Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Art/Art History

Successful collecting societies transform museums through the expansion and strengthening of an institution's permanent collection. The Georgia Welles Apollo Society at the Toledo Museum of Art is an example of a successful society whose collective efforts have brought major works of art to the Museum through the active engagement of the membership. Since 1986, the Society has collectively voted to fund the acquisition of over fifty-seven major works ranging from ancient to contemporary art. Contributions include works by notable artists including Chuck Close, Dale Chihuly, Alfred Stieglitz, Yinka Shonibare, Mary Sibande, Maya Lin, Robert Arneson, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Andrea Palladio, and Jasper Frances Cropsey. As a whole, these gifts have impacted the museum in their totality, breadth, and significance. Through archival study and oral history, this research brings together the history of the Society for the first time. In the following history of the Society, critical moments of the Society's development are examined in order to analyze and explore best practices, as well as to discover the realistic challenges that possibly all societies encounter. Georgia Welles, the founder of the Society, still leads the Society today. Her story is portrayed to highlight the dedication of a key individual, a person who is necessary for a collecting group's development and overall success. Additionally, through a detailed examination of the 2012/2013 year in the area of global contemporary art, the annual program of events and meetings are analyzed. Currently, no other histories of art museum collecting societies have been published. This research sets an example for more institutions to publish the history and impact of their existing societies.

Committee: Andrew Hershberger PhD (Advisor); Sean Leatherbury PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Art History; Fine Arts; History; Museum Studies; Museums

Master of Arts in History, Cleveland State University, 2012, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The notion of Tibetan art as a preservation of the Shangri-La culture that existed before Chinese occupation is a pervasive ideology among western scholars. Buddhist thangka paintings were and still are an important aspect of Tibetan heritage and sense of identity. This paper, however, focuses on the shifting roles of Tibetan artists from the onset of the Chinese “liberation” of Tibet in 1959 to present day. The tremendous lack of scholarship on contemporary Tibetan artists, including both those who still live in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and those who have traveled abroad, has served as a catalyst for the research presented in this thesis. The major theme of this paper, which encompasses the shifts in Tibetan artistic identity over the past sixty years, is presented three different sections. The first section explains artistic identity as it was before the Chinese occupation. The second section presents Tibetan art identity as it existed under Communist rule and the Cultural Revolution, and the third section notes the changes in contemporary art identity in regards to the post-Mao era to present day. The change in social and political climates dictates how Tibetans classify and explain their identity and the roles of artists change with both internal and external influences. The Buddhist thangka artists, socialist-realist painters, and contemporary artists, all define Tibetan artistic identity over the last sixty years and create a visual, interconnected timeline of Tibetan people's suffering and transformation.

Committee: Marian Bleeke PhD (Committee Chair); David Goldberg PhD (Committee Member); Mary Ellen Waithe PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Asian Studies; History

MFA, Kent State University, 2021, College of the Arts / School of Art

Camera-Smith, Maria, M.F.A., May 2021 (Ware)withal When debris is discarded, it becomes integrated into the geologic processes and identity. We all leave objects behind after consumption. A statement in history lingers, told by our physical traces and material remains. These components reveal a collective, as well as personal identity, whose epilogue is translated through our environment. (Ware)withal is an exploration of these concepts in metal, examining roles of preciousness historically and contemporarily, in interactive, wearable and functional formats. Each piece is designed to reflect the consumerist relationship we maintain with the natural environment.I utilize traditional and contemporary metalsmithing techniques in my work, as well as weaving/textile techniques, digital fabrication, and leather forming. Found, mass-produced, and handmade elements merge to adorn one another through application and imitation. At times, the scale or function of these objects impairs the user to convey the conceptual, dysfunctional heaviness of waste accumulation. Constructing these wearable and functional objects of consumption allows me as a maker to explore these areas of personal anxiety and to share my observations.

Committee: Andrew Kuebeck (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

MFA, Kent State University, 2019, College of the Arts / School of Art

An examination on the conventions of antique portraiture and how they are translated into a contemporary painting context. Through the use of a limited color palette and a restrained focus on the subject matter, (only hands, faces, and singular objects), the portrait becomes a concise, streamlined conception.

Committee: Gianna Commito (Committee Member); Darice Polo (Committee Member); Shawn Powell (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, Art History

In this undergraduate thesis, I discuss an alternative method of conducting contemporary art history that I have developed and implemented in two approaches over the two years. This method functions to engage with contemporary women-identifying and non-binary artists through a three-step interview process. The first two interviews took place virtually over Microsoft Teams. The first interview was approximately thirty minutes long and the second was approximately forty-five minutes long. The final interview also included a studio visit in Chicago, Illinois where each of these artists is based. These interviews/studio visits lasted between one and three hours. Through this process, I was able to draw new art historical conclusions regarding each artist's practice. The ability to draw these conclusions proves the validity of oral history as an art historical practice within our contemporary times. With the continuation of this method and methods like it, art historians in the future will be able to analyze and understand the work of these artists, and other women artists, within the correct context.

Committee: David LaPalombara (Advisor) Subjects: Art History

MFA, Kent State University, 2023, College of the Arts / School of Art

I have mourned many people, most of whom are still alive. Forming and maintaining relationships has always been difficult for me. They blossom and die in unexpected ways. For the vast majority of my life, I have felt like an outsider, never quite fitting in with family, friends, or community. This has led to relationships ending in sudden and unexpected ways, and I carry an immense amount of grief with me. These experiences have led me to create a collection of mourning veils in which I explore my non-linear grieving process of interpersonal relationships. These pieces are heavily influenced by my identity as a fat, neurodivergent, genderqueer dyke. I find it impossible to separate my mourning process from my identities which often leave me alienated and on the outside of my communities. Through captured pearls, cast silver, linked steel chain, and laser cut acrylic, I create a structure for my grief to manifest. These wearable objects allow me to physically express the emotions I experience internally but struggle to appropriately display. The weight and/ or placement of the pieces make them impossible to ignore, much like the aching pangs of sorrow.

Committee: Andrew Kuebeck (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, History of Art

With the continual rise of right-wing populism, the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, the global devolvement of environmental crises, and the ongoing violence against BIPOC and queer individuals, the world has been subsumed by a bleak, dystopian reality. As a result, any hope for a future under the present circumstance may seem not only naive but inconceivable. This pessimistic approach has generated a revisionist understanding of the future, which insists that it is perhaps time for humans to accept their impending extinction and rescind their place on the planet. Political theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi summarizes these pessimistic sentiments regarding the future's failure, writing, “There is no way out, social civilization is over, the neoliberal precarization of labor and the media dictatorship have destroyed the cultural antibodies that, in the past, made resistance possible.” So if there is no future and we are perpetually trapped in a present state of exploitation and precarity, is there any hope in resistance? This dissertation argues that an inability to envision a future is caused by a failure to imagine anything beyond the present. Therefore, anti-futurist assessments only identify the end to a certain kind of future, one that is bound up in hopes for the progressive evolution of humankind and the promises of modernity. In order to reinstate hope, and in turn, resistance, the political imagination must be rekindled with new outlooks for the future. “Queering the Future: Hopeful Imagination in Dystopian Times” explores the works of Wu Tsang, Alex Da Corte, and Jacolby Satterwhite, three contemporary artists who strategically implement their bodies to reimagine the future as queer. Through a variety of methodologies, these artists critique standard modes of existence that have foreclosed the possibility of imagining an alternative future. By reorienting the past and present through queer acts of bodily engagement, their artworks open a new trajectory f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kris Paulsen (Advisor); Karl Whittington (Committee Member); Erica Levin (Committee Member); Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Gender Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

After multiple years of teaching art education at the college level, I have witnessed apprehension amongst undergraduate students when asked to discuss contemporary art that tackles social justice issues like racism, heteronormativity and classism. Moreover, art teachers are also in a difficult position of struggling with how to help students open up relevant classroom discussions. My study designs an innovative and playable Contemporary Artwork Data Visualization (CADV) tool as a pedagogical device aimed to support undergraduate students' engagement with contemporary artworks that address social justice. Specifically, the study evaluates the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing the CADV teaching tool into a college level digital artmaking class that requires dialogues and art making relevant to social justice. Furthermore, the study is committed to building a “buffer zone” that can alleviate the fears and potential “minefields” that teachers and students may encounter when confronting controversial social justice issues in the classroom by appreciating relevant contemporary artworks provided databases that the CADV connected to. The guiding question for this research is “How can the use of data visualization to introduce contemporary art impact students' engagement with social justice issues in a digital artmaking class?” The CADV was developed with the theoretical guidance of Critical Multicultural Art Education pedagogy and John Dewey's Art as Experience. This study was conducted using action research as the methodological framework. Using observations, students' in-class reflections, student interviews, samples of student work and journals, this study analyzes the impact of employing the interactive CADV as a primary pedagogical tool to introduce and explore justice oriented contemporary art. Moreover, to consider the impact of this study beyond the horizons of the digital art classroom at a macro-level of employing the CADV as a pedagogical model i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joni Acuff (Advisor); Shari Savage (Committee Member); Jennifer Richardson (Committee Member); Richard Fletcher (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Educational Technology; Higher Education; Instructional Design; Teaching

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2019, Art History (Fine Arts)

In 2016, the first artist-led super political action committee (PAC), For Freedoms, was formed by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman. Two years later, the super PAC had transformed into a non-partisan platform for civic engagement and was generating the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history, The 50 State Initiative. This thesis seeks to analyze For Freedoms as art organization and impart examples of how it provides structure for contemporary artists to engage and participate within American society. The research focuses on For Freedoms' connection to the theoretical concepts of participatory culture, media convergence, and collective intelligence by means of reimagining uses for traditional mediums such as billboards and town halls. The research also showcases how For Freedoms provided space for the attempted reworking of classic American iconography. This thesis is meant to communicate how an art organization can help foster a system and space for artistic collaboration, connection, and creative participation by artists with other artists and the general public, ultimately helping to create a more diverse and inclusive conversation around what it means to be American.

Committee: Samuel Dodd (Committee Chair); Dori Griffin (Advisor); Marion Lee (Advisor) Subjects: Art History

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2019, Art

My art materialized my grief, but it did not heal it. “Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.” – Louise Bourgeois, 1982,

Committee: George Rush (Advisor); Laura Lisbon (Committee Member); Kris Paulsen (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Street art exploded in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Graffiti, films, and murals were created in and around Tahrir Square as powerful tools of protest. The artworks supported and advanced the protesters' quest for “bread, freedom and social justice,” and communicated with local, regional and international audiences. They narrated and documented the unfolding of the revolutions' events, countering those propagated by state-sponsored and international media outlets. Through the media of paint and film, the artists claimed the agency and authority of creating historiographic work, and provided a voice for the protesting masses. This dissertation offers an analysis of seven primary artworks created in Cairo between 2011 and 2013. They include paintings and murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street by Ammar Abo Bakr and Alaa Awad; three films produced by the Mosireen collective; and the documentary film Crop, co-directed by Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke. The examination of artworks in various media broadens the understanding of “street art” and highlights the diversity of global, contemporary art. Drawing from the work of Hayden White and Fran Lloyd, the artworks are posited as `historiographic objects,' a term coined here to describe visually representative accounts of history. Like other forms of verbal and written historiographies, they embody creative processes of storytelling that shape understandings of the past and lend to various practices of remembering and memorialization. The artworks document events and human loss, re-imagine and re-contextualize historical figures and iconographies, form memorialization projects, and confront the agendas, hierarchies and meta-narratives of established historical discourses. This dissertation contributes to the field of art history by positioning Egyptian art as both global and contemporary. It pays particular attention to local and regional specificity, while also considering the ways in which the artworks are produ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Charles Buchanan Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Erin Schlumpf Ph.D. (Committee Member); Andrea Frohne Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ziad Abu-Rish Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Film Studies; Fine Arts; Middle Eastern Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze ways to expand the educational role of art museums in terms of their relationship with schools. Recently, art museums in South Korea began to emphasize their educational role and provide school programs. However, so far, these programs have only targeted to visual art education and art teachers, instead of all classroom teachers. After a yearlong internship at the Wexner Center for the Arts, located in Columbus, Ohio, I conducted a study of Pages, a yearlong collaborative art museum-school program between a contemporary art museum and school teachers who do not teach visual art. During my participation in Pages, I discovered several aspects with the potential to benefit collaborative art museum-school programs both in Korea and the U.S. Thus, overarching research question of the study was formulated as follows: What are the unique and essential components and practices of Pages that can inform collaborative art museum-school programs in Korea and the U.S.? To delve into the Pages program, I grounded this qualitative case study in constructivism. Specifically, I utilized the communities of practice framework, a contemporary version of social constructivism. This framework helped me explain the collaborative learning process of adult educators. In addition, constructivist learning theories helped me place art museums as legitimate learning institutions and to describe the practices of the educators which target meaningful student learning through connecting art museum education and school education. Finally, constructivism was used as an interpretive framework for the study: I co-created knowledge with the research participants and aimed to show their diverse perspectives. I utilized qualitative case study research as a methodology. Like Pages, several ongoing education programs at U.S. art museums require involvement of core classroom teachers. However, I chose Pages because it has several unique characteris (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joni Acuff (Advisor); Karen Hutzel (Committee Member); Jennifer Richardson (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Museum Studies; Museums

MFA, Kent State University, 2018, College of the Arts / School of Art

Spreading prolifically and harmfully, invasive species overpower the areas they inhabit. This body of work contextualizes the concept of invasive species into five main parts. Each element, ivy vines, honeysuckle plants, rabbits, black beetles and cicadas, are classified as invasive for their destructive tendencies. In addition to this, each serves as a metaphor for different aspects and characteristics of myself and life. Whether they be representative of a moment from childhood or of a trial of adulthood. "Invasive" presents a series of 23 suspended fabric panels and 3 crafted benches that come together to create a large scale three-dimensional sculpture to capture the essence of my concept.

Committee: Janice Lessman-Moss (Advisor); Taryn McMahon (Committee Member); John-Michael Warner (Committee Member); Andrew Kuebeck (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Folklore; Interior Design; Textile Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History of Art

This dissertation studies the politics of the global in contemporary Korean new media art at the intersection of globalization and technology from the sixties to the present. The period coincides with the “global turn” in contemporary art as well as the emergence of global capitalism. Against this backdrop, my goal is to offer a much more complex interpretation of the “global” by highlighting how “old” signifiers of race, nation, and history continue to shape “new” media art. The present study focuses on the career of artists Nam June Paik and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI). They are often deemed as successful global new media artists who use mediums such as video, television, and the World Wide Web. By grounding their electronic art in local, national, and material contexts, I examine how the global is simultaneously imagined and contested. These artistic mediums help Paik and YHCHI promote the imagination of global village as well as portray the Korean body as nomadic on screen. In this light, it is true that the celebration of the global as borderless and nomadic gives them international success and visibility. However, I contend that the global reception of their art effaces the specific South Korean political and historical situation they stem from: a post-colonial state, a Cold War frontier, and a technologically advanced nation. The Korean context reveals how their art is located at the complex nexus of the global and national, fraught with ideological clashes, desire for economic success, and aspiration for global technology. As such, it is crucial to ground Paik and YHCHI in their local context to avoid depoliticization and deshistoricization. This dissertation concludes that global art history must acknowledge heterogeneous trajectories of its players to resist a monolithic account that still centers around the West.

Committee: Kris Paulsen (Advisor); Lisa Florman (Committee Member); Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member); Erica Levin (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Art/Art History

The works, doctrine, and persona of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) have all heavily influenced successive generations of artists from both the modern and contemporary eras. Scholars frequently examine Cezanne's impact on the artistic movements of Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. While these connections have been widely discussed, Cezanne's relation to and impact upon the iconic French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still (1904-1980), and the British street artist Banksy (b.1974) has not been given sufficient analytical attention. Duchamp coined the expression "cult of Cezanne" when he discussed other artists (including himself) who spent time referencing, studying, and following the paintings and career of Cezanne. In this thesis, I am appropriating the phrase "cult of Cezanne," and loosely defining it to incorporate a group of modern artists (including Duchamp, Clyfford Still, and Banksy) who were/are leading figures of their own respective movements while being notoriously autonomous vis-a-vis the other "members" as well as the artists and art officials working contemporarily. A careful analysis of Cezanne's letters and selected primary sources from the late nineteenth century provides evidence for ways in which Cezanne's reclusive persona, and his search for a truly autonomous painting style, connect him to these three disciples. The commonalities between Cezanne and his "cult members" exemplify ways in which these three artists refused to become an extension of the "Modernist institution" of Cezanne. By rejecting the formal style of their master, they instead followed in his footsteps by emulating his reclusive lifestyle and single-minded approach to artmaking. Without previously studying, referencing, and/or following Cezanne at some point in their career, they might not have been provided with this kind of exemplar. I believe that shadowing Cezanne's lifestyle, his interaction with the art world, and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Hershberger PhD (Committee Chair); Rebecca Skinner Green PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Fine Arts; History; Museum Studies; Museums

MFA, Kent State University, 2017, College of the Arts / School of Art

Reflections on Aloneness is an investigation into my own feelings of aloneness and how that has affected my views on identity. This investigation was done by creating Tell Me Again about Entanglement, an art exhibition shown in the Kent State School of Art Gallery in Spring of 2017. The exhibition was the result of me evaluating my own life as an artists through sculpture utilizing tension, time, color and a wide range of materials.

Committee: Peter Johnson (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, Art

The purpose of my research is to examine and gain an understanding of the space between knowing and not knowing as it relates to methods of serious play, repetition, failure, chance, and documenting lived experiences. This occurs through explorations of photography, especially focusing on the camera as vehicle for documenting experience, as well as my impulsive and reactionary studio practice. I am interested in the boundary where science meets poetics. I loosely model my studio experiments on the scientific method. I set up a problem centered on these aforementioned subjects and explore it through designing camera obscuras, of small and large scale, which are used in performance. These often absurd or makeshift pinhole cameras become the documentarians of a performed trajectory. Through the use of specially made analog cameras, and the structures that carry or propel them, I have discovered that futility, failure, and active engagement with materials are means that produce unexpected, compelling results. These results are sculptural, photographic, performative, and experiential art pieces, which could have never been pre-determined. The work in `Thesis' is a culmination of three years of the prolific fumbling and fervor of this process.

Committee: Laura Lisbon (Advisor); Dani Leventhal (Committee Member); Suzanne Silver (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Art Education; Cinematography; Civil Engineering; Experiments; Fine Arts; Gender

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2017, Theatre Arts-Arts Administration

The ever-changing nature of New Media art provides a unique set of challenges for art institutions. As technological tools and social interactions and routines continue to evolve, New Media art will use technology that continues to evolve and, ultimately, become obsolete. As a result, arts institutions, such as galleries and museums, struggle with funding. Furthermore, maintenance of New Media art's technological medium in its original form over long periods of time can become a museum conservationist's nightmare. Installation and presentation must some how be accomplished even as software and hardware becomes obsolete, hard to find, and therefore costly and difficult to fix and maintain. The cost of maintenance will continue to grow as increasingly rare in spite of being in demand. This makes investment to individuals and foundations increasingly difficult, because the art form's dynamic nature results in high costs without guaranteed longevity and the categorization of New Media is often misunderstood. Non- profit arts organizations need to seek none traditional funding methods and partnerships as difficulties increase.

Committee: James Slowaik (Advisor); Elisa Garagarella Ph.D. (Other); Michael Seiler M.F.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Arts Management; Business Administration; Business Costs; Finance; Mass Media; Multimedia Communications; Museums; Performing Arts; Sustainability

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2016, Art

Methane Ghosts, a twelve-minute looping video installed in an art gallery, presents imagery of a landfill for aesthetic consideration. However, this periurban landscape was built not for scenic views, but for the impolite needs of a major metropolitan area. It is supposed to be out-of-sight, and the bureaucratic entity with which I contracted to gain access explicitly asked not to be identified. The film asks questions of the natural environment and the Sublime, while the installation asks questions of our own bodies in relation to the filmed image. This essay asks questions of institutions and the categories they set. In this essay, I consider the works of filmmakers like James Benning and Robert Gardner, the formal and material questions posed about filmmaking by critic Gilberto Perez and anthropologist David MacDougall, and the history of the Sublime in American thought, especially as related to technology and avant-garde film. This whole is framed by a consideration of my own rural agricultural childhood. Behind this fascination is a theory of the garden, a place outside traditional categories, between woods and farm, home and nature, which originally began from the first waste dumps. I consider the landfill a sort of garden, though one on a bureaucratic scale, out of reach of the individual, hidden in plain sight. Rather than explicate the minute particulars of Methane Ghosts, I have chosen instead to offer an archaeology of my thoughts during its making. So I have structured the essay as a series of fragments. Like the landfill itself, one might find such scraps and then piece together some understanding. In the scraps of this essay, certain themes occur and reoccur. Since I signed a contract, I cannot include Methane Ghosts. Instead I sketch some jobs for future work.

Committee: Amy Youngs MFA (Advisor); Roger Beebe PhD (Committee Member); Michael Mercil MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Agriculture; Film Studies; Fine Arts; Landscape Architecture; Philosophy

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2015, Art

I am invested in an ongoing exploration into the process of making in concerns to ritual, text and material. Through the use of ritualistic labor, mediums with potent histories, Biblical texts and memories I am seeking a form of making that exists as a palimpsest of sorts, working and reworking itself to form new meanings. Having left behind any form of pictorial representation, I am interested in the vestigial of the act and the presence of my hand that remains after the ritual is accomplished. Through the process of enacting these self-made rituals I am seeking to understand what space exists for ritual and religion within the context of a contemporary art world. This paper is a furthering of this process through the analysis of the two major works I installed in the Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at the OSU Urban Art Space in February 2015.

Committee: Sergio Soave (Advisor); Amanda Gluibizzi (Committee Member); Suzanne Silver (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Religion