UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    VERY ANXIOUS PEOPLE: ALICE NEEL’S LATE PORTRAITS
    (2022) Callahan, Maura; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the mid- to late 1960s, as her previously underrecognized work as a painter started to secure visibility in the art world, the American portraitist Alice Neel (1900-1984) began to minimize her subjects’ physical environments, often leaving the surrounding area a blank white field. She instead concentrated her paint within the figure, the boundaries of which became emphasized by a vivid blue outline. This attention to the figure and its borders reveals a critical nuancing of the humanist ideals her paintings purportedly defended. Rather than merely affirming the autonomy of the human subject, Neel's late portraits suggest an anxiety toward the coherence of selfhood and its sheltering within the body. This essay considers a small selection of these paintings, created between 1965 and 1982, alongside the work of preceding and contemporary artists who used portraiture to work through Western culture’s shifting conceptions of the human subject to different ends. These studies ultimately explore the possibilities and limitations of portraiture in revealing and validating the subject, and how these challenges were negotiated by Neel during the culturally transformative decades which coincided with her late career.
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    Plastic Fantastic: American Sculpture in the Age of Synthetics
    (2018) O'Steen, Danielle; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation considers the role of plastics as a sculptural medium in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. At this time, artists were turning to synthetics in large numbers and with great enthusiasm, in spite of wavering public opinion on plastics in the U.S. I argue for the significance of this “plastics moment” for the arts by looking closely at the work of four artists: Donald Judd (1928–1994), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), De Wain Valentine (b. 1936), and Frederick Eversley (b. 1941). I position their sculptures in the social context of synthetics in twentieth-century America. In their distinctive practices, Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley each used plastics with a pioneer’s zeal: working with local industries, creating new means of production, and even developing formulas for the materials. Plastic Fantastic is an interdisciplinary text, engaging scientific and cultural histories in conversation with American art scholarship. I focus on the production accounts of the objects to understand how these four artists took on the challenge of synthetics, and consider the diversity of substances used, looking at sculptures in Plexiglas, Fiberglas, and polyester resin. Using a technical approach to art history, I expand the literature on artworks from this period, which often omits material details and overlooks plastics’ place at this crux of sculpture in the U.S. My dissertation illuminates the important innovations of Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley to understand this juncture in the 1960s and 1970s, when American art found plastics.