Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care(2023) Peskin, Eva; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care brings together stories, moves and activations for approaching access and difference as preconditions for belonging. Both a text and an enactment, the project offers a framework for interdependent creative practice and care-oriented collaboration, doing multiple things at once: it demonstrates an ethic and technique of play-based learning, offers a story about maintenance as the work it takes to keep caring together, and embraces lunacy as a method for creative resistance. Drawing on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ premise that attention to maintenance can pause the perpetual motion machine of capitalist consumption/production and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's insistence that freedom is a place we make together in the present, the dissertation stages a confrontation of the multiple trainings that have formed my ethical, aesthetic, and relational processes of learning – both within and beyond the academy, both amateurish and professional – in order to lean into the fissures and ruptures one might ignore that the other can see. This inquiry takes shape in a spiral geography of four repeating moves, a conceptual fractal which gives rise to the action of the work: Unsettling, Dwell, Meanwhile, Sensuousness. The project rehearses this repertoire of moves as a means to center consent, access, self-determination, deep listening, and joy – necessities for the creativity required to undo/step away from/dismantle the many intersecting projects of empire which conspire unendingly against life itself, and to collectively transform into a culture of care.Item Separately Together(2022) Katt, Elizabeth C; Strom, Justin D; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This body of work explores aspects of our Covid-19 experience for the past two plus years. The unknown quality of the virus in its beginning, people going alone to the hospital with no loved one by their side, unpredictable outcomes from infection, and preventable deaths enabled by incompetent leadership has become the subject matter I explore in my creative practice. Public health officials and healthcare professionals knew what to do but the effort was fragmented, confusing, and poorly led in the United States. The lack of coordinated response, the marginalization of public health officials, the inconsistent messaging, incorrect information, and the use of a public health crisis as a political tool were exasperating and disorienting. The exploitation, willful ignorance, or disregard that impacts people with less power and means make me want to scream.Item Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular(2018) Young, Kalima Y; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On September 15, 1955, Jet, a national Black magazine, printed the image of Emmitt Till’s battered, disfigured corpse on its cover. Images such as Emmitt Till’s corpse are visual testimonies of Black pain, wounding and death. This imagery has been used for racial control and subjugation since the era of lynching photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Black pain, wounding and death imagery has also been used for Black liberation purposes, such as the photos and film of Black citizens in Birmingham being attacked by police dogs and sprayed with high-pressure fire hoses. These images helped spur anti-segregation and the voting rights activism in the Black American civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. Contemporary videos capturing U.S. police officers killing Black Americans have forced many to acknowledge the disproportionate numbers of Black Americans targeted by state violence. These videos have sparked recent civil rights protests in cities across the nation, including Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, and have galvanized online social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, which illuminates Black women’s experiences of police violence. Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular asks: What does it mean to be Black and to be the subject, witness and consumer of Black pain, wounding and death imagery? What impact do these images have on Black collective identity formation and Black cultural production? Using embodied image schema analysis, discussion group data, in-depth interviews, textual analysis, and auto-ethnography, this project examines viral videos of Black pain, wounding, and death and Black Cultural Workers’ (BCW) responses to these visual texts. An afro-futurist examination, this project grapples with the concept of Black life in response to the anti-blackness that has structured the world (Wilderson 2010) since the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, framing Black life as existing in/and out of time. By unpacking the role of spectacle, surveillance, and consumption on Black Americans’ witnessing practices, identity, and cultural production, Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular illustrates the ways Black people navigate anti-Blackness to live fully and vibrantly under the specter of death.Item TRANSATLANTIC DISBELONGINGS: LOCATING LIBERATORY WORLDMAKING PRACTICES IN NIGERIAN DIASPORIC WOMEN’S ART(2018) Akinbola, Patricia; Sies, Mary Cobin; Ater, Renée; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Transatlantic Disbelongings: Locating Liberatory Worldmaking Practices in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art” examines how women artists of the Nigerian diaspora use contemporary visual art, performance, film, and literature to contest and redefine their familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its diasporas. Foregrounding the work of five women artists: Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor, who straddle multiple geographies, identities, and allegiances, this project analyzes how they resist popular understandings of what has been deemed proper conduct for women in Nigeria and its diaspora—a process I call “disbelonging.” My use of disbelonging refers to the process by which female diasporic artists embrace and employ anti-respectability and queerness to recode, remix, and resist oppressive colonial legacies surrounding gender, sexuality, and national belonging in a Nigerian context. Their works depict visual and literary landscapes where women move freely through time and space, engage playfully with one another, prioritize their own desires, and unapologetically embody contradiction and taboo. This dissertation argues that their artmaking is worldmaking, which creates opportunities to reconfigure understandings of transnational flows and unsettles oppressive conceptualizations of community and family to embrace a range of affiliational tensions.Item A Well Within A Sinking Ship(2018) Bryant, Hugh Condrey; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A Well Within A Sinking Ship is an exhibition of sculptures in The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland. It comprises four sculptural works exploring formal and structural possibilities within the context of destruction, reclamation, and salvage. In the following, I explain the basis of my creative practice and subject matter referenced and then provide descriptions and reasoning behind the sculptures presented in the exhibition.Item Mal-Content(2017) Brooks, Curtis W.; Richardson, William C; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mal-Content is a project culminating in an exhibition including several laser-cut etchings, a large vinyl application to the wall, and a small book of symbols. This document consists of visual documentation and an edited transcript of a self-interview about the genesis, intellectual basis, and critical and material realities of the project. Mal-Content explores the nature of information as it is carried, rather than what it carries, through application of successive processes of technological and manual manipulations.Item GAUGUIN'S NOA NOA: ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE IN TEXT AND IMAGE(1991) Day, Amy Elizabeth; Hargrove, JunePaul Gauguin's novel Noa Noa is a fictionalized account of his first Tahitian journey. The artist planned to combine his text with ten woodblock prints, now known as the Noa Noa Suite; and he began working on both the text and the images in 1893. The two works were never printed together in the same volume, and no information has been found concerning the placement of images with text. There has been no investigation of the relationship between these images and the written story they were meant to accompany. This thesis attempts to establish a functional relationship between Gauguin's images and his text and to explore the many different narrative levels employed in Noa Noa. Both the text and the images are examined alone to determine how each functions separately as a narrative. Then, when examining the two forms together, the images are each found to connect with a specific textual passage -- a passage almost always containing references to Gauguin's previous works. This association between text and image creates an entirely new narrative. It is proven that, when writing about his painting, Gauguin created a discourse between image and text that contains a multi-layered reference to himself as a creator. Finally, it is shown that Gauguin combined this intermedia narrative with other, more universal narratives to elevate his own position as a creator.Item The Sugar Factory(2016) Waugh, Rachel; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Luke Banas is a young video artist who lives illegally in the disused Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While his art is an attempt to fully record and share his own life story, developers want to tear down the building where he works; a building that’s a monument to his hip neighborhood’s industrial past. The novel’s narrator, Lila Fairfax, is a journalist writing her first feature article about Luke and the fate of the factory. Observant and astute, she soon realizes that, despite his obsessive self-revelation, Luke is hiding a secret. Lila’s rational, detached approach to life is disrupted as, in the course of her reporting, she falls in love with Luke and as a result, learns far more than she anticipated. Though primarily a love story, The Sugar Factory is also an investigation of art, and art’s interaction with commerce, history, and new technology.Item Rural Decay Almanac(2016) Winkler, Dane; Sham, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rural Decay Almanac is an exhibition comprised of sculptural objects and video/sound documentation. The following is an explanation of inspiration and personal history, a proposed schematic/manual for the objects in the gallery, and other contemporary artists I frame myself within. The front half of The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland as well as the atrium space directly outside the gallery hosts the work: four large scale Site-Responsive sculptural objects, and one video/sound loop projection. The library of materials comes from a farm site in Ijamsville, MD which has been re-purposed into the structures. As a sister work, the process of dismantling documentation is shown alongside the objects in a sound/video installation. The gallery space is transformed into a meticulously controlled environment via hard objects, sound, light, and video.Item King of the Renaissance: Art and Politics at the Neapolitan Court of Ferrante I, 1458-1494(2016) Riesenberger, Nicole Joy; Gill, Meredith J.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the second half of the fifteenth century, King Ferrante I of Naples (r. 1458-1494) dominated the political and cultural life of the Mediterranean world. His court was home to artists, writers, musicians, and ambassadors from England to Egypt and everywhere in between. Yet, despite its historical importance, Ferrante’s court has been neglected in the scholarship. This dissertation provides a long-overdue analysis of Ferrante’s artistic patronage and attempts to explicate the king’s specific role in the process of art production at the Neapolitan court, as well as the experiences of artists employed therein. By situating Ferrante and the material culture of his court within the broader discourse of Early Modern art history for the first time, my project broadens our understanding of the function of art in Early Modern Europe. I demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, King Ferrante was a sophisticated patron of the visual arts whose political circumstances and shifting alliances were the most influential factors contributing to his artistic patronage. Unlike his father, Alfonso the Magnanimous, whose court was dominated by artists and courtiers from Spain, France, and elsewhere, Ferrante differentiated himself as a truly Neapolitan king. Yet Ferrante’s court was by no means provincial. His residence, the Castel Nuovo in Naples, became the physical embodiment of his commercial and political network, revealing the accretion of local and foreign visual vocabularies that characterizes Neapolitan visual culture.
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