History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations

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For more information about the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, visit the web site at: https://design.uoregon.edu/arthistory

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Open Access
Enslaved Afterlives: The Ancient Greek Grave Stele of Hegeso (410 - 400 B.C.E) and Its Contemporary Museum Display
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Garcia, Alexis; Seaman, Kristen
The Grave Stele of Hegeso (410 – 400 B.C.E) is an ancient Greek mistress-maid type funerary stele from Athens that depicts an elite woman attended to by an enslaved attendant. This thesis centers the analysis on the enslaved woman who has been overshadowed in the scholarship and seeks to excavate enslaved experiences. By analyzing the iconography of the grave stele, its placement in the highly traveled Kerameikos Cemetery, and representations of the enslaved in theater, I argue that the enslaved figure draws upon the theatrical trope of the Good Slave to communicate ideology to both enslaved and free viewers. And I argue that modern conceptions of the Grave Stele of Hegeso and the role of slavery in antiquity are shaped by the stele’s display in the modern Greek museum that situates it within the context of the continued absence of slavery in the academic and museological tradition.
Open Access
From the Avant-Garde to the Humanitarian: Kati Horna's Photomontages and Photography (1937-1938)
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Cleary, Elizabeth; Cheng, Joyce
The Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) photographed the Spanish Civil War and created photomontages for the anarchist organization, the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation) between 1937 and 1938. Scholarship to date has debated whether Horna’s political activism or her association with interwar avant-garde groups played a greater role in her work. In this thesis, I suggest that Horna’s political activism and her associations with Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism are inseparable aspects of her work by tracing Horna’s work from Hungarian Activism in the mid-1910s to what has been described as humanitarian photography in the 1930s. I argue that Horna’s work reveals the proximity of the avant-garde groups on the one hand and, on the other, the ambiguous relationship between art and politics during the European interwar years.
Open Access
Pergamon’s Athena Parthenos: Questions of Greek Identity and the Impact of Ancient and Modern Display
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Kleihs, Maja; Seaman, Kristin
One of the largest and best preserved copies of the Athena Parthenos, the famed statue was found in Pergamon, a major city in the Hellenistic period. This statue from c. 170 BCE diverged in part from the original becoming a representation of Pergamon’s interest in art and assertion of Hellenism. It is often featured in studies of Hellenistic sculpture or of the excavation of Pergamon. Drawing on previous scholarship of Pergamon history, cultural positioning, and excavations, this thesis analyzes this work of art and examines its role in constructing Pergamene identity. By comparing this statue to the original version and other extant copies of the Athena Parthenos, I also investigate issues of interpretation and access. Finally, this thesis examines the history of its display to understand how it is understood in modern spaces and its relationship to important museological issues.
Open Access
Nike-Apsara Imagery in First and Second-Century Gandharan Art and the Theoretical Framework of the Roman Image-Language
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Milliken, Ashley; Gasparini, Mariachiara
Scholarship has examined the Greco-Roman deities used as prototypes for Buddhist figures in Gandhara, such as Apollo-Buddha, Tyche-Hariti, and Atlas. Minimal research has explored the surmised correlation between Nike and Apsaras. Therefore, this thesis investigates the thematic roles, iconography, and historical relationships between the two, including Roman interpretations of Nike, to expand on prior Greek and Hellenistic-centric discussions. I argue that when we look at evidence of the Apsara, such as that depicted on the first or second-century Gandharan relief in the Art Institute of Chicago, in comparison to Nike representations from the Imperial Roman period, similarities can be identified that support the notion of a correlation between the two existing in Central Asia. Further supporting this claim, I utilize the theoretical framework proposed by Stoye, which builds on Hölscher’s Roman-Image Language, to recontextualize the Apsara imagery on the Gandharan relief and explore why the Kushans viewed the figures as interchangeable or capable of being synthesized.
Open Access
Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Lawhead, Emily; Mondloch, Kate
Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century considers interactivity in digital art practices. Emerging technologies advance so quickly that artworks using such technologies are not fully understood. Digital artworks are susceptible to unprecedented threats, including technology obsolescence, file incompatibility, and software updates that might considerably alter the artwork in a matter of months. However, immaterial characteristics such as interactivity are often overlooked in the panic of preserving physical technologies. Software and hardware do not always indicate how interactive a work should be, if it involves one or many participants at once, or how exhibition space should facilitate interaction. In this dissertation, I establish a framework to quantify and prioritize the many ways in which participants interact with artworks that make use of digital technologies. I propose a three-part typology – individual interactive experience, collective interactive experience, and distributed interactive experience – as illustrated with case studies including the VR artwork The Chalkroom (2017) by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, the immersive digital exhibition Continuity (2021-2022) by the Japanese “ultratechnologist” collective teamLab, and the social media performance Excellences & Perfections (2013) by Amalia Ulman. The project offers clarity to the nature of interactivity, with an eye to long-term preservation when digital artworks are on display, on loan, or acquired in museum collections.
Open Access
Global Contemporary Art by Way of Chinatown: Chinese American Art in New York City, 1970-2000
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Cole, Jayne; Mondloch, Kate
New York City, a major capital of the art world since the mid-20th century, has long been an important center for site-specific contributions by avant-garde artists interested in activism, identity, and collectivism. This dissertation investigates the transnational praxis of artists working in New York City’s Chinatown at the end of the 20th century. This time frame encompasses a key period of rapid global, political, and economic transformations, perhaps nowhere more so than the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Following the end of Maoist rule in the PRC (1949 – 1976) and repeal of the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) in the United States, many artists from East Asia emigrated to cultural centers like New York. Manhattan’s Chinatown, where many artists settled, witnessed a rise in activism, artist collectives, and non-profit gallery spaces because of increased immigration and heightened understandings of global events, including the Vietnam War (1955-1975), Student Protests of 1968, and the Cold War (1947 – 1991). My dissertation examines the visual cultures and oral histories of four Asian diasporic and Asian American artist spaces and collectives in Chinatown to emphasize the importance of site-specific understanding of global contemporary art. My primary case studies are the Basement Workshop, an Asian American artist-activist space (1971-1986); Epoxy Art Group, a Hong Kong artist collective based in New York (1982-1992); the artist collective Godzilla Asian American Art Network (1990-2001); and the Asian American Art Centre, a non-profit exhibition space in Chinatown, founded in 1983. I unearth phenomena integral to global contemporary art history including cross-cultural understanding, nationalism, institutional critique, and methods for expanding the art historical canon. I suggest that global contemporary art produced during the late twentieth century is best understood through site-specific case studies that demonstrate the local impact of these phenomena. I conclude by proposing oral history as a method for global contemporary art history. I argue that the benefits are twofold: first, to empower marginalized artists, including those working in artist spaces and collectives in late 20th century Chinatown, to voice their own stories and, second, to account for local perspectives and site-specific contributions within an increasingly global art history.
Open Access
Yayoi Kusama's Cosmic Nature: Connecting Sculpture and Space at the New York Botanical Garden
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Fowler, Andrea; Walley, Akiko
Botanical gardens are a place where research is typically performed, but over time, the need for funding has pushed these institutions to exhibit art within their garden spaces. This thesis demonstrates how these exhibitions could be mutually beneficial for both artists and botanical gardens, and further, that the context of a botanical garden influences how these exhibitions are interpreted and understood. I examine these relationships through Kusama Yayoi’s outdoor sculptures and installations exhibited at the New York Botanical Garden, in their 2021 special exhibition, Kusama: Cosmic Nature. I argue that the space was used to create a symbiotic relationship between art and nature. Through this relationship, the major themes in the artist’s works (in the case of Kusama, concepts such as reflectivity, interiority, and obliteration) are amplified, while the garden is gaining the opportunity to extend their core mission to those who are not interested in plants otherwise.
Open Access
Closure as Perception and Interpretation: Ikeda Manabu's Negative Space Through Comics Studies
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Newell, Christin; Walley, Akiko
Ikeda Manabu (b. 1973) creates monumental images that emerge from an aggregate of unrelated miniature motifs. These small motifs are made from an accumulation of short, colorful lines drawn on paper canvases. Taking Buddha and Regeneration as case studies, this thesis investigates Ikeda’s effective use of the paper surfaces between his lines, focusing on the “silhouetted figures,” which are the undrawn spaces in the shapes of people and creatures. I employ the analytical frameworks of Comics Studies proposed by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, such as non-frames, bleeds, and closure, to argue how Ikeda’s negative spaces create room for perception and interpretation for the viewers, like the paper surface between the comic panels (the gutter). This thesis helps us understand the post-Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) generation of Japanese artists and how their mode of production reemphasizes the use of one’s hands and impacts the audience’s engagement with their works.
Open Access
A Garden Among the Flames: Stylistic Changes in the Osma and Facundus Beatus Manuscripts as Reflections of Medieval Iberian Socio-Political Change
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Kambour, Zoey; Hutterer, Maile
Scholars universally acknowledge the eleventh century as the turning point in medieval Iberian history. Léon-Castile did not ally with the papacy until 1080 at the Council of Burgos when their liturgical practices were forcefully changed from the Visigothic to Roman rite. The illumination style, controversially referred to as “Mozarabic,” emerged alongside this multi-century old Visigothic religious tradition. Therefore, this forced change resulted in the imposition of a new, foreign style found in Rome. Before the style was fully assimilated into the northern Iberian manuscripts, I argue that two eleventh-century Beatus manuscripts, the Facundus (1047) and Osma (1086), reflect the socio-political transitionary period in their use of local and foreign styles. Through stylistic analysis, I demonstrate that the instances of religious involvement — the introduction of the order of Cluny and the papal intervention regarding the Visigothic rite —catalyzed a stylistic progression out of the local style and into the foreign.
Open Access
The Adventurous Archaeologist and the Discovery of the Hellenistic Statue: An Archaeogaming Excavation of the Japanese Video Game Site La Mulana
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-29) Casimir, Zane; Seaman, Kristen
Taking the 2012 Japanese video game La Mulana as a case study, this thesis investigates the contemporary reception the popular culture idea of 1.) an adventuring archaeologist who finds 2.) an artifact in a moment of 3.) discovery. I work within the paradigm of contemporary reception theory, as well as performance studies as a means to better understand and parse the aesthetic experience of video games as a medium. Further, I employ the concept of kitsch, looking at how ideas of what is authentic and what is reproduction inform how we are receiving the ancient world within pop culture. I appeal to the game studies theory of procedural rhetoric, arguing that games persuasively—if fictionally—convey the ancient world into our contemporary moment. Ultimately, I argue that this game presents us with an example of playable kitsch, a reproduction of an original reality constructed via performance and play.
Open Access
Imperfect Inclusions: Exhibiting Non-Western Art at the Museum of Modern Art, 1935-2019
(University of Oregon, 2021-04-27) Shaw, Samantha; Cheng, Joyce
During its ninety-year history, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) has undergone four major architectural renovations, accrued a permanent collection of almost 200,000 works, mounted over 5,000 exhibitions, and constructed a vast archive of publications. Apart from these transformations, the museum’s curatorial mission over the decades attests to an effort in expanding its representation of modern art beyond the so- called Western canon. In brief, it went from exhibiting modern art’s relationship to non- European influences in the early twentieth century to orchestrating major interventions within its concentration of great Eurocentric canonical modern masterworks in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. To trace this effort historically and assess its success and failure, I will examine major MoMA curatorial endeavors since its founding in 1929, including William Rubin’s famous 1984 “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity Between the Tribal and the Modern” exhibition and Glenn Lowry’s 2019 permanent museum collection reinstallation.
Open Access
"Herstory if Caught by the Camera's Eye:" Photographers of Oregon's Lesbian Lands
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Root, Raechel; Scott, Emily
This thesis explores the photography of Oregon’s lesbian land communities, through the Ovular workshops hosted at the lesbian land Rootworks from 1980 to 1983 and their subsequent magazine The Blatant Image (1981-1983). I argue that these photographs are crucial to developing, documenting and disseminating a queer ecological “culture of nature.” I analyze the photographs’ blending of the female body and the landscape, through Ruth Mountaingrove’s landscape- portraits, as well as a recognition of the land as female and erotic, typified by Tee Corinne’s Isis series. I argue that the photographs cultivate an intimate, circular sense of visibility through the print networks of The Blatant Image, and that their distribution is a tactic for suggesting alternative futures. Lastly, I reflect on the archival existence of these photographs in that future, and their subsequent engagement by contemporary artists such as Carmen Winant.
Open Access
States of Invention: Disorientation and Parangolé
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Maher, Liam; de Laforcade, Sonia
The complexity of Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés poses a challenge to art historians. The multiplicity of the Parangolés’ iterations coupled with their unclear history make them hard to define, and consequently hard to put in dialogue with other aesthetic practices. As a performance rooted in improvisation, Parangolé is mutable and morphological in its methodologies. They are performances of queerness, experiments in how queerness is activated as a mode of inquiry. To inhabit queer space in these ways is to explore methods for combatting injustice, conditioning, and complacency. Using Hélio Oiticica’s words, Parangolés initiate a “state of invention” that turns viewers into co-creators, participators who collectively watch and wear Parangolé objects as a means towards queer ends.
Open Access
Situating the Field-based Artist Residency: An Ecocritical and Art Historical Analysis of Signal Fire
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Schoenfelder, Cassidy; Amstutz, Nina
This thesis analyzes Signal Fire, a Portland-based arts organization founded in 2008. The organization produces extended, reading-intensive, and practice-oriented backpacking artist residencies in wild places. My own participation as both artist and researcher in a summer 2019 program called “Waiting for Salmon” informs my analysis of specific artworks made by fellow participants in order to situate and contextualize the residency. I focus on Signal Fire’s pedagogical framework the organization’s ecologically-driven public lands advocacy and collaboration with tribal communities and Indigenous perspectives. Signal Fire adheres to certain aspects of the American wilderness ideal and preservationist environmentalist ethics while simultaneously engaging with the tensions between settler colonial and decolonial approaches to the landscape. By observing Signal Fire, this thesis aims to provide an ecocritical and art historical framework for assessing the significance of other site-specific residencies within contemporary art, environmental humanities, and decolonial studies more broadly.
Open Access
Confronting Polish-Jewish Antagonism in a Post-Holocaust World: Yael Bartana's Film Trilogy "...And Europe Will Be Stunned"
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Zamosc, Leanna; Lin, Jenny
At the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Israeli artist Yael Bartana represented Poland with “…And Europe Will Be Stunned”, a film trilogy that depicts the rise and evolution of the fictional movement JRMIP - Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. The movement calls for the return of the Jews and the restoration of the Jewish presence in Poland. Bartana’s work includes photographs, films, and installations about the conflictive nature of contemporary identities and the politics of memory. Her films on the imagined return of the Jews to Poland focus on controversial themes related to Jewish and Israeli national consciousness and how the rise of a narrow-minded Polish nationalism has been stiffening anti-Semitic attitudes. This study interprets Bartana’s Polish trilogy as an attempt, through visual historical and cultural references and cues, to challenge intolerance, induce people to reconsider, and foster new conversations about how Poland should relate to its Jewish and other minorities.
Open Access
Inventing Chinese Modernism: The Art and Design of Pang Xunqin (Hiunkin Pang), 1930s-1940s
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Chen, Yinxue; Lin, Jenny
As one of the first Chinese modernist artists to study painting in Paris in the 1920s, Pang Xunqin’s art and design projects were profoundly influenced by both Western European and Chinese aesthetics. From the 1930s to 1940s, his output shifted from cosmopolitan Shanghai-based paintings to Guizhou Miao ethnic paintings to traditional Chinese and Art Deco-influenced industrial designs. Integrating historical context, Pang Xunqin’s biography, and stylistic analyses, this thesis interprets how the artist's work transformed through particular social and political upheavals, including the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and conflicts between vying political parties in China. Studying Pang Xunqin’s overlooked artworks and designs and his attempts to invent a new Chinese art contributes cross-cultural perspectives to modern and contemporary art history.
Open Access
Unfinished Earthworks and Their Institutional Ecologies: A Status Report on Roden Crater, City, and Star Axis
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Curry, Casey; Scott, Emily
This thesis explores the institutional and financial histories of James Turrell’s Roden Crater (1974-ongoing), Michael Heizer’s City (1972-ongoing), and Charles Ross’s Star Axis (1971-ongoing). It frames these works as second wave earthworks, or those deployed after the first wave of earthworks in1969 and 1970, which nonetheless percolated from a similar art historical context. It mines published accounts of these projects and recently filed 990 forms to construct financial and institutional narratives that illustrate how these artists capitalize on the social and economic motivations of contemporary art patrons, and simultaneously, how patrons employ these artworks and their institutional structures to advance their own social and economic goals. By reframing these projects through an institutional lens and incorporating information from nonprofit financial documents, this study leverages the history of these projects to extend the history of earthworks and offer an entry point into the history and development of large-scale, contemporary arts funding.
Open Access
Remaking the Rainbow: Queer Memorialization, Counter-Histories, Kinship, and Local Tradition in Taipei’s “Spectrosynthesis”
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Austin, Landry; Lin, Jenny
While Taiwanese queer film and literature studies have flourished over the last few decades, virtually no English language scholarship on the history of LGBTQ art in Taiwan and Mainland China exists. Due to the contentious reception of LGBTQ relationships in Mainland China and furthermore, Taiwan, queer studies remained a largely underexplored topic until the last few decades. Until the last few years and the debut of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei’s “Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now,” queer Taiwanese and Chinese art was virtually unheard of. My thesis focuses on three contributing artists including Chuang Chih-Wei, Wen Hsin, and Xiyadie, their utilization of distinctive methodologies and media, and uses their artworks as case studies to reveal the diverse approaches to queer art making that support the curatorial aims of “Spectrosynthesis,” and contributes to a non-binary, nuanced understanding of queer art in Sinophone cultures.
Open Access
The Nation Arrested: Propaganda and Human Rights at Argentina '78
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Machado, Liam; Burdette, Derek
This thesis examines the graphic design and propaganda generated by the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina. The football tournament drew ever more scrutiny to the brutal repression carried out by the Argentina’s last military dictatorship, which ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, and forcibly disappeared or murdered some 30,000 Argentinian citizens Increasingly, the World Cup became couched in terms of a conflict between morality and violence, innocence and conspiracy, with the dictatorship and its supporters in the local press seeking to absolve themselves through the image of a modern and welcoming global event, and a pan-European boycott strongly associating its repressive methods with the Holocaust. The visual materials created for and in response to the World Cup, by the government and by activist groups boycotting the tournament, respectively, reveal a struggle to define the most pertinent image of Argentina: that of a stable, modern, and upright society, or one of a fascist-ruled nation, living in fear.
Open Access
Sublime Views and Picturesque Embellishments: Westward Expansion and “Progress” in Gilded Age Guidebooks Illustration
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Hernandez, Carolyn; Amstutz, Nina
In this thesis I apply literary analysis to railroad guidebook illustration (1880-1890) to argue that the framing and decorative embellishments aided the nineteenth century reader in imagining an idealized version of the Western landscape. Although rail travel was quick and removed from the physical experience of the landscape, guidebook illustrations highlight the picturesque aspects of the Western environment and supplement the rail travel experience by guiding the viewer through a contemplative and romantic reading of the landscape. Guidebooks immersed the reader in the progressive narrative of the guidebooks. The authors utilize language that assumes the readers are riding along the transcontinental path as they read, and the imagery serves to engage the readers’ imaginations and guide the viewers in viewing the picturesque and idealized version of the Western landscape.