with consumer choice and monetary greed cast this public health crisis in a troubling light.

Marginalized artists are doubly burdened in their praxes; they must produce work that reinforces a distinct, often contrived narrative while convincing the art world of its significance. Artists of certain backgrounds must choose between agency and livelihood, repudiating any art idealism that this elite community portrays. The global art power structure is a racist, sexist, and class-dependent, hegemonic machine. It relies upon assumed identities used to exploit the underrepresented artist, gallerist, curator, and fundraiser. This study demonstrates how the marginalized artist is commodified in the marketplace. It analyzes the modes by which the financial and social value of works of art are perceived by those who wield power and influence in the contemporary art world. The relationship between visual culture, art communities, and the mechanics of trade in these spaces is essential to this research. Equitable representation in art is about far more than inclusion in collections for the sake of meeting quotas. Instead, it should champion a fairer critical evaluation of identity politics in sociological, feminist, class, and critical race approaches to art history. 

For this paper, four artists comparatively demonstrate these layered contemplations of identity. This thesis focuses on the misinterpretations of the artistic intentions of Frida Kahlo, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kerry James Marshall, and Carrie Mae Weems. Specifically, ways that institutions posthumously iconize the two former and presumptuously critique the two latter based on their public personas and not their visual practices. Ultimately, this thesis necessitates the art world’s understanding of marginalized artist’s self-imposed identities when considering their output and promoting inclusivity without relying on them as a justification or motive for what they create. In this, marginalized artists move one step closer to being just artists.

Art is usually considered creative, risky, emotional – words that are not normally associated with a safe investment or accessibility.  Can blockchain technology change this perception? Developed in 2008, blockchain is a digital ledger created to record transactions that are public and incorruptible. This emerging technology, most commonly identified with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has many applications in the art world. This paper discusses the implications blockchain will have on the various players in that art market, including artists, collectors, sellers, art lawyers, financial advisors and the average art enthusiast. Artists are using blockchain as a medium and to authenticate their work and receive royalties. Blockchain is making art a safer and more accessible investment for collectors by tracking provenance. It also helps auction houses maintain records and galleries become increasingly digital. Blockchain technology has introduced smart contracts to art law and will raise questions regarding the applicable securities laws to fractional sales of artwork. By reducing the risk of fraud previously inherent in the art market, blockchain enables financial advisors to recommend art as an investment. Museums are using blockchain to collaborate and share pieces of art, transport their physical locations to screens and tablets, and to make digital art more accessible to patrons. The art market is a global billion-dollar business made up of multiple players. The players in the market remain the same, but blockchain technology is changing the rules.

Site-specific art is created with the intent of coexisting with its physical environment, like the term implies. The content and meaning of the work cannot be divorced from its sense of place, its self-professed existence. As they are tethered in space to the area around them, these works are typically ephemeral in their materiality yet unmovable by character. Since this type of art remains in the open it can become a victim of time and weather, evolving with its environment. My goal is to explore the lifecycle of site-specific art with particular interest in instances where the art is intended to be temporary. It becomes adrift with its referent and redefines the space around it in meaning. I will delve into different site-specific phenomena and address the impact that temporality holds over the companionship between art and site. Richard Serra famously said “To remove the work is to destroy the work”; in a similar vein, I survey works that rely entirely on their site for support, forming their spatial and aesthetic ecosystems. These works include: Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson (1970), Katie Patterson’s work Inside this Desert Lies the Tiniest Grain of Sand (2010-present), Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas, Laura Aguillar’s Center 94 (2000), Meredith Monk’s Juice (1969), and Tilted Arc by Richard Sera. These instances explore the duality between the ephemeral and the monumental, and how a work which possesses both spirits can be torn apart by this contradiction.

Allegory has been an artistic tool throughout history to symbolize deep moral or spiritual meanings. It can also readily convey complex ideas in ways easily comprehensible or striking to the recipients of its messages. Francisco de Goya, widely considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, first used Greek and Roman myth narratives and visual formulas to create classical allegories, like other artists of his time. But his allegories evolved from representing social and cultural ideals to symbolizing and highlighting the flawed realities of life as he knew it.

This presentation explores some of Goya’s personal allegories in three of the Caprichos, his famous series of etchings published as an album in 1799. The prints explored are plates 19, Todos caerán (All Will Fall), 20, Ya van desplumados (There They Go Plucked), and 21, ¡Qual la descañonan! (How They Pluck Her!). The presentation also introduces the audience to the Caprichos series and to its most emblematic etching, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters).

After the Civil War, artistic growth and adaptation meant survival for Gothic Revivalists, especially A.J. Downing’s successors. One such associated architect, George E. Harney (1840–1924), worked around New York’s Newburgh Bay among Frederick Clarke Withers and Calvert Vaux. His early career climaxed in two adjoining projects, Windridge and Bengenone, completely absent from scholarship on Hudson River estates. Marking his ascension, their plans animate those of his luminary Downing and contemporary Vaux to predict the future of medievalism in the long nineteenth century. In this paper, I introduce Windridge as a monument to the English romanticization of Renaissance Italy. Tracing commissioner William J. Roe’s 1862 European grand tour, I note the effect of Venetian palazzi, Roman aqueducts, and Pompeiian dwellings on the planning process. I also present new evidence for the relationship between Withers and Harney that introduced the latter to Ruskin. These influences welded to create a picturesque, theatrical Italian castle above the Hudson, providing stability for both commissioner and architect.

During his dictatorship, Francisco Franco censored almost every form of art except for fine, visual arts. Thus, artists like Pablo Picasso continued to produce art legally, whether or not it painted the dictator in a flattering light. Due to Franco’s once seemingly innocuous decision regarding national censorship, Picasso was able to gain such a large following that we would go on to become one of the country’s biggest threats. Time and time again, the Spanish state provide their dislike for Picasso as they attempted to slander his name and force him out of work. The fact that his influence only grew worried the Spanish government even more. Decades after the 1937 unveiling of Guernica, the painting was still discussed in the press and was continually exhibited in cities across the world, gaining more attention every day. Through the collection of telegrams, dispatches, newspaper articles, and more, I will prove that due to a lack of censorship, Picasso was able to voice his disapproval of the dictator and inspire Spanish citizens to follow his lead. As a result, the Spanish government would attempt every trick in the book to limit his influence.

MoMA’s entanglement with the 1939 World’s Fair is a critical point of demarcation in American art history, as its involvement with the Fair helped the museum rapidly shift its conception of its mission and purpose in ways that permanently transformed the place of modern art in American society during the 20^th century. With an impressive new building, growing collections, and an intellectually lively staff, MoMA used its work with the Fair to launch a much more expansive agenda:  become both an international art powerhouse and a nationally influential organization promoting American taste for modern art and design.  To accomplish this, the staff advised Fair organizers on aesthetic matters, mounted an impressive public exhibition of American modern art at the Fair itself, and coordinated a special exhibit in its new Manhattan building specially designed to ease fair tourists into an appreciation of modern art. Staff also accelerated the use of traveling exhibitions destined to be viewed in the American hinterland at colleges, smaller museums, and department stores. Through these traveling exhibitions, MoMA (like the Fair itself) broadened its conception of the American public, moving away from strictly targeting a male-centered audience to making important inclusive gestures to woo women as spectators, consumers, and taste-makers.

Therefore, MoMA’s collaboration with the 1939 NY Worlds’ Fair led to the popularization of modern art in middle America in the 1940s and beyond, domesticating a style of art that previously had been seen by critics and the American public alike as foreign and even anti-democratic. Building on the New Deal’s emphasis on art as a public good and artists as important cultural workers, MoMA’s vigorous outreach activities in the 1940s helped to claim modern art as American and anticipated its later Cold War program of traveling modern art showcases throughout the US and abroad.

The appeal of the taboo is undeniable and has existed as a facet of most cultures and societies for centuries. Arguably the most notable example of forbidden practice is cannibalism, which has sustained illicitness. This makes it the ideal artistic and literary device because it has never ceased to draw attention and awe. In order to better understand how human intrigue has developed, I have explored the prevalence of cannibalistic depictions and themes in the fields of ceramics, sculpture, and painting over the past three millennia, from the Greeks in ninth century B.C.E, to the Netherlandish painters of the sixteenth century, and to Brazilian feminists of the twentieth century. By building on my art historical foundation with my studies in ethnography, I have concluded that the reasoning for the use of cannibalistic themes and imagery in art has shifted over time. Originally, the implementation captured audiences for its shock value and gorey imagery, however in modern examples, from the nineteenth century to the present, the use of cannibalism has served as an allegory for political unrest, colonialism, and capitalist consumption. In order to disrupt contemporary misconception3s regarding the appeal of cannibalistic imagery, we must explore its greater metaphorical purpose with regard to its sustained appearance throughout the history of art.

This paper combines a traditional art historical paper and an it-narrative, a story from the perspective of a work of art. The object selected is a porcelain plate emblazoned with the phrase “The Reign of the Workers and Peasants Will be Without End,” a piece of Soviet propaganda in 1920 (Fig. 1). Its tale is one of terror, revolutionary fervor, and paradox. Henry and Ludmilla Shapiro, the object’s owners, act as conduits through which its story is told. His role as an American reporter in Moscow places the object at the crux of Cold War tensions.

The paper is divided into four epochs. First, the plate is born in Petrograd, amid revolutionary fervor, and branded with an authoritative message. Next, the object is exhibited in Moscow, a talisman of Shapiro’s obsession with Russian History, and becomes a shroud to protect his family from Stalinist paranoia and get the beat on breaking news. Third, the plate ties the Shapiro’s to their lives in the Soviet Union, in addition to being the target of ridicule among his fellow faculty members at the University of Wisconsin, where Shapiro taught Journalism. Finally at the Cooper Hewitt the plate symbolizes their harrowing journey from the Soviet Union and testifies to the propaganda of the early regime.

Reconstructing this story required substantial research in the Library of Congress and the Online Archive of the University of Wisconsin on individuals associated with the plate including Sergei Chekhonin, its creator, and Henry Shapiro. Additional research was undertaken on the design of the plate and the October Revolution, specifically the rediscovery of the Tsar’s cache of blank porcelain plates. Undergraduate scholars should be interested in the Narrative because it expands the possibility of art historical papers and explores how we affect objects and, in turn, how objects affect us.

As East Central Europe began its democratic transition after the collapse of the Soviet Union, five countries decided to preserve some of their Soviet monuments in statue parks on the outskirts of their cities. This spatial relegation of the monuments to urban peripheries, combined with a notable lack of contextualization given to them in these spaces, has prompted scholars to criticize these statue parks for seemingly failing to allow for the collective memory work necessary to overcome the trauma of the communist past. Countering these arguments, I use liminality as a methodological framework to interpret the effectiveness of statue parks in terms of engaging with post-communist societies that themselves exist in a liminal condition, caught between East and West, communism and capitalism, and memory and history.  Adopting this perspective also leads me to challenge the view that has emerged in the American media suggesting that statue parks can serve as a simple solution for Confederate monuments. I argue that the context in which they exist and are effective in East Central Europe does not necessarily translate to the situation in the United States. Ultimately, post-communist statue parks are uniquely positioned to negotiate the impossibility of historicizing a past that exists in living memory within a specific context—in this particular case, that of East Central Europe. This approach not only adds a more nuanced understanding of these spaces but demonstrates the importance of taking a culturally relative approach to interpreting spaces of memory within a given region.

The ocean has remained fairly unchanged since 1225; human hubris has not. Today we assume that the ocean is quantifiable, while truly its enormity and our inability to survive underwater relegates it to a land of mystery. The people of the thirteenth century did not suffer from the same sense of hubris. This is reflected in the English bestiary MS. Bodley 764 (c. 1225- 1250), where the sea is a hunting ground for monstrosity with humans as the prey. In my talk, I will examine how the manuscript’s illuminated sirens embody fears of monstrosity, physical desire, and visual deception in ways that make them both visually and psychologically monstrous. The siren’s accompanying text (folio 74v-75r) tells of sailors entranced to sleep by creatures who devour them at the first opportunity. The women trap unwary sailors through the appearance of creature comforts but deceive the men through their false fronts which were created specifically to lure them to their deaths. These pretty faces are in themselves false as the siren’s lower body reveals their fishy nature and the monstrosity of the hybrid feminine body. This surface-level monstrosity is complemented by the siren’s true nature which is sexually deviant and destructive. Because of its digressions from the canon of bestiary images, the siren imagery in MS. Bodley 764 was likely created at the request of the book’s patron. I suggest that this request might have stemmed from the family’s own sexual scandal leading to a desire to shame the “wrong kinds” of feminine behavior. By analyzing this manuscript, we can glimpse past opinions on the sea and femininity allowing us to glean valuable information about the Middle Ages.

The field of environmental history has brought new methods to bear on old questions about medieval life; however, these findings are rarely applied to medieval art history. This presentation locates the distinctive Late Medieval iconography of Christ in the Winepress within the climate and landscape of Northern Europe. It focuses on a Netherlandish example found in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (ca.1440) and uses Michael Baxandall’s concept of “the period eye” to analyze the iconography with an eye towards how its meaning might intersect with materiality, with experiences and practices in nature. It shows that this iconography can be seen, not only as a reference to the Eucharist and the Hebrew scriptures, but also through a layperson’s knowledge of the seasonal grape harvest and winemaking process. This presentation argues that Christ in the Winepress has more resonance north of the Alps, a region at the northern limits of medieval viticulture. During the transition to the Little Ice Age (ca.1300), temperatures fell and growing seasons shrank.  At a time when yields were uncertain and nature was acutely irregular, Christ’s provision of eternal sustenance in the winepress would have been particularly meaningful to viewers. This presentation also looks closely at the barren landscape depicted in the miniature above the border vignette of “Christ in the Winepress.” It links this symbolic terra incultae to an actual region in the Netherlands called the Veluwe, raising questions about how artists and patrons viewed local landscapes. Historians have recognized that nature acts neither as a passive backdrop for human life nor as a deterministic force upon it; art historians ought to consider this interrelationship when examining art. This presentation suggests that, just as historic and religious context can be valuable tools for analysis, environmental context can also deepen our understanding of art.

This paper focuses on the various depictions and attitudes towards art and nature during the medieval period, and the significance that nature in art provided to a medieval audience, as well as the relationship between nature and medieval society. The beginning of the Gothic period introduced new representations of nature in art and architecture. In the middle ages, nature provided mystical and symbolic significance, as various representations of nature influenced medieval attitudes towards nature and led to advanced developments in science. The sophisticated, refined style of the Gothic period resulted in sensitive and astute observations of nature, which improved the senses. A strong sense of observation and skill resulted in life-like works, which were depicted in cathedrals, tapestries, and manuscripts. It was necessary to give nature a place in works of art because it acknowledged that God was the creator of the universe. Nature in works of art also contained religious, literary, and secular meaning, therefore making it entirely subjective to medieval viewers; every living thing was viewed with admiration and reverence because they were divine creations of God. The symbolism of nature was religious and secular, which is seen in the Unicorn Tapestries, although the flora and fauna is depicted in stylized, generic forms. This paper also focuses on the plant symbolism in the Unicorn Tapestries, while also discussing the accuracy and identification of the depicted plants in these works.

This talk will focus on the function of two miracles of construction and design at Chartres Cathedral and Cluny Monastery. Through analysis of the Biblical construction miracle of the Tower of Babel and the societal response to these miracles, the talk will argue that the Cult of Cart and Dream of Gunzo miracles served an important purpose for the religious and secular leaders of France. The leaders ultimately used them to amass support, explain deviations, and emphasize the importance of the site.

I will first address the Cult of Carts at Chartres Cathedral and the way in which this miracle not only ensured financial and communal support for a small town, but also legitimized the project’s divine necessity. Using the image of the Cult in the stained glass of the Cathedral, it will also be argued that the Cult in this instance also becomes a miracle that attempts to soothe tensions with the local peasants after various revolts. This talk will then look at the third construction of Cluny Monastery under Abbot Hugh and the miracle of the Dream of Gunzo. This miracle allowed for a large financial budget and lavish deviations from standard plans. In this way, this talk will argue that this dream miracle was a way the monks could retroactively support their departure and ensure that they were not accused of any sacrilegious innovation. Through manuscript illumination, the monks were also able to disseminate the miracle to potential foreign donors.

 I propose that whether or not these miracles of construction and design happened likely does not matter. Instead, I elucidate why these miracles were so popular during the medieval religious construction projects and how they inspired support for these incredible buildings.

An artist is often impossible to separate from their work. Hieronymus Bosch is no exception. His unique immersion in religion, alchemy, and art influenced and are portrayed in his paintings. By looking at his painting Tondal’s Vision under the scope of both religion and psychoanalysis, it reveals new discoveries and perspectives. The theoretical framework of psychoanalysis from author, Anne D’Alleva, aids in uncovering Bosch’s obsession with religious symbolism. This suggests that he is dealing with an underlying quarrel. By discovering the 1475 manuscript of Les Visions du Chevalier Tondal (The Visions of Tondal) it reveals who “Tondal” is through the story of a wealthy knight that goes on a journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. With the images and the stories that are attached to The Visions of Tondal, it can be concluded that Bosch’s work was incited by this religious piece. My psychoanalytical reading, in conjunction with an analysis of the 1475 manuscript, leads me to argue that there is a strong sense of religious symbolism that is reflected in Bosch’s Tondal’s Visions. However, certain moments in Bosch’s painting can better be served through a psychoanalytical perspective. This specific analysis is only revealing certain moments in Tondal’s Vision, the rest of the painting deserves the same attention and perhaps from a different theoretical approach.

This talk analyzes the connection between art and socio-economic political power during the Italian Renaissance, especially in regard to Cosimo Il Vecchio de Medici. It asks the question: how did art function, both as a possession and method of communication, during the Medici rise to power? I argue that it is due to the rise of classical ideology in the art world that Cosimo was able to slide so neatly into power. By collecting and using not only financial but also social capital through art, he was able to obtain and retain his power, while also ensuring his enduring legacy. My talk is divided in three sections: the first two establish why the rise of humanism was essential for the rise of Cosimo Il Vecchio and central to the importance of art, and the last part focuses on the actual methods this movement allowed Cosimo to employ. First, I will focus on the rise of humanism in fifteenth-century Florence and then discuss the relationships people had with art depending on their social class. Finally, I will present on Cosimo Il Vecchio’s patronage of the arts in the context of his social status. Cosimo’s use of art highlights its political power and is indicative of the role art can play in society and how society in turn influences what type of art flourishes.   

When Italian armor has grabbed the attention of art historians in the past, it has generally been the highly decorative and self-consciously artistic parade armors of the cinquecento. The less elaborate armors of the preceding century, though, were vital in the political self-fashioning of elite Italian men and cannot be ignored as examples of a fundamentally “Gothic” or backward-looking craft. Unlike the already famous, delicately ornamented, and visually elongated armor privileged in fifteenth-century Germany, Italian nobles valued sturdier, highly reflective surfaces. In this paper, I argue that quattrocento Italian armor should be seen in conversation with the most current trends in painting and sculpture and that, in its vibrant luminosity, it represents a crucial medium for understanding the politicized expression of elite masculinity. I will first present examples of surviving suits of armor of the quattrocento to demonstrate the valorized armorial quality of brilliance, and how this characteristic interacted with the wearer and the surrounding built and natural environment to activate the armor and imbue it and its wearer with political meaning. I will also analyze select examples of painted armor, revealing various ways painters attempted to simulate the activated radiance of armor. These paintings will demonstrate artists’ understanding of the political value placed on armor by their patrons, such as Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, as well as the competitive appetite of painters to show how their medium could capture its dazzling effects. Ultimately, this paper argues that, although quattrocento Italian armor was not highly ornamented or decorated with all’antica motifs, it was not understood as dull, plain, or Gothic, but rather as a function of a different aesthetic, in which smooth luminosity was the prized attribute, expressing the Renaissance paradigm of the radiant lord and providing the impetus for artists to reproduce these effects in paint.

Her innovative way of capturing intelligence through carefully chosen emblems during a time of female illiteracy made Northern Italian Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola the first notable and internationally acclaimed female painter of the modern world. In some of her most noteworthy portraits, Sofonisba uses objects like books, a chess game and subjects typically reserved for altarpieces as powerful indicators of the intellect and accomplishments of women. This essay closely examines works such as Anguissola’s The Artist’s Sister Minerva Anguissola (1564), The Chess Game (1555), and Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1559), deciphering each symbol and comparing the works to her male counterparts and mentors. These paintings demonstrate that Sofonisba’s use of subtle symbolism pushed her seemingly simple genre scenes and portraits beyond the boundaries of established subject matter. Defying Renaissance conventions, Sofonisba is the prototype of a contemporary woman who finds her voice and establishes her authority through painting in a male dominated profession, while gaining an international reputation as the Spanish court painter for Philip II and lady-in-waiting to Isabel de Valois. She did not sell a single painting during her unusually long lifetime (she lived to be 93), but Sofonisba influenced several artists and her work lives on as an outstanding example of women’s contributions to the Renaissance, opening the doors for more women to become career artists.  Not only did her portraiture defy the patriarchal conventions of her time, but Sofonisba did too.

Located in the bustling European Paintings gallery of New York City’s famous Met Fifth Avenue, is a portrait painted in 1650 by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, a portrait of Juan de Pareja, his formerly enslaved assistant who was an artist in his own right. Approximately 6 miles uptown at the Hispanic Society of America exists a copy of this same portrait, by an unidentified artist. However, there are some who posit that the Hispanic Society work was painted by the sitter himself. The copy in this case, becomes a self-portrait, a flipping of the script, a change in the narrative. This paper seeks to contextualize and view Juan de Pareja outside of the literal frame that Velázquez and his legacy kept him in and continues to keep him in. My aim is to observe through methods of art historical connoisseurship and technical examination whether the Hispanic Society copy was in fact done by Juan de Pareja’s own hand, and in doing so, posthumously provide a semblance of ownership and autonomy that was not afforded to the artist in his lifetime. Through deep research into representations of black people in Renaissance-era Europe, close observation and studies of the two paintings and other paintings by the artist’s hand, and the biography of the intertwined lives of Velázquez and Pareja, my hope is to shed more light on the topic of silenced voices within the art historical canon.

My research project will explore the influence of Ottoman visual culture on the Tudor-era English Renaissance (15^th-16^th century).  The circulation of materials, such as costume books, travel logs, embroidery books, and textiles, depicting Ottoman culture led to the development of the idea of a distinctly “Islamic Art” in Europe.  Such materials influenced Tudor England’s relationship with the arabesque, a design motif, and perceptions of what was “Islamic.”  Focusing on the circulation of material culture between Ottoman and English rulers of the time period, my aim is to examine the impact of Islamic art and design motifs on English artistic production through the work of Hans Holbein the Younger.  Within this artistic context, I endeavor to elucidate Ottoman-English diplomatic relations during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.  As such, I intend to answer how might England’s artistic engagement with the Ottomans reflect a larger political culture of the time, and the role of religion, literature, and travel logs of the Ottoman Empire within this political context.

Ruling from the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth century, the Safavid Empire was one of the most significant Persian dynasties. One of this empire’s crown jewels was its carpetmaking industry, from which the wealthy and powerful would commission carpets from skilled workshops. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these pieces became prized objects for art collectors in the Western world. Despite what many of these collectors assumed, Safavid carpets were not simply aesthetic pieces. In this paper, I investigate Safavid carpets with their visual language in mind. By exploring the Emperor’s Carpet in depth, I will identify common visual elements of Safavid carpets including material, color palette, imagery, and inscriptions. From these clues, we can infer who might have commissioned these textiles. The Emperor’s Carpet serves as an example of the role Safavid textiles played during the dynasty’s rule. I will also examine these carpets in light of their collection alongside other objects as part of the commodification of Middle Eastern cultures in the late nineteenth century. By examining the collections history of the Emperor’s Carpet, the Ardabil Carpets, and others like them, I will illustrate the era of art collecting that fostered Orientalism. By surveying writings from early twentieth century art scholar Arthur Upham Pope and a response from modern art historian Yuka Kadoi, I will illustrate how Pope’s hierarchy of carpets was inherently Orientalist. Finally, by detailing the Ardabil Carpets, I will describe how Orientalism has affected the collections history of these carpets.

In this paper, I re-imagine the function of the river in a series of paintings that Dutch artist Frans Post completed in Brazil between 1637-1644. Rivers functioned as key roadways and communication channels in both the Dutch Republic and Brazil, yet Post was the only landscape artist to live and work in both environments. In Post, then, we see a relationship to rivers that is uniquely and fundamentally dependent on the artist’s direct experience of landscape. The image of the river in the work of Frans Post remains unexplored, despite a rich literature on Dutch Colonial Brazil and despite the fact that Post’s works following his return to the Dutch Republic in 1644 are often discussed for their depictions of the flora and fauna. The seven surviving works he completed in Brazil itself, however, are less discussed. These seven paintings are unique in Post’s oeuvre for their commitment to depicting a specificity of place, yet they are mainly examined through the same lens as that of his more generic colonial landscapes. Post was born and lived in Haarlem before his journey to Brazil, and thus came of age as an artist amidst a rapidly-developing tonal landscape tradition. I argue Post’s work both draws from, and fundamentally breaks with, Dutch domestic landscape conventions. Why do the tools and figures of the human world never quite escape the bounds of the earth in Post’s in situ Brazilian river scenes? Why is the mobility of water as roadway not emphasized to the same extent as landscapes made by his contemporaries? Drawing both upon the visual evidence of the works themselves as well as largely unstudied contemporary documents from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries, I argue that the moral implications of man’s proximity to water is a fundamental part of Post’s visual composition. 

Spain’s colonial conquests across the world, and particularly in Mexico and Latin America, left painful and violent scars on the histories of those who were subjects under their viceroyalty. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish elites created increasingly complex and muddled systems of racial classifications defined by mestiaje, or “race mixing.” Art historians have studied the imagery found in casta paintings depicting various racial pairings, many notably focusing on racial classifications including indigenous people and their offspring. The relationship and proximity to pulque, an alcoholic beverage with indigenous roots, is a trope often featured in these depictions. The present study, displayed as a gallery of images, synthesizes research focusing on indigenous representations in colonial art and the economic history of pulque. It ascertains that the Spanish viceroyalty intentionally and insidiously overtook the production and distribution of pulque. This was a means to police not only the outside of the indigenous body (already being done through casta paintings) but also the inside, by controlling the substances that went in it. When the pair of aims met through images depicting both the indigenous body and pulque, dangerous stereotypes and beliefs about indigenous people emerged, some still remaining through the 20th century and today. This study examines images of pulque and the indigenous body throughout history, concluding that alcoholic regulation in Mexico City was an inherently racist practice: it only sought to prevent marginalized groups from gathering in crowds at the pulquerias while wealthy Spanish elites were allowed to partake in imbibing more expensive alcohol. Ultimately, stereotypes of the “drunk Indian” remained in popular culture because of the images produced during this period and the desire to associate pulque with a “reckless” indigenous body.

In a 1699 fresco in the Romanian monastery of Hurezi, Christ, Muhammad, and Calvin are depicted together. While Christ steers a boat symbolizing Orthodox Christianity moving forward across the sea, Calvin and Muhammad are on the shore, endeavoring to sabotage it. This spectacular 1699 fresco and its extraordinary iconography reflects its contemporary geopolitical situation, with the Orthodox Romanians caught between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires, under the watchful eye of the burgeoning Russian Empire. The Hurezi Monastery, a Gesamtkunstwerk comprising architecture, paintings, sculptures and prints, is the most complete example of Brancovan art, named after the Romanian dominus Constantin Brancoveanu, heir to the usurped Byzantine throne. Utilizing religion as the most efficient instrument of the time, Brancovan art aims to strengthen Brancoveanu’s political power. While its style adapts foreign influences to autochthonous traditions, its meaning is profoundly counter-propagandistic, without resorting to “Orientalism.”

Brancovan art challenges the popular discourse of Postcolonialism, an area of study which condemns Colonialism but fails to address its root cause: Imperialism. Focusing only on the former colonists who are today’s world powers and on the peoples they have succeeded in colonizing, Postcolonialism continues to prop-up and perpetuate the Colonial world order. Simultaneously, Imperialism continues unfettered, under a new, unstigmatized guise. This obscures the societies which, though oppressed by Imperialism, have resisted Colonialism. It should serve as an example in the face of New Imperialism: the national architectural style of Romania today is an iteration of Brancovan art.

An intriguing stone sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicts a seated woman with swirling tendrils of matted hair. The fingers on her raised hands curl over like the talons of an eagle, and her eyes stare blankly ahead out of a skeletal face. She represents one of the mythical figures known to the Mexica, or Aztecs, as cihuateteo, literally “woman gods”. Cihuateteo were understood to be spirits of women who died in childbirth: an honorable death in the Mexica worldview, analogous to a warrior’s death in battle. The Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s account depicts the cihuateotl as a kind of wicked witch, who manifested at crossroads to steal children and cause bouts of epilepsy. This simplistically malevolent narrative presented by Sahagún likely reflects his Catholic conversion agenda more than it does the indigenous religious concepts of the Mexica, yet it remains mostly unchallenged by scholars. By perpetuating a narrative beset with such obvious colonial distortions, scholars and museum curators erase Indigenous perspectives and tacitly reaffirm the racist and misogynistic viewpoints inherent in the retellings. This paper seeks to complicate the existing narrative around cihuateotl statues and problematize their contemporary presentation in the museums charged with their keep. I explore Mexica conceptions surrounding femininity, motherhood, and death in the archaeological record to develop a picture of how the cihuateteo fit into the broader system of Mexica religion. I contrast my findings with depictions of female figures in colonial accounts to demonstrate how Eurocentrism and Christian bias may have warped the picture of the cihuateteo given in these accounts. In the last section, I turn to an assessment of the presentation of cihuateotl statues in the museum and consider how reliance on colonial narratives perpetuates cultural harm.

This paper demonstrates how a digital online resource transcends the geographical and temporal limits of an art museum, thereby reaching a larger audience and ensuring accessibility and visibility. Recognizing that the “digital divide” continues an erasure of Indigenous peoples with a widening gap between Western colonial powers and Indigenous populations, an analysis of search terms, web platforms, and access to digital infrastructure will be considered. Expanding upon Marisa Elena Duarte’s Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country notion that digital space is a tool of self-determination and a fundamental component of employing Indigenous sovereignty and Tuscarora scholar and artist, Jolene Rickard’s assertion that, art is a means of exercising “visual sovereignty,” the development of a decolonizing web-presence will be discussed. This website will bring together artists from each of the Six Haudenosaunee Nations with attention to rethinking colonizing frameworks.

From Shelley Niro’s (Mohawk) ironic hand-tinted photograph series Red Heels Hard from 1992 that captures the lively spirit of Indigenous women to Frank Buffalo Hyde’s (Onondaga) paintings that subvert stereotypical symbols of Indigenous peoples in contrast with pop culture icons such as Meta Painting – Black Feather from 2017, the website visualizes the diversity of contemporary Haudenosaunee experiences.

This project stems from my recent work researching, as a non-Native scholar, museum exhibition possibilities that begin tackling histories of colonization and efforts towards decolonizing. The legacy of colonialism in present-day Canada continues to erode the natural world of Indigenous ancestral homelands and denies the legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing. Yet, contemporary Inuit and First Nations printmakers have generated work and explored processes of creation that re-engage Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and relationships with the land, evincing resilience, especially against destructive colonial forces. imPrinting Resistance: Land, Lore, and Lineage in Indigenous Art —a proposed exhibition and model for what other scholars and curators might consider—reflects on the printmaking technologies and imagery of three prints crafted by contemporary Inuit and First Nations artists Lisa Myers, Shuvinai Ashoona, and Norval Morrisseau. These artists use varied printmaking technologies and produce aesthetically distinctive work, but they each draw on stories from their ancestors fused with their personal experiences. Through these prints, this talk explores how printmaking fosters deep connections between artist and earth, how art and artistic processes can bridge knowledge across generations, and how art can restore life to the land, reclaiming the spirit of earth commodified by capitalism. By foregrounding Indigenous voices, often underrepresented in art history dialogues, in the exploration of visual culture and colonization, this talk will spark new thinking about how contemporary Indigenous prints actively combat colonial extractivism and how artmaking functions as a site for Indigenous artists to navigate their place and presence in the world.

Often when viewing art of ancient cultures, we tend to see exactly what’s given, a story and try to piece together the puzzle of their culture that way. The same can be said of Etruscan art as a large part of Etruscan art is the story it tells us about what Etruscans valued and how they interacted as a culture. However, if we take a different vantage point and look a little deeper into how the art itself is made, namely the pigments being used we can create a different story about how they are creating these works. Specifically, the chronology of pigments in Etruscan society. The development of the Etruscan palette changes over time due to the introduction of new pigments during the Orientalizing, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic. These insights into the use of pigments do tell us how they are making these fantastic works but, more importantly, are an integral part of the larger puzzle of understanding the Etruscan culture. This might mean understanding how they valued certain figures or who might have been important. These kinds of answers have been made possible by using technology like multi-spectral imaging, x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence. Through these methods we are beginning to understand Etruscan culture better and painting a clearer picture of the Etruscan palette and its uses. Thus, by combining science with art we can then better comprehend the Etruscan culture.

The usage of Rhodian amphora sherds as a metonymic metric for studying Rhodian wine transportation and trade is commonplace in modern Hellenistic and early Roman scholarship. However, despite ample disclaimers in scholarly literature noting the possibility that these amphorae may have carried a variety of cargoes other than wine, the vast majority of analyses conducted fail to otherwise take into account and problematize the implications of these content assumptions. This lack of problematization has led to an overemphasis of epigraphic and iconographic evidence to support the baseline assumption that Rhodian amphorae essentially—or only notably—singularly carried wine.

The goal of this study was to build a more highly problematized framework for analyzing Rhodian amphora sherds in the archaeological record that can be both retroactively applied to previously published data and also proactively used to drive new research questions for Rhodian amphora studies. In order to accomplish this, I first investigated the history of content assumptions in Rhodian amphorae and their past problematizations in both contemporary epigraphic records and in modern scholarship. I then proceeded to integrate that investigation with new organic residue data published on the contents of the Rhodian amphorae of the Kyrenia wreck, building a problematized framework specifically focused on the affordance of a greater variety of cargoes and also on the affordance for amphora reuse. Finally, I presented a case study in the application of this framework on the analyses and conclusions drawn in the 2015 paper “To the Dregs: Drawing Meaning from the Rhodian Handles of Hellenistic Ashkelon” by Dr. Kate Birney. The application of this framework demonstrated the necessity of more thorough problematization in Rhodian amphora scholarship, in particular as it can open up new ways to investigate subjects such as disparate socioeconomic experiences with reused vessels.

In ancient Rome, securing a place in the collective memory was of the utmost importance. Roman emperors had long utilized sculpture, architecture, portraiture, and inscriptions as a means of immortalizing their place within the cultural history of the city. Therefore, suffering damnatio memoriae—or the public condemnation of memory—is a fate no Roman would wish. However, in the case of Nero, the emperor of Rome for a tumultuous fourteen years (AD 54-68), damnatio was actually an apt way of memorializing his reign. Unlike common practice, which saw the removal of a condemned figure’s image and name after their death, Nero’s official damnation began while he was alive and still emperor. Nero spent his entire life creating a persona that was memorable. An enthusiastic patron of public displays of violence, Nero was embroiled in rumors of matricide and incest, and was unprecedently hubristic in his self-representation. How effective, therefore, could the physical erasure of his portraits be in erasing him from the collective memory of Rome? Even after his image and name suffered damnatio, was Nero really forgotten? This paper argues that the attempted defacement of the portraits on his coinage and the reuse of his statues after his death did not erase Nero’s memory but instead rewrote the legacy he left behind. With a focus on the methods used to remove Nero’s image from imperial and provincial coins, and on the appropriation of the Colossus of Nero by his successors, it explores how the image of Nero was not forgotten because of his damnatio but replaced by it. It also argues that given the turbulence of his time as emperor, the remnants of Nero’s damnatio offer a more accurate representation of his rule than would his untouched portrait. Where other emperors are remembered by their likeness in the portraits that outlive them, Nero is remembered by the scratches that cover his.

The Church of Saint Demetrios in Thessaloniki, Greece, otherwise known as the Hagios Demetrios, is a relatively under-researched building in Byzantine art history. The original church dates to around 412 CE, built on the supposed site of Saint Demetrios’ martyrdom. Though the basilica has endured two fires and not enough conservation, several vibrant mosaics from the 7^th century still survive which enshrine some of the city’s most prominent figures. However, due to its lack of exploration and preservation, many facets of the church and its mosaics are still unknown or lost to academia. Upon finding interest in this monument, my research discovered new questions and possible solutions to various aspects of the site. The primacy of my research revolved around one of the basilica’s most famous mosaics, that of St. Demetrios with the Founders of the Church, and specifically, the identification of the figures within it. While the center figure is widely believed to be the St. Demetrius of which the church is named, it is unlikely that he ever existed in the form he is known today, likely because of mistranslations and relic misidentifications. The figures that flank him (a bishop and an eparch) are also disputed, though the debate is much more fervent for the still unidentified governor.

It is my conclusion that the clerical figure to the saint’s left depicts Bishop John who served at the time of this mosaic’s commissioning, and that the eparch to the right depicts the church’s original founder, Leonitus. I argue that this is the case using pictorial symbolism, supporting historical records, inscriptive evidence, and linguistic analysis, all of which helps rule out other suggested figures.

Ampullae were popular devotional objects and a type of travel art frequently associated with pilgrimage and cult sites in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine. They reached the height of their production and popularity between the 6th-7th centuries CE but continued to be used until the 13th-15th centuries. The flasks were filled with dust, holy water, or oil that had ceremoniously come into contact with a relic. Saints, evangelists, crucifixes, or biblical stories frequently appear on flasks embellished with images. Ampullae could also be left undecorated, an indication that the possessor of the flask could invoke holy blessings with or without inscriptions or icons. Their amuletic properties made them a highly sought-after commodity in late antiquity.

Questions surrounding the imagery, production, and distribution of ampullae from Asia Minor, however, have proven to be troubling for scholars. In this talk, I will address these issues by discussing pilgrimage centers as just one of a handful of locales that ampullae were produced at and distributed from. Ampullae could be manufactured at production centers specific to a cult site or in off-site facilities that may have utilized non-specific images to cater to the diversity of the late antique world. Apart from shop stalls in or near pilgrimage centers, ampullae too could be distributed by way of gift-giving and travelling peddlers. Instead of calling for the creation of categorical boxes, whose etymologies are more telling of modern scholars’ motivations than contemporary ones, this talk urges Byzantinists to think just as creatively and fluidly as the societies and cultures we have set out to study. By presenting a range of conceivable methods for the production and distribution of ampullae, I hope to both enlarge the scope of previous studies and to show the importance of conversing with our evidence and recognizing nuance in art and history.

Though perhaps not well known outside of medieval circles now, the “Chalice” of Antioch owned by the Met was once believed to be the Holy Grail, the vessel used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. There were doubts from the “Chalice’s” first public appearance in the early twentieth century that the object was old enough, despite the efforts of one Gustavus Eisen who devoted an entire book to this relic which he said depicted portraits of not only Jesus but the apostles as well. The “Chalice” of Antioch was even brought to the world’s fair in this guise. But further studies, building on the skepticism of earlier historians such as Martin Conway, determined that the object could not be of 1st century (or earlier) origin, suggesting a creation date closer to 500 CE. More recent work has determined that it is likely not a drinking vessel either, but an oil lamp. Investigating the physical origins has also brought doubt to its excavation site: rather than Antioch, one of the oldest Christian cities, it may have come from Apamea, a city with an ancient tradition of philosophy. Marlia Mundell Mango theorizes that the “Chalice,” which she would hazard to call the Lamp of Apamea, does not depict Jesus twice and ten apostles, but Jesus once and eleven philosophers, referencing the light of Christ, rather than the blood of Christ. The placard beside this “Chalice” of “Antioch” cannot easily explain all the history and discussion associated with it, but in light of all the revisions made to it after its infamous introduction to the world, and the time that has passed, it may be prudent to rename the object in order to offer a more correctly targeted study of its place in the decorative arts.

My research examines depictions of scribes and artists on Maya polychrome ceramics from the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). The Maya scribe has long interested scholars, because the Maya developed the most sophisticated writing system in the Pre-Columbian world. Moreover, the Maya conceived of text and image as closely interrelated, as the use of a single term for both writing and painting, tz’ihb, demonstrates. Yet despite extensive previous literature on the role of scribes in Maya society, depictions of the acts of writing and painting are markedly rare. In this talk I will reconsider one particular “scribal” motif from Maya vase paintings: that of the seated figure in front of a codex book. Although these figures are typically glossed as scribes or artists in the scholarly literature, the majority do not hold writing implements or artistic tools. The distinction between those who write and those who do not is further borne out by the differing supernatural identities and types of regalia worn by the two groups. I draw upon quantitative analyses and insights from both art historical and anthropological methods to argue that these images emphasize the role of performance, ritual, and orality in Maya artistic practice. Simultaneously, the divide between readers and writers suggests an implicit hierarchy of artistic production with possible ideological implications. The iconography of Maya artists indicates that the Maya concept of painting and writing (tz’ihb) represented just one component of a much larger and more nuanced notion of art in which not only text and image, but also the spoken word, were all deeply interconnected.

Despite the common binaries applied to the categorization of the Medieval period as one of darkness, and the Renaissance as a revolutionary, Classical revival, much evidence remains of the pervasive infiltration of Greco-Roman symbolism in the aesthetic lexicon of Western Christianity during the 12th century. In analyzing the presence of Satyr figures within Medieval illuminated manuscripts, this paper seeks to shed light on the iconographical legacy of Ancient Greek mythology in societies which persecuted its very-same pagan origins. Such hybrid figures evolved to serve new religious purposes, the biblical texts of St. Jerome paving the way for the proliferation of Satyr imagery within later bestiaries.

Although these Satyrs retained their original form, this paper examines the shift in their visual application: from the vases of pleasurable symposiums to factual documents forewarning against Satan. How did these mythological figures remain visualized? How did they become synonymous with demonic and sinful? What new meanings did these creatures adopt for medieval viewers and artists?

A close analysis of such ‘monstrous’ renderings reveals potential answers to these questions and sheds light upon changing attitudes regarding Dionysian pleasure, sexuality and ‘otherness’ within Medieval Europe.

Jan van Eyck, a pioneer Netherlandish artist in regard to the development of oil painting and the entire Renaissance, was known for his unprecedented level of virtuosity and innovation of illusory realism. Among his artworks, the secular portraits created later in his life left behind a number of artistic enigmas for contemporary art historians. This research paper investigates one of his most obscure paintings, Woman at Her Toilet, with a focus on the artist’s featured application of visual paradoxes and optical devices. Though former researchers put an emphasis on symbolism and prototype of the artwork, this paper tries to argue that the specificity of objects is not important for interpretation. Rather, the corporeal objects serve as a medium of sight, and the imaginative implication of the subject matter provides clues for the painting’s construction as well as the potential transformation from the reality to another realm. As a master of applying visual tricks, in Woman at Her Toilet, Jan van Eyck ingeniously created a series of visual paradoxes through the interplay between vision and space, commenting on the function of paintings as a medium of art. With the help of optical devices, van Eyck sets up a stage to put on the performance of voyeurism and instructs his potential viewers to follow his constructed visual pathway to interpret the function and meaning of the artwork and to appreciate the potential of vision. The masterly delineated reality and pictorial illusion gives rise to the silent pictorial dialogue between the viewers outside the painting, the women in the painting, and the voyeurs outside the window. Van Eyck’s self-consciousness of his role as an artist and the interactive nature of his paintings also reflected the potential ability and individuality of an artist in the fifteenth century.

Throughout the Renaissance, there was a great resurgence of interest in the classical world. Classical art, philosophy, literature, and mythology became primary interests of scholars, poets, and artists. In 1551, Titian was commissioned by King Philip II to create a series of six paintings which drew upon classical mythology, specifically scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In his correspondence with the king, Titian referred to these paintings as poesie, or visual poetry. This series of paintings makes a particularly good case study for several cultural phenomena of the Renaissance. Titian’s use of “poesie” to describe his work for this commission exemplifies the paragone which existed between painting and poetry during the cinquecento, a relationship which was vital to the reemergence of classical mythology in the Renaissance. The relationship between poets and painters created a competitive environment that encouraged the production of new art and translations, flooding the Renaissance world with art and literature inspired by antiquity. Artistic depictions of myths helped to popularize and normalize classical imagery, fueling the surging interest in the creation of accessible vernacular translations of classical literature. Examining the relationship between Titian’s poesie, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other sources from antiquity enables a deeper understanding of the transmission of classical ideas to Renaissance art, the availability of vernacular translations of classical texts, as well as how classical subjects were interpreted and received by Renaissance audiences. The resurgence of the classics in the Renaissance is best understood as a complex and multifaceted cultural phenomenon that relied on both the visual and literary arts. Titian’s poesie and its display of the paragone between poetry and painting aids in understanding how literature in particular influenced art and culture in the cinquecento.

The Italian quattrocento and cinquecento are periods most well known for their simultaneously extraordinary and humbling public art, from enormous bronze doors and world-altering advances in perspective to sprawling frescoed ceilings. These splendorous works enhanced the quotidian public theatre of citizens across the Italian peninsula and were translated into private life and a desire to create the same dazzling effect in the domestic sphere — much in the same way that twenty-first century folk bring home postcards of paintings from museums, or hold onto the antiques of generations past. This translation revealed itself in home furnishings such as wall fountains, tables and chairs, credenzas, and tableware used for food and drink. In addition, different regions had their individual customs for objects and decor. One of the most efficient ways to exhibit these splendorous items to others was to invite company over for a meal, celebration, performance, or a joyful combination of all three. But among each of these fine objects lies the question of function versus ornament. Should a hand-blown Murano glass pitcher be used to pour wine and water, or sit idly as a beacon of beauty over which guests can fawn, or both? In Giovanni Pontano’s 1498 treatise De Splendore, the author discusses functional household furnishings (supelectiles) and ornamental objects (ornamenta) in regard to the concept of splendor. In this essay, I will apply Pontano’s writings on the notion of splendor to household decorations, tableware, and objects of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as they would be used to prepare for and host a party. I will examine these decorations and objects from both functional and ornamental lenses, arguing that while these two classifications can be separated, they are not categorically different; and oftentimes, in fact, the ornament itself serves as a function.

In the 17^th century, much of the design of furniture used and made on the Eastern Seaboard was based upon the European style of Artisan Mannerism, which was being imported to colonial America through the immigration and trade with Europe, particularly England. This Northern European interpretation of late Renaissance design was collected and compiled by artisans for use in architecture, furniture, and other decorative arts and was defined by its voluminous, architectonic forms, exceedingly complex carving, and bright coloring. This taste for lavish decoration may have fit in well with the courtly culture of high-style Europe of the day, but why did the style see such continued usage in British America during a time when the area was largely devoid of this type of culture? To incoming immigrants, the New World seemed to be a powerful and untamed force. The wilderness of North America stretched on incomprehensibly far beyond the last outpost of colonized land, untouched by the European world. The Mannerist style may have represented a tool of civilization to these European-Americans, one with which to bend the menacing natural world to their concepts of high society and impose their vision of a refined, advanced world upon it. The following rise in popularity of Baroque style furniture, however, exhibits an embrace of the aesthetics of the natural world. With the Baroque style, artists chose to instead emphasize the beauty of organic lines and the natural patterning of domestic woods, a choice which mirrored a growing sentiment among European-Americans on the Eastern Seaboard that they had “become part of the landscape” and that from this land was born an independent American identity.

Art of the Baroque period is defined by its often-convoluted symbolism and new interpretations of old subjects. One such subject is the putto. Putti are naked boys, often present as tangential elements of Renaissance and Baroque artwork. They are distinct from cherubs and seraphim, which have theological or classical connotations. Putti, on the other hand, are secularized. In the Renaissance, they often represent classical elements, either commenting on or subverting the theological depictions taking center stage in the artwork.  In the Baroque, however, putti become humanist symbols — a representation of human emotion, human fragility, or the mind of the artist. In this way, putti are the wise/fool archetypes reimagined. Often depicted as silly little boys, putti are anything but. In Baroque art, they are often the wisest individuals in the piece.

In this paper, famous and not-so-famous works of Baroque art are explored to discern the intentions of the putti that dwell within the frames. Artworks such as the obscure prints of an unknown artist only dubbed “H.L.” to the more famous Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, and putti adorning St. Peter’s Basilica are discussed. The putti found in these contexts are compared to some of their most famous counterparts during the Renaissance, such as the putti found in Venus, Mars, and Cupid by Piero di Cosimo, those in Mars and Venus by Sandro Botticelli, and in several other Renaissance artworks. The putti of the Baroque are divided into several categories, but all serve the same purpose: putti are the wise fools of Baroque art. Baroque putti often find themselves at the center of a visual paradox: children holding signs of death, adolescent fools imparting morals and wisdom, children as guides to learned viewers. It is in understanding the paradoxical nature of the Baroque putti that their meaning is uncovered.

Johannes Vermeer is currently regarded as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Baroque era. During his life he created many genre scenes depicting everyday life, but only ever painted two allegories: The Art of Painting and The Allegory of Faith. The former is a major work and depicts the artist’s studio with certain conventions common at the time. Acknowledging these conventions implies that Vermeer was both aware of and looking at the works other Dutch Baroque painters.

This paper examines if Vermeer was looking at other contemporary Dutch paintings by comparing various elements of The Art of Painting to other works depicting the artist’s studio. It is generally acknowledged that Vermeer likely used a camara obscura as a visual reference in order to create many of his works. Knowing that Vermeer was willing to use contemporary technology to assist in is works, it is not unreasonable to examine if Vermeer was also observing contemporary paintings for similar reference. Within this paper, several specific works depicting the artist’s studio are compiled and examined for common tropes, and then The Art of Painting is examined for those same commonalities. The argument will be made that Vermeer did look at his contemporaries in order to educate himself on the common tropes used in depicting an artist’s studio, and then altered these tropes as he found necessary in order to create a single cohesive work.

Dutch paintings of the 17th century are commonly characterized by the proliferation of distinct genres, most notably portraits, allegorical, genre, landscape, and still–life paintings, executed in oil paints of vibrant pigments with a loaded brush by frequently well-known names. However, there are other subgenres and techniques of painting that were executed simultaneously that have been overshadowed by the tremendous success of those highly acclaimed artists. This paper will focus on one of those often-neglected sub-genres, Dutch pen-schilderijen, or “pen-paintings,” of the latter part of the 17th century and the artists who created them. These illustrations were crafted through an arduous process of painting a white chalky ground onto panel or canvas and then painstakingly “etching” the composed picture with a sharpened reed-pen, then shaded in with black and grey ink washes. They required expensive materials and were time-consuming to not only craft but to master. This was arguably specifically engineered with a nautical subject matter in mind. It revealed meticulously rendered details such as fine ropes and chords, custom taffarel, and sculptures sacrificed by the use of paint and brushes. The necessary time and expertise explain the very small body of works produced by only a few select artists, such as Willem van de Velde (1611 – 1693 CE) and Adriaen van Salm (1660–1720 CE), who also employed their own naval experience. This meticulous technique attracted artists such as Experiens Silleman (1613–1653 CE) who was able to imitate the results through various alternative methods, but greatly sacrificed the quality. Pen-schilderijens required such precision and time that commissions were few, but one could be, even today, in awe by viewing these impeccably painted works.

Guxiu, or Gu Family Embroidery, was one of the most celebrated type of embroidery named after Gu family in late Ming China. Known as Embroidery Painting for its acclaimed painting-like quality, Guxiu becomes an in-between medium that engages and negotiates the materiality and the traditions of painting and textile. While like other textile art in China, Guxiu was typically considered as a feminine medium and was studied and inherited by the female members of the gentry, the males, the husbands and the friends of the family, had also been actively assisted and participated in the process of its education, creation, circulation and collection. One of the most significant founding figures of Guxiu, Han Ximeng, for example, closely engaged with the literati traditions through the help of her husband, Gu Shouqian, an adequate painter himself, and the connections her husband had. The most eminent family friend of Gu was Dong Qichang, who was not only a prominent politician, but also a very fine artist, connoisseur, and an important art theorist in the history of Chinese pictorial art. By examining the Flowers and Fishes Album, one of the finest works by Han, and comparing it with other ancient and contemporaneous paintings of similar subjects, both from the literati traditions and by female artists, this paper presents how Han assimilates the literati traditions set by Dong, but also diverges from the practices by absorbing other female weaving and pictorial traditions and invents the technique of life-weaving. Further illuminated by the historical documents on the production of Guxiu and the essays in feminism and gender studies, this paper interrogates the specific social, cultural barriers and opportunities Han Ximeng faced and took at her time and the legacy she left in the increasingly commercialized art market in late Ming China.

In his groundbreaking work, The Death of Socrates (1787, oil on canvas, 51 x 77 1/4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY), recognized today as the epitome of the Neoclassical style, Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) brought to life the tragic last moments of the Greek philosopher Socrates. David created this large painting immediately prior to the French Revolution, when the French ruling classes were fundamentally grounded in the Estates System – a relic of the feudalistic era. Amidst political upheaval, and a growing disenchantment with the establishment, David depicted the man who revolutionized philosophy by questioning authorities. Known among his contemporaries for boldly undermining the status quo, Athenian leaders convicted Socrates of religious impiety and sentenced him to death. Rather than renounce his philosophical convictions, Socrates accepted his fate with unyielding bravery. With the details surrounding Socrates’ life, and the political tension that characterized France during David’s time, one starts to wonder what the artist might have wanted to communicate to his audience by having the Greek philosopher be the focal point of his piece. In addition, what parallels would David have wanted to draw between the France of his time and the Greek society in which Socrates lived? This paper examines the shifts in visual art’s subject matter during this tumultuous chapter in French history in order to discover more about David’s use of Socrates’ death. This paper also aims to investigate how the shifting sands of artistry were influencing David throughout his career. Moreover, color choice and design elements represented a new approach pioneered by David to make political statements as an artist. These elements will be analyzed in conjunction with several of David’s other creations to see what sort of techniques carried over from those works, to the piece in question.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ 1814 portrait titled La Grande Odalisque is passed daily by thousands of people who misunderstand who she is and what she represents. Without intentionally observing this image, it is easy to believe that it is no more than another traditional female nude, yet this painting was produced in tandem with Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign. As a result of such colonial practices, Orientalism – marked by fantasy, luxury, exoticism, violence, and romanticism of Eastern culture, beliefs, and practices – thrived as an artistic theme in nineteenth century France. Currently in scholarship, La Grande Odalisque is considered for its formal qualities and its canonical notability. Scholars and historians have carried out exhaustive research on the role of the female nude in the canon of Western early modern art, on Ingres’ disregard for anatomical exactitude, and on the placement of this image in the discussion of Orientalism at large. What scholars often overlook is how the audience comprehends this image. The political context in which she was rooted is brushed over in existing scholarship; meanwhile, to the average viewer she is another painting of a nude woman, no different than Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Manet’s Olympia, or Giorgione’s Dresden Venus. In this paper, I will explore the canonical transition from the Renaissance Venus to the Neoclassical odalisque in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and will address this image’s deceptive nature within such categorization. In grappling with contemporary colonial politics and Orientalism across the humanities, I bring this image’s roots to the forefront and address the reckoning we face in the reception of this image today. Ultimately, I aim to explain how hidden in plain sight within this image is years of stylistic tradition and colonial politics that, I argue, we are not adequately comprehending today.

This paper shares my work in curating an exhibition of 18th- and 19-century decorative arts and my research in analyzing pieces of needlework in this show.  “Self and Sensibility:  Women and Decorative Arts in the Age of Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson” was an exhibition that I mounted during the Fall 2020 semester in collaboration with twenty other undergraduate students under the mentorship of two faculty members in Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.  For this exhibition, we borrowed fifty objects from a local Newport collection with the goal of celebrating women and their relation to the decorative arts.  Among the works in the exhibition were rare examples of needlework, ceramics, antique sewing supplies, dolls, mourning pictures, and personal accessories (like dance cards).  A highlight of the show included a collection of dolls in their original dress, including one once owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Despite our inability to fully comprehend the lives of women from the past, studying these works within their cultural and historical context allows us to understand better the lives of Victorian women. 

A rare English needlework book cover from the first quarter of the 17th-century, the earliest work in our exhibition, offers insight into the lives of contemporary women.  The book cover depicts Moses and Aaron along with Biblical motifs worked in a variety of stitches.  An example of religious symbolism is the embroidered goldfinch and fly referencing the Passion of the Christ along with sin and redemption.  The liturgical subject matter and imagery reflect the needlewoman’s religious dedication, beliefs, and values.  The art of needlework was also a way in which a young woman demonstrated her readiness for society and marriage.  While working within the strictures of society’s expectations of women, needlework offered women a means of fashioning their identities.

Amelia Van Buren was a little-known, lifelong commercial and fine art photographer who worked in Philadelphia and Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century. She began her career not only as an artist, but as a patient undergoing treatment for a chronic nervous illness. Few details about Van Buren’s diagnosis have survived. But a set of portraits of the artist painted and photographed by her friends between 1886-1899 offers insight into this complicated moment of her life. These portraits reflect broader attempts to visualize nervous patients through a mixing of medical and artistic modes of representation. The ways in which Amelia Van Buren is represented reveals the complex interdependence of art and medicine involved in the cultural construction of illness and gender in the late nineteenth century. Her portraits prompt us to ask, how is medical knowledge used to visualize meaning? How do art and medicine participate in the construction and self-construction of gender? To respond to these questions, I will make connections to the broader issues of gender, medical image-making, and medical history at play in nineteenth century nervous illness in an effort to understand Van Buren, her portraits, and her experience. I propose adopting a different practice of looking, the diagnostic gaze of the physician, to consider Amelia Van Buren as a complicated, even disunified portrait subject.

Members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) sought to distance themselves from their era at all costs, in pursuit of a purer, earlier art form—paradoxically, the group’s work was a direct product of nineteenth-century imperialist frameworks. Through a dissection of the PRB’s self-characterized agenda and analysis of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s 1865-6 painting The Beloved, this paper will show that any scholarly study of the PRB’s art must grapple with the Orientalizing perceptions of the world inherent in their philosophy. First, the group’s commitment to depicting “the simplicity of nature” through scientifically precise observation reveals a connection to imperialist systems of discovery and categorization. Second, the nostalgia inherent to the PRB’s mission cannot be divorced from the exoticization of non-Western culture—in attempting to craft a distinctly British style, the Pre-Raphaelites looked both to Britain’s past and to its colonies, the quintessential symbols of empire.

An analysis of The Beloved illustrates both these points. In order to construct his sensual scene from the biblical Song of Solomon, Rossetti not only indiscriminately adorns his five main models with imagery from across the “exotic” world, but also implies a parallel between them and the surrounding lush foliage. Among these natural elements are martagon lilies, flowers featuring prominently in art of the Mughal empire, and camelias, which were known in the nineteenth century as “roses of Japan.” Lastly, the placement of the androgynous black child in the foreground reveals Rossetti’s reliance on the Oriental harem trope to titillate his audience, the jewel of which is, ironically, the light-skinned bride. This paper attempts to take a first step towards problematizing the PRB’s nostalgic sensibilities; it is a luxury, in a time of innovation and increasing social mobility (true both of the industrial and digital revolutions), to desire a return to some previous, elusive state of the world.

Pygmalion is famously known as the mythological figure set on building his ideal woman who he then falls in love with after she is granted life by the goddess Aphrodite. The Roman poet Ovid created the sculptor in Metamorphoses. Centuries later, the image of Pygmalion would be appropriated by many European artists studying the classics as inspiration for their work. Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French artist who like many, chose Pygmalion as a subject for one of his many paintings; this piece is appropriately titled Pygmalion and Galatea (1890.) The painting depicts Pygmalion’s ideal woman as she is being brought to life. The notion of the “perfect woman” has many implications from a critical feminist perspective but is especially intriguing to explore when observing Gérôme’s piece. Gérôme curiously paints Galatea in a more domineering stance on a pedestal as opposed to Pygmalion who looks up at her from the ground with his arms held open. It is an interesting decision to make him the submissive force in the composition when one considers the misogyny surrounding Pygmalion’s character. Gérôme’s portrayal of Galatea is also subtlety indicative of 1890s culture in France with the opening of the infamous Moulin Rouge. Gender dynamics were shifting as women were employed by cabernets like the Moulin Rouge and entering a stronger presence in the work force in general. This research discusses the ways in which Gérôme’s work is an indication of the shift of night-life culture and the growing women’s rights movement in France, as previously outlined.

Beginning in the late 1890s and continuing into the first decades of the Twentieth Century, painters of the Art Nouveau and Symbolist movements continued a tradition of exploration into Greek and Roman themes carried over from the Neoclassical period. To read this exploration as a return to the well-tread waters of academic classicism in response to the experimentation of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism is, however, an oversimplification. From this basic assertion, this paper launches an argument that these painters of the fin de siècle — Vaszary, Vrubel, von Stuck, Klimt, among others from across Eastern and Western Europe alike — sought importantly in their art to detach classical nudity from the academic and moralizing elements of Neoclassical painting, and that they did so through the embrace of lustful Dionysian desire as man’s natural state. Unsurprisingly, it was the female body onto which this new interest in distancing art from morality (and morality at all from eroticism) was mapped, and in this call for the naturalizing of erotic desire, the female form becomes symbol: one that stands in for the liberation of the Greek body from marble and back into warm and pliant flesh. Through a chronological discussion of the works of several painters, beginning with the work of German Symbolist Franz von Stuck in 1896 and spanning the next twenty years, this paper explores the desire of the naturalized fin de siècle man, who lives in a state of sexual charge rather than sexual neutrality that is enacted largely through the use of Greek iconography.

Although Paul Cezanne is best known for his still-lifes, landscapes, and portraits, the figure motif envisioned on a monumental scale was a major interest during the latter part of his career. In Les Grandes Baigneuses, a series of three paintings so named for their size that he worked on during this period, we see the evolution of his stylistic elements applied to a composition that critics termed primitive. And yet, despite the blunted forms and flattened space, Cezanne created a sensual tension by subverting the human form. We will explore in one of the three works, known as The London Bathers, how Cezanne’s innovations in color, brushstroke, perspective, and compositional structure were used to deconstruct the figures and create an implicit eroticism. Cezanne’s work is a stepping-stone to Cubism and influenced Fauvism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism. He broke the last links that bound art to the faithful depiction of objects and explored techniques to capture objects as they are perceived and felt. In London Bathers, we can see both his struggle and his achievement. This work includes many techniques that he had experimented with over the course of the last decade of his career. His use of flatness rather than chiaroscuro, the atmospheric effect of light, the harmony of color achieved with a narrow range of values, the distortion of form, and the lack of hierarchy among compositional elements are all taken forward to Cubism and reinterpreted, mostly by Braque and then Picasso. In this paper, I will explore how Cezanne’s work departs from artists before him, freeing the purpose of art that was interpreted, conceptualized, and abstracted by future generations.

Women, and their bodies, consistently find their place in the timeline of art history. Whether rendered for Classical or allegorical purposes, men have idealized, and sexualized, Venus since her mythological conception. Her abstracted ideal influenced not only how men viewed women’s bodies, but also dictated women’s servile condition within the greater context of society and male pleasure. With each passing era, the appropriateness of the nude female form was measured by how much it clung to the ancient ideal of Venus. Therefore, women’s comparison to, or embodiment of, the goddess was man’s indirect way of controlling women and keeping them subservient, thereby preventing them from breaking free and existing outside of male perception. In my paper, I explore the evolution of the archetype of Venus by examining different female nudes from Aphrodite of Knidos, to Manet’s Olympia, to feminist works by Alice Neel, and demonstrate why the representation of the female body in Western Art cannot be predicated on the male gaze. Further, I argue that we cannot obtain an authentic and comprehensive picture of Western Art without a more nuanced look at the effects of male involvement in the portrayal and study of the female nude. However, despite the oppressive weight of this male dominated cultural structure, history has shown that women can indeed break free and control their own narratives. Unfettered by the misogyny of old, the Venus of the 21st century serves as her own ideal and, fueled by her own femininity, she gazes boldly outward onto what could one day be a more equal and free future.

The nude has been a reoccurring subject in Western art for centuries. Despite its prominence in art history, the nude was practically unheard of in self-portraiture until the twentieth century. Modern artists, in their typical disruptive fashion, decided to turn their gaze upon themselves to tackle the subject that has occupied the artist’s imagination since the beginning of time. My paper considers the cultural and material conditions that led to the emergence of this sub-genre within self-portraiture. The nature of the art market, theoretical developments in areas such as psychoanalysis and moral philosophy, relaxing laws relating to censorship, and the loosening grip of religious institutions all set the stage for the artistic revolution that was about to unfold. In the second chapter, I consider the ground-breaking self-portraits of Egon Schiele, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Frida Kahlo, Maria Lassnig, Lucian Freud and Alice Neel. Each of these artists used the nude self-portrait to grapple with topics that range from sexuality, masculinity and femininity, pain, phenomenal and sensory experience, mortality and the aging body, and finally, the complicated history of the nude and new, distinctly modern, ways to paint the figure. With no clothes to hide behind, stripped bare to confront oneself directly, modern artists explore questions of identity in uncharted territories and pushed the genre to new limits.

Paula Santiago is a contemporary artist from Mexico whose practice engages in an ongoing conversation rooted in the ways the body intertwines with memory. Her most notable works are small figurines that merge pre-Columbian references with modern Mexican culture to offer reflections on time and emotion, intertwining mind and body through her use of organic materials including her own blood and hair. As Santiago puts it, “I didn’t want to work with concepts, I wanted to work with my life.”

This analysis will cover three artworks of my choice that span Santiago’s career and best exemplify her style and theme. The presentation will touch on the historical influences that inspired her work as well as the machismo culture behind it in order to help the audience understand the ritualistic process behind the assembling of her sculptures. Overall, I believe that Santiago’s work engages in feminist issues by referring to gender identity within a Mexican context. Santiago employs embroidery in her work, a practice that is perceived as a feminine form of art that is purely manual rather than intellectual. Santiago’s incorporation of the female body and identity challenges Mexican gender scholarship by combining it with the archaic philosophy that influences Mexico to this day. Her work merges the ancestral with the modern, showing that the intellectual and spiritual value behind feminine practices has always there.

How does it feel to be gazed at with a male stare? In 1974, Lynda Benglis confronted the vast public with a photographic advertisement on Artforum, a notable magazine specialized in contemporary art. The photograph depicts a female nude, played by Benglis herself, gazing at the viewer directly while holding an erect male genital attached to her lower body. This confrontational, strange, and insultive image, breaks free of the traditional passive, fertile presentation of the female body in art as this figure aggressively challenges the audience with her physical action. Publishing this daring image in one of the most well-known art magazines also assaults the system that shadows its male gazers behind the role of artist and audience.

This presentation will discuss interpretation of the female body in the male-dominated art scene during the 1970s when feminist movements and theories were blossoming. The aim is to investigate how Lynda Benglis reversed the traditional dominant-passive relationship between viewer and the female nude by deforming, altering, and reinterpreting the female body in a radical way. In Artforum, the figure takes on the dominant role as she becomes the gazer while the audiences become the target of her gaze. By intentionally presenting a female figure with a strangely dominant image, Benglis converted the female body, which has a long history of carrying hidden sexual messages under the veil of beauty, to a carrier of condemning message, rebelling the authority that hides its male gazers under the veil of beauty. This photographic work is instrumental for Benglis to throw the question back at the public and the art world–still dominated by men: “How does it feel to be gazed at with a male stare?”

This paper examines how bodily fluids in works by contemporary transgender artists Heather Cassils and Micha Cárdenas put seemingly incompatible essentialist and postmodern/performativity identity theories in dialogue with one another; they simultaneously engage with and resist earlier traditions of gender theory to reach the most potent possibilities for identity and societal liberation. Cárdenas’s film Pregnancy (2015) presents enlarged footage of the artist’s sperm and text that cycles through her experience going off prescribed hormones to have a child through cryogenic tissue banking (sperm banking). The described dimensional messiness of her lived experience reclaims what transgender theorist Sandy Stone calls an “erased history” to dismantle authoritative notions of biological essentialism. However, the work also finds value in separationist tactics advocated for by gender essentialist feminists of the 1970s. Similarly, Cassils’s performance and video installation Tiresias (2011), which features the artist pressed against a neoclassical Greek ice sculpture for five non-consecutive hours, resists trans commodification through the half-melted ice sculpture’s fleetingness and postmodern multiplicity of gendered signifiers. Pissed (2017) by Heather Cassils features a glass cube containing all of the artist’s passed urine for the 200 days following the Trump administration’s rollback of an executive order allowing transgender students to use the bathroom aligning with their gender identity. While Tiresias offers fluid possibility, Pissed leaves no room for gender confusion in definitively naming the oppressor and oppressed, thus building rather than simply deconstructing identity narratives. While gender essentialism proves problematic for transgender art, imperative work by this earlier tradition allows for the political punch needed to expose transgender oppressions and offer practical solutions.

The graffiti art movement in New York City offered an expressive outlet to oppressed and marginalized people in the 1970s through the early 1980s. Photographers of this time not only captured temporal moments of history but are the reason viewers can still examine and appreciate this art form years after the graffiti movement largely died out in this city. Martha Cooper (1943) is one of the most prominent graffiti and street art photographers from this time period and a major reason we have documentation of this historic movement. Examining Martha Cooper’s photograph (Lady Pink in the 3 Yard with Skeme and Agent, 1982) through the methodologies of biography, feminism, and gender studies reveals how she captures the historical context of this time period. Utilizing a biographical lens, I question how Cooper’s work was received by her contemporaries and the relationships she had with the artists whom she documented. Feminism and gender studies aid in analyzing how Cooper’s photograph relates to female representation and women as producers in art. I question ideas about how women are represented as subjects versus objects in artworks and how Cooper pushes for the ideals of feminine strength and power in her photography. In addition, further research and exploration into the social contexts of this time period provide more insight into the diversity and cultural identities of the people who were actively involved in creating graffiti art during this time period.

Judy Chicago’s 1979 installation piece The Dinner Party is widely regarded as one of the first great feminist artworks. Today, it is permanently housed in the Brooklyn Museum in an especially designed room at the center of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. As a monumental work, representations of race are critically important to its narrative. In the piece, there are 39 women represented with place settings at a massive triangular table, and only one Black woman, Sojourner Truth, is given a seat at Chicago’s table. One of the elements the piece is best known for, the vulval designs on the plates, is not present in Truth’s place setting. Rather, her plate is decorated with three mask-like faces. Through an examination of Truth’s depiction, the role of race in The Dinner Party and the role of race in its display, this paper examines the following questions: What sort of personhood is assigned to whom through Chicago’s representations of historical and mythological women, and what narratives are told through her artistic choices? What does it mean to show this piece in a museum today, especially when it is so large and is given so much physical space, and thus importance, in the museum? How can museums account for multiple perspectives in the display of feminist artworks?

As a work that is emblematic of the ideals of the feminist movement of its time, The Dinner Party’s display has a vastly different meaning today than when it was first exhibited in 1979. Not only are narratives within the piece important, but the narratives the museum creates through the display of this piece are also of immense importance in the contemporary moment where museums interact more and more with issues of social justice.

Considering modern habituation to consuming viral images of Black death, Sociologist Leigh Raiford writes, “In the images of broken Black bodies, it is very easy to see like a state: to question what the victims ‘did’ to end up like this.” As she implies a framework within which the State visualizes and surveys its subjects, Raiford similarly raises a question of how a mixed economy of gazes has become attuned to the spectacle of violence enacted onto the Black body. Through this familiarized looking, a meticulously crafted visual language of violence repeatedly denies citizenry to subjects of the State’s apparatus of control.

Beginning with images from the recent killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police, this paper examines historical and contemporary legacies of State violence that convene to create this modern iconography. From Jim-Crow era postcards of spectacle lynchings, to photography from the Global War on Terror, to personal images of American police brutality, this body of imagery is underscored by an ingrained perception of citizenship that informs the State’s biopolitical military project. These visualizations deem collectives of bodies to be threats to the State that must be contained by their violent othering through learned acts of suppression practiced on the corpus of the Other. Additionally, the ways in which these visualizations are consumed—as both private souvenirs of violence and public objections to it—establishes a condition wherein the body bears the burden of experiencing and speaking against the State’s injustice. This crisis of representation begs the question: what is there to do with a seemingly endless trove of violent imagery inundating the modern spectator? Examining themes of ownership, memory, and virality, this paper attempts to address this question while reframing visualizations of State violence as representations of statelessness.

Nowadays, high school and college students are likely to encounter important examples of architecture through Historical Simulation Games (HSGs) before learning about them in an academic context. HSGs are videogames set within specific locations and historical contexts. Architecture plays a fundamental part in these games, as it provides the physical foundation the user explores. These sites are often relevant to architectural history, while being pivotal to the overall narrative of the game. This project investigates how HSGs can be used as pedagogical tool in architectural history and building preservation — two disciplines where HSGs are under-utilized in comparison to fields like history or political science. Accurately replicated historical sites in videogames are accessible to audiences who may not be interested otherwise, and scholars suggest that the use of videogames can enhance students’ understanding and the introduction of more advanced material. This presentation seeks to evaluate the relative accuracy of important architectural examples as they are rendered in the Assassin’s Creed videogame series. I will investigate the continuities and departures between three historic sites and their digital reconstructions: the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Athens Acropolis, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. I argue that their virtual reconstructions are not only successful at introducing uninformed audiences to complex architectural concepts and ideas, but that they also have an important role to play inside the classroom. I conclude with a demonstration of the pedagogical potential of videogames by carefully looking at the Greek orders of architecture as they are embodied by the Acropolis in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

Illustrations within Medieval manuscripts reveal to us the ways in which people understood and portrayed key stories of their time from their own perspective. One such case is found within two notable Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from the eleventh century, the Junius, or Caedmon Manuscript, written in Canterbury (early 11th century), and the Old English Hexateuch written in Kent (early 11th century). In studying these manuscript illustrations, we see how people living in the Medieval world made sense of unseen or unknown places based on what they knew from their surroundings. Although the illustrations vary between the manuscripts, they provide an example in how these artists interpreted Biblical stories, taking what they knew from their world and inserting it into what they did not know from the Biblical world. For example, in depicting Noah’s Ark the artists drew a Viking long ship instead of following the description in Genesis because they knew what the long ships looked like and applied it to their art. Furthermore, scenes such as the Temptation of Adam and Eve are depicted differently in each of the manuscripts due to the artists interpreting the written word differently. Overall, illustrations add to the information given in the text of a manuscript and can show us details of medieval life in terms of how the artists made sense of the text by looking at familiar objects in the world around them.

Elizabeth Colomba is a French artist of Martinique descent who employs her classical training in painting to comment on the persistent invisibility of the black body in art as well as the enduring legacies of colonialism in the modern world. What makes these paintings striking, is Colomba’s juxtaposition of portraits of black men and women with inset images—or what I call ‘meta-works’—that evoke the apogee of French art, namely the art of Neo-Classicism and Romanticism.  Focusing on The Portrait, Ceres, and Chevalier de St Georges, Colomba’s choices of meta-works in her portraits contextualize this age of French artistic success within a period of colonialism and oppression, while her treatment of her subjects fights against colonialism’s dehumanizing effects.

Employing both primary and secondary sources to understand the power dynamics between France and its colonies, specifically as they pertain to the former colony Martinique, I am able to better explain Colomba’s conceptualization of not only Martinique’s past but also her broader intervention in the histories of the African diaspora. To discuss the centrality of aesthetics to black identity in the African diasporic world, I draw upon Frantz Fanon’s essay “The Fact of Blackness” among others to understand the stereotypical and misleading representations of the black body which Colomba disputes. I examine the way in which Colomba mobilizes and deforms her classical training in order to present the chosen individuals in an innovative style of portraiture. Finally, I conduct brief formal analyses on the meta-works Colomba has chosen, while focusing on their origins and historical contexts, in order to understand their meaning in relationship to the larger work by Colomba. Finally, I offer my own investigations of how Colomba’s employment of the meta-works speaks to the underlying colonialist relationship between France and the members of the African diaspora.

Remedios Varo, a Spanish-Mexican Surrealist painter, fused biographical elements with otherworldly figures and objects to create metaphors that showed glimpses of her life story. In a series of three paintings designed as a triptych, Varo reflected on her childhood, specifically, her upbringing in a conservative Catholic family and restraint under the harsh control of nuns while in a convent school. In this series, she depicted her young self as a rebel that longed for freedom and peace. Also, as a child, she would accompany her father while he traveled for work. As a young adult, Varo traveled to Paris and later, she was forced into exile from her native country of Spain. After several years, she lived in Venezuela before returning to Mexico permanently. Varo’s travel experiences led her to develop a fascination with the invention and means of transportation, which appeared in her artwork. By incorporating whimsical locomotives, Varo was able to reflect on a life that was distinguished by traveling, escaping, and migrating. However, her voyages, especially her exile, affected her psychologically. In Varo’s paintings, cultural and spatial breakdown due to displacement and exile is evident. These experiences forced her to explore and illustrate the unknown. Ultimately, by portraying her life on canvas, Varo was able to free herself from familial and social pressures.

Affixed to the walls of the 96th Street Subway station, contemporary artist Sarah Sze’s Blueprint for a Landscape (2016) boasts a composition of nearly 4,300 handcrafted tiles illustrating scenes of everyday objects—falling sheets of paper, towers of scaffolding, and dynamic lines. Alongside other works commissioned for the Second Avenue Subway, Sze’s striking exhibit was praised by critics for its eye-catching, dichromatic design, its ability to embody motion in two-dimensional space, and its references to Sze’s critically acclaimed practice. Such an emphasis on the work’s formal qualities fails to address the cultural and socioeconomic implications of Blueprint for a Landscape. These facets of the installation, alongside the artist’s intersectional identity and the work’s geo-cultural context, acquire deeper meaning when analyzed through a Marxist framework. 

In this paper, I argue that Sze’s multifaceted identity—a  member of the cultural elite and a woman of color with a modest income—positions her as a “double agent” with an anti-establishment agenda. As a result, the remarkable impact of Sarah Sze’s Blueprint for a Landscape lies not in its quality and scale. Rather, Blueprint for a Landscape becomes Sze’s manifesto for economic reform. By dissecting the iconography and formal elements of Blueprint for a Landscape through Marxist theory, I reveal the work’s subliminal message: a call to action against wealth inequality. Sze delivers a seemingly apolitical work to her patrons, the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program, and the city’s elite, the contemporary bourgeoisie. Yet, by amplifying the voices of the proletariat in her work, the artist takes on this “double agent” identity. Sze’s commodification of everyday objects and references to “blueprints” act in solidarity with primary occupants of the subway—the working class—and in denial of the conventions of class, wealth, and status.

Centered on themes of radical love, the sacredness of Black motherhood, and abolition, Free Our Mamas by Shoshana Gordon & The People’s Paper Coop (PPC) adds to a rich art history of political posters representing art as action. This poster is one of many created annually by The People’s Paper Coop, a fellowship of formerly incarcerated Philadelphia women collaborating with artists across the country. Following in the tradition of mutual aid, it seeks to take action by selling posters and using those funds to post bail for indigent Black mothers and caregivers. The message of abolition is viscerally communicated through handmade paper crafted from shredded criminal records, repurposing a limiting identity into the possibility of freedom for others. Free Our Mamas focuses on “de-labeling” women embedded in the carceral system by screen printing the identity of “mama,” over the label of “criminal.” These aesthetics and symbols are shown to repudiate criminal labels, emphasizing that efforts for social change must be focused on persons with lived experience. In this fashion, this poster also works to reject labels of posters as “low art,” and directly connects PPC’s work to a rich history of posters conjoined to social justice movements. This collaborative poster operates as both a call to action and a reminder that imagining more just systems is grounded in the love and collaboration of community.

After learning the valuable artwork owned by her uncle was expropriated by the Nazis following World War II, Maria Altman promptly took legal action against the Austrian government. Though unsuccessful in the Austrian courts, Altmann’s case was granted certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court. Through her 2004 success in Republic of Austria v. Altmann, Altmann was able to recover the six paintings from the Austrian Gallery and set the U.S. Supreme Court as an admissible platform for future cases involving the Nazi plunder. Previous scholarship on this topic focuses on the legal aspects of Republic of Austria v. Altmann, specifically the retroactivity of Foreign Sovereign Immunity. In this paper, I hope to offer a new perspective by analyzing this case using the article “Two Ways of Thinking About Cultural Property” by John Henry Merryman. In his article, Merryman argues that two competing ideologies characterize the cultural property debate: “cultural nationalism” and “cultural internationalism.” These ideologies are widely accepted in current scholarship and respectively state that objects “belong” to their nation of origin or a specific group of people to whom the object is special and “belong” to humanity as a whole. Through an expansive analysis of Republic of Austria v. Altmann, this paper will critically investigate the ongoing ownership debate between cultural nationalists and cultural internationalists and will examine the objectives, flaws, and implications of each argument. Finally, I will evaluate the contemporary significance of Republic of Austria v. Altmann and discuss a nation’s role in mediating restitution debates.

In the last three years, several American art museums have turned to the practice of deaccessioning as a method of increasing the diversity of their collections, responding to a growing awareness of the systemic inequities within the traditional canon of art history, alongside those more directly perpetrated within artistic institutions. As a result of their actions, however, the deaccessioned pieces risk disappearing from public view forever, drawing severe criticism and resistance from many across the art world. But despite this onslaught of controversy, these few instances of “progressive deaccessioning” have largely been carried out within the purview of industry norms and have allowed institutions to acquire significantly more work than what was originally sold. These resulting acquisitions, mostly authored by women and people of color, have meaningfully expanded the museums’ abilities to offer visitors a more complete and equitable narrative of art history. Diversity and equity-oriented initiatives have become increasingly relevant in the wake of racial reckonings across the U.S. and within the museum industry. This, coupled with a recent loosening of AAMD restrictions around deaccessioning, suggests that the practice of progressive deaccessioning will persist throughout the years to come. My talk will examine two instances of “progressive deaccessioning” at the Baltimore Museum of Art to argue the merit of selling artwork into private hands to increase institutional diversity. In the process, the connections and relationships between the public, museums, and museum art will be analyzed and challenged, advancing a more thoughtful and inclusive framework for their interconnection.