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

The transactional interplay between “Blackness” and “whiteness” is a dysfunctional melody that sets the tone for America's inner workings. This is particularly true for those who fit the description of a Magical Body. A Magical Body as defined by sociologist; Tressie Mcmillian Cottom are "bodies that society does not mind holding up to take the shots for other people. Magical bodies are bodies that have negative things done to them so other people can be conformable. Magical bodies are seen as self-generating, and as not requiring any investment from the state or from other people.” It is in the mundane that the members of my family represented in this body of work are consistently confronted with the reality of what it means to be a Magical Body. More importantly, it is in the mundane that my family has continued to live, love, and celebrate our existence. The body of work titled Magical bodies is an exploration of the lack of representation of Black people figures in art historical canon. This work focuses on making space for Black figures to counter act the notion of erasure in the canon.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2020, Art History

This thesis traces the niche that women have created for themselves in the tattoo community, with a focus on the United States. I discuss the relationship between increasing visibility for women in the tattoo industry and the shift in women's status in American culture. My study cincludes with contemporary tattooed women, including prominent female tattoo artists, collectors, and media personalities.

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.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Art/Art History

This thesis investigates the intersectionality of ink painting and revolutionary politics in modern China with the work of Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) as an analytical lens. Through a critical sociopolitical contextualization of Fu's paintings at crucial junctures in his career, I will analyze the ways in which his paintings have changed to reflect their respective eras. Along with negotiating his artistic identity and practice, these same junctures have provided a means by which I will critically examine Fu's negotiations of national identity. Born in 1904 when China's final imperial dynasty—Qing (1636-1912)—was in a terminal decline, he grew up during the tumultuous era of warlordism and the shaky beginnings of the Republican Era (1912-1949). Fu was an artist and political activist during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). He was an artist in service of the entire Chinese state as a propagandist (1926-27, 1929-30 for the Kuomintang, and 1950-66 for the People's Republic of China). Though he died one year before the Maoist-led Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Fu's work was posthumously affected. In addition to the abovementioned events, I examine Fu's negotiations of national identity evident in his art historical writing, his time as a propagandist, as well as his formative studies in Japan from 1932 to 1935. His studies proved fruitful as he developed a novel trajectory of modern “guohua” (Chinese national painting) and his signature style that elevated his work to a position of paramount importance. The goal of my project is to provide, a succinct yet satisfactory historiography of modern China while interrogating the ways in which Fu Baoshi not only captured the essence of his natural subjects through novel landscape painting, but the ways in which his career embodies the search for a quintessential “Chinese-ness” within the fine arts and in the realm of national character.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1997, Art Education

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to identify, explicate, and clarify a range of genres, or subject-matter focuses, of art history to assist art educators in considering and planning art history components of art curricula. It is aimed at adding to the theoretical knowledge base of art history education – upon which curricular decisions are made, teachers are trained, educational practice is guided, and further research is conducted. In this study, literature in the fields of art history and art education is analyzed to correspondingly accomplish the following: to create portraits of art history based on art historians' monologues and dialogues, and to review art educators' depictions of art history in art education literature, specifically as published from 1980 through 1996 in Art Education , the journal of the National Art Education Association. Philosophical inquiry is the principal research methodology used to identify alternative perspectives, clarify ideas, and stimulate reflective thinking regarding art history and art history education. In this doctoral study, a Conceptual Map of Genres of Art History is drawn to identify a diverse range of art historical scholarship. The reader is taken on an investigation of five broad areas of this scholarship through an analytical exploration of art history literature. The areas or zones of scholarship identified and explored in this odyssey alternatively focus on art maker, art object, context of creation, art audience, or have multiple focuses. Within these five zones of scholarship, nine specific regions of art historical studies, or genres of art history, are identified, investigated, and placed within the conceptual map: biographical art history and psych-based art history within the area that focuses on art maker; formalist art history and content-based art history within the area that focuses on art object; socio-cultural art history within the area that focuses on context of creation; response-based ar (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2023, Studio Art

The Potato Famine Paper illuminates a document written and passed down by eight separate members of a Catholic Irish-American family. Over a thousand years of history and culture have been studied and compiled in order to create an edition of handmade books of that document. Various processes of printmaking, papermaking, bookmaking, lettering, and painting have been used to preserve this document in a style inspired by Insular illuminated manuscripts as well as contemporary illustrated books.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, Environmental Studies

The contemporary age suffers from a state of cynicism and inertia in light of climate change and seemingly inescapable global capitalism. This project departs from the theory and creative work of William Morris, a 19th century artist, designer, and revolutionary socialist, in conceiving of a socialist aestheticism—an aestheticism that acknowledges the creative labor behind art-making and the imaginative limitations of creating "true art" under capitalism. This is done through an analysis of Morris's involvement with the socialist periodical "The Commonweal" and his subseqeunt creative, utopian project the Kelmscott Press. The value of utopianism and creative labor is then applied to the state of contemporary art and the climate change crisis. Finally, there is a reflection on "Realized Utopias," an art exhibition I created on the subjects of this discussion through a creative praxis process.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Art

Monsters are powerful symbols of transformative agency, heavily ingrained in Western culture. With transmutating creatures living rent-free in our collective imagination, I have to wonder: why is it taboo for queer people to transform? Tracing a historical line from biblical angels, Greek mythology, the gothic novel, and contemporary horror cinema, I create a framework for understanding monsters as revered, transformative figures in important texts throughout the centuries. Just as LGBTQ+ activists reclaimed `queer' as a radical identifier, I reclaim `monster' as an uncompromising symbol of bodily agency, engaging with Queer readings and critical media theory along the way. Using my MFA Thesis artwork God Made Me (And They Love Me), I weave my soft sculpture beasties through historical imagery, religious text, folklore, and media pieces depicting `monster' and `monstrosity'.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, East Asian Studies

This thesis examines the interpretation and representation of Korea and Korean people through Korean art and material culture at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1914 – 1945). To meet these ends, this research focuses on contextualizing the museum and its Korean art collection through an intersectional lens that considers both Japanese colonial and Western hegemonies. This contextualization reveals how the purposes of the modernist, universal survey museum and the hermeneutics of Japanese colonial historiography of Korea and Eurocentric Orientalism incorporated the ways that Euro-Americans appropriated Korean material culture into the museum to understand Korean civilization and people, thus reproducing Japanese colonial hegemony over Korea and validating Western colonial-imperial hegemonies generally. Based on articles from The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art and other primary sources, Korea typically occupied a position under Japan in the museum's iconographic program. Similarly, museum professionals at CMA, such as Langdon and Lorraine D'O. Warner, were directly involved with the Japanese colonial apparatus in Korea, and admired its colonial efforts. I argue that this resulted in the double Orientalization of Korea, as such researchers adapted Japanese colonial knowledge about Korean material culture for the purposes of Western enlightenment, resulting in Korea becoming both the West's and Japan's inferior Other in the museum space.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Art/Art History

The CoBrA art movement (1948-1951) stands prominently among the few European avant-garde groups formed in the aftermath of World War II. Emphasizing international collaboration, rejecting the past, and embracing spontaneity and intuition, CoBrA artists created artworks expressing fundamental human creativity. Although the group was dominated by men, a small number of women were associated with CoBrA, two of whom continue to be the subject of debate within CoBrA scholarship to this day: the Danish painter Else Alfelt (1910-1974) and the Dutch sculptor Lotti van der Gaag (1923-1999), known as "Lotti." In contributing to this debate, I address the work and CoBrA membership status of Alfelt and Lotti by comparing their artworks to CoBrA's two main manifestoes, texts that together provide the clearest definition of the group's overall ideas and theories. Alfelt, while recognized as a full CoBrA member, created structured, geometric paintings, influenced by German Expressionism and traditional Japanese art; I thus argue that her work does not fit the group's formal aesthetic or philosophy. Conversely Lotti, who was never asked to join CoBrA, and was rejected from exhibiting with the group, produced sculptures with rough, intuitive, and childlike forms that clearly do fit CoBrA's ideas as presented in its two manifestoes. Examining Alfelt's and Lotti's individual roles within CoBrA through the feminist art theories of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey, writings by scholars and art historians, and exhibitions and collections, I focus on individual and institutional influences, and patriarchal contexts that shaped these two artists' status in relation to CoBrA membership. In doing so, I also pose questions about who belongs in any art movement, and who gets to decide who belongs, and how all of this is defined complexly over time.

MA, Kent State University, 0, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

"Pyramids of Lake Erie" uses the Cleveland Museum of Art's Egyptian collection as a case study that illustrates how museums balance the organic nature of the institution and its connection to the community in which it resides and serves with the static nature of its ancient collections, examining the dynamic relationship between American museums and historical trends from the early 20th century to the present day. The founding of the museum, and its Egyptian collection, in 1916 is examined first, arguing that an Egyptian collection is vital to the museum's power and legitimacy in the museum world and the city of Cleveland. The 1950s shifts the focus from collecting to preserving this collection due to the threat of destruction during the Cold War. Then, in the 1990s, during the museum's 75th Anniversary celebration, a travelling exhibition brought visitors and integrated technology into the museum. Finally, in 2016, a new lack of relevance of the Egyptian relics to the museum is investigated. The Cleveland Museum of Art's acquisition and display of its Egyptian collection exemplifies the modernist struggle to both understand and convey knowledge about the ancient past as well as demonstrate how current events and trends affect the manner in which museums operate.

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Art History

Flemish representations of mythological rapes produced in Counter Reformation Catholic Europe were highly sought after by patrons in the first half of the seventeenth century.This thesis will examine the popularity of visual representations of mythological abduction, in particular, the Rape of Europa, as explored by such artists as Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Cornelis Schut (1597-1655), and Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), it will examine three monumental mythological rape and abduction paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, and the interpretation of these images as reflections of the artist's political views, and will review the sensual, sexual, and allegorical implications of portrayals of rape, and their appeal to wealthy Flemish patrons in relation to Early Modern attitudes about rape and sexuality. Because most of the variations of the subject and format were already established by the master painters working in the first half of the century, this study is limited to images produced before 1650.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art Education

This thesis is designed to reconsider art therapy through the lens of a well educated and newly experienced art educator. It follows the relationship between art education and art therapy as they evolve, following largely separate paths over time, to develop a conversation that will begin to examine how art therapy has been applied to art education in the past, and to offer possible suggestions for further research in several overlapping points of study. I use a critical pedagogy framework and a generic qualitative research methodology as I conduct my research to develop ideas and raise questions that I feel have the potential to improve my pedagogical strategies and to open up a new set of possibilities for other art educators as to how art therapy might be reconsidered. The main research question that this inquiry explores is how can art therapy inform an art education curriculum? This study includes a historical inquiry, emphasizing events, theories, and some of the key figures who have made significant contributions to both art education and art therapy, and a review of recent accounts in which art therapy and art education have been used in conjunction. My own experience and practice is another focus of this study, and I relate trends in literature back to my own ideologies and approach to pedagogy. The purpose of this study is by no means to offer advice to art educators on how they can function as art therapists,. This study does not suggest that art educators can or should expect to function in the same ways as an art therapist might, and it does not encourage art educators to try to diagnose developmental problems or disabilities in their students because of the information that can be garnered from art therapy. It is my goal in writing this to simply begin a preliminary conversation that can perhaps offer ideas to art educators on how to think about improving their practice, and ideas for me on how I might improve my own, from ideas that are rooted in t (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2006, History

Marianne Strengell overcame sexual stereotypes and established herself as a notable 20th century designer. The study considers Strengell's role as an educator at Cranbrook, innovator in cottage industry development, and active participant in design for architects and industry. Emigrating from Finland to the Detroit area in 1937, Strengell served as weaving instructor at Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she inspired numerous Cranbrook weavers who shaped textile design in America and abroad. Strengell pursued various projects outside of the Academy, including the development of a cottage industry in the Philippines. During the 1940s and 1950s Strengell worked with several architects and industrial designers and designed woven car upholstery fabrics. Research methods for this thesis included archival research at Cranbrook Archives, as well as readings in published books, articles, and reports on related topics: woman designers in the United States, Scandinavian immigrants, and Cranbrook artists.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2013, Art History

During the period 1870-1915, painters and photographers created some of the most famous contributions to American imagery. More often than not, these images dealt with the extraordinarily complex social issue of children and childhood, and the way that the sentimental value of children evolved alongside a transitioning nation. Post-bellum genre painters portrayed boys as defiant mascots of the nation, in communion with nature, at odds with social institutions like the school. These painters foreran the realist “Ashcan School,” whose paintings of misfit children illustrated the vices of the growing, clashing American city. Yet these were not the only images of children produced in this period. Paintings of the “Genteel Tradition” portrayed pampered children, and their photographic analogue, the “Photo-Secessionists,” attempted to establish a highly artificial rhetoric of the “child-angel.” Often, these discreet artists ironically unmasked the psychological complexity of real, living child models. Finally, documentary reform photographers invented a new, stark aesthetic mode to advocate disenfranchised child laborers. American art about children was not only profuse, but also treated the subject in new and unusual ways that often directly paralleled contemporaneous literature and social commentary. Yet curiously, while psychologists, literary and cultural theorists, and historians have generated a vast body of scholarship on the role of the child in America, their observations never intersect systematically with research on children in American art. This dissertation will attempt to rectify this gap in art historical research. It focuses on the brief but fecund time frame when American artists overwhelmingly depicted children. It discusses children exclusively as a subject, as opposed to the extant survey-oriented studies that sandwich children within a list of disempowered social groups. Simultaneously, I attempt to draw comparisons and contrasts between co (open full item for complete abstract)

MA, Kent State University, 2024, College of the Arts / School of Art

Within the practice of curating non-Western art, there is a delicate balance necessary when developing the language for didactic texts. This research investigates the dichotomy of aesthetics versus contextual meaning in the display of African art within U.S. museums, specifically analyzing two installations at the Art Institute of Chicago: the 2011 exhibition curated by Kathleen Berzock and the 2019 exhibition curated by Constantine Petridis. Through employing content analysis, this research examines the language used in didactic object labels to determine where the bias, if any, lies between highlighting aesthetic or contextual qualities. By categorizing and counting nouns and adjectives in the labels, the findings reveal a significant emphasis on contextual language in both installations, with 81.3% in the 2019 installation and 81.5% in the 2011 installation. The research contributes a quantitative approach to art historiography, advocating for the importance of contextual knowledge in the appreciation of non-Western art, and indicating a shift towards more nuanced curatorial practices that honor the cultural significance of the objects displayed.

MFA, Kent State University, 2024, College of the Arts / School of Art

As an artist and writer, I create work to explore my own complicated identification and disidentification with queer aesthetics, experiences, and environments through conceptual and physical processes. My thesis, entitled Someone's Sun, is a meditation on gay loneliness in the current age of gay-male sociality made material in a series of handwoven tapestries. I aim to embody a sense of self-inflicted ennui, a self-defeating act of seeking for connection while simultaneously hiding oneself behind banal / insipid landscapes. Through the remediation of photographs of sunrises and sunsets posted by gay men as placeholders for their own portraits on social media apps, I abstract and amplify saturation and composition in photoshop to create a digital painting of an otherworldly environment akin to those of Science Fiction films and television. I use my digital paintings as references, glancing up at them as I dye-paint warps with a variety of color using painterly brushstrokes, once again filtering each image through a further filter of abstraction. Through these digital and analog painting processes I explore color and scale, culminating in a final remediation by weaving with single toning color of wool and a metallic lurex weft yarn on traditional floor looms to create shimmering watercolor tapestries. I weave queer tapestries, that whisper seductively hushed desires while screaming “look at how I shine.”

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, History of Art

My dissertation, Communities of Color: The Life and Painting of Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978), examines the work of Thomas, particularly the abstract compositions she produced between 1960 and 1978, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and the contentious debates within the art world itself around different forms of representation. I am particularly interested in both the demands made during that period for greater representation of women and non-White artists in public museums and the widespread belief that arose more or less simultaneously that only representational or figurative art could adequately address feminist or anti-racist concerns. My dissertation aims to show that Thomas's paintings, although non-figurative, were intended to contribute to the goal of a more diverse and integrated society, principally by changing perception itself. Despite what initially appears to be their cheerful simplicity, Thomas's compositions are in fact subtly complex, inviting viewers' attentiveness to small differences in the elements' shape and color. In this way, they solicit a positive form of “discrimination,” one that discourages generalization and attunes us instead to individuality. Her paintings, comprised as they are of separate daubs of paint, stand as analogues, then, for other, even more complex communities of color.  Thomas's own life story is an interesting one: she spent most of her adult life teaching art within the Washington, DC public school system, turning to painting full-time only after her retirement at the age of sixty-nine. In addition to analyzing individual paintings by Thomas, I also investigate the artist's artistic biography, including her commitment to the tradition of European modernism, her affinities with the Washington Color School (particularly the artists Kenneth Noland and Sam Gilliam), and her fascination late in life with the Apollo space program, which I discuss as an early form of Afrofuturism. My ambition is to reveal the (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, History of Art

James Clifford's Art-Culture System, first published in 1988, establishes a clear differentiation between “tourist art,” and artworks worthy of the museum through a semiotic square of authenticity and multiplicity. Through this system, Clifford delineates the criteria by which Western art historians, critics, and curators ascribe value to different kinds of objects. This thesis deploys Clifford's Art-Culture System as a framework for examining the work of Ainu artists trained in tourist villages whose oeuvres oscillate between the categories of “tourist art” and “fine art” in a way that problematizes clear distinctions between the two. Of particular interest are Bikky Sunazawa (1931-1989) and Fujito Takeki (1934-2018), both woodcarvers raised in Asahikawa who began working in the tourist industry to support their families at young ages. However, while both artists challenge the categories of Clifford's system, they do so in markedly different ways: Bikky produced modernist sculptures for museum exhibition that were devoid of overtly Ainu symbology alongside smaller carvings for the tourist industry, while Fujito remained devoted to the basic practices of Ainu tourist woodcarving throughout his life but has risen to prominence in the broader Japanese art world because of the unique ways in which he has elevated particular motifs, most notably that of the bear. By using these two artists to problematize reflexive categorization of artworks along a hierarchal scale—with “tourist art” at the bottom and “fine art” at the top—this thesis will advocate for new ways of thinking about the Ainu tourist village as a place of legitimate, culturally-specific education for Ainu themselves rather than as a mere ludic space for the enjoyment of outsiders.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Art/Art History

The aim of this thesis is to identify and analyze underexplored risk factors that, in the past and present, have led to the damaging, and in some cases, the destruction of artifacts or works of art. The intentional destruction of art and relics has occurred throughout history for various reasons, and by analyzing specific examples in connection with particular risk factors, museums and galleries can further understand how to protect the objects within their collections from potential future damages. Within this thesis, I will address three risk factors through an analysis of case studies in which one risk factor served as a major cause that is closely related to an artifact or work's destruction. The significance of this study is that it begins the identification of rarely explored risk factors that have culminated in the destruction of important historic artifacts. As this study has taken the first steps in a larger field of risk factors, future research is needed to fully identify the many risk factors that exist.