Relatively little is known of European artists who worked for short periods of time in the American Colonies during the eighteenth century. Perhaps Cosmo Alexander was typical of other artists who came to America seeking greater opportunity than in their homeland, only to leave several years later, perhaps disillusioned and no wealthier. Artists who are better known stayed in America long enough to build up clientele in a broad area and produced enough works to have many survive long enough to be documented by later sources. As the subjects in many of Alexander's portraits show, there was a large prosperous middle-class patronage of the art of portraiture. Considering the social conventions of the time, personal references and letters of recommendation would have facilitated travel and introduction to prospective clients. The emphasis of this research is the patronage which Cosmo Alexander found in the American Colonies as evidenced by portraits executed between 1765 and 1771. Family connections, Scottish ancestry and communities having large Scottish populations have played a part in determining probable routes. In 1961 Gavin L. M. Goodfellow submitted a thesis to Oberlin College on Cosmo Alexander. This was the first and (to date) the only extensive monograph on the artist. The thesis was general in nature, covering Alexander's life and listing all paintings known at that time, only sixteen of which were believed to have been painted in America. Because he dealt in detail with Alexander's total biography and stylistic characteristics, only one chapter was devoted to American works. Since Goodfellow's research the number of American paintings signed by or attributed to Alexander has increased from sixteen to twenty-six. With greater documentary evidence available, patterns can be established and generalizations made which possibly are typical of other artists in similar circumstances.

The goal of this study is to create a qualitative resource guide of African American culture, art, and artists for an art education curriculum. This project encompasses four main themes to reflect an area of African American culture via a work of art created by an African American artist. These themes are, Family with the sub themes African American Male, Matriarch, and Children; Spirit with the sub themes Faith, Spirituality, and Inspiration; Identity with the sub themes Artist’s Voice, Triumph, and Hope and Vision; Community with the sub themes Ancestors, Social Issues, and Cultural Voice. These themes constitute a basis depictive of the African American culture at a deeper level as resounded by ethicist Peter J. Paris’s reflection of the culture’s foundational building blocks, God, community, family, and person (Paris, 2004). This thesis looks beyond the composition, artistic essentials, historical relevance, and biographical sketches of the artists, to create an accessible and effective way to approach African American culture thematically. The resource provides connecting elements into a culture that has contributed to the very essence of the larger American culture.

The main aim of the Master Thesis is the work of the 1940s by the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) in a relationship to the long poem by Wystan Hugh Auden The Age of Anxiety. A Baroque Eclogue (1947). The Thesis in ten chapters researches Hopper's painting Nighthawks (1942), which is considered to be one of the most important works by Hopper from the war years. Unique position of this painting is reconstructed through intermedial projections and linkages towards the Auden's poem. Next to the interpretation of the intermedial relations, in the centre of the Thesis are time-space relations to Hopper's painting semantics due to period thoughs of temporality, atemporality and aperspectivism. An attention is also paid to the relation of the painting and phenomenology of temporal consciousness and continuance in connection with semantics of the space as "heterotopia".

A presente dissertação de mestrado propõe-se a analisar o processo de criação da primeira e única edição da Bienal Latino-Americana de São Paulo, que teve como título-tema Mitos e Magia, realizada no período de 3 de novembro a 17 de dezembro de 1978, na cidade de São Paulo. Os registros remanescentes, deste acontecimento, testemunham a importância do encontro entre críticos de arte, artistas e intelectuais das humanidades em debate sobre as questões polêmicas relativas às identidades culturais da América Latina, na sua produção artística contemporânea. O centro dessa discussão girou em torno do tema, sua expansão e seus limites. Observou a regulamentação da mostra e a análise do processo da I Bienal Latinoamericana de São Paulo, trouxe à luz a falta de um ideário capaz de abranger o universo plural das nossas culturas. / The remaining records of this event attest to the importance of this meeting among art critics, artists and intellectuals of humanities who debated about controversial issues related to cultural identities in Latin America, in its contemporary production. The focus of their discussion was the Biennials theme, its expansion and limits. The regulation of the display and the development of the process of the I São Paulo Latin American Biennial were analyzed in this research. It also raises issues concerning the lack of a body of ideas that comprises the plural universe of the Latin American continent.

This dissertation comparatively analyzes the architectural and visual histories of two black churches as examples of the material contribution of African Americans to the nation’s built environment. As cultural repositories, Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) (1881-1886), Washington, D.C., and the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1, Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (1925/1957), Detroit, MI, are two sites that represent distinct forms of Black Nationalism. The history of Metropolitan AME uncovers aspects of late nineteenth century Classical Black Nationalism cultural practice. The Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 reflects the revisionist agenda of the Black Cultural Nationalist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The objective of this study is to expand through a cultural lens the growing body of scholarship that seeks to excavate under-recognized African-American visual and architectural traditions. This study contrasts different modes of claiming space for cultural affirmation: construction and real estate acquisition. Chapter one offers a rationale for the artifactual interrogation of African American churches and outlines the interdisciplinary methodologies employed in the case studies. In chapter two, Metropolitan A.M.E. Church’s architectural history presents an instance of an African American community using popular architectural and artistic styles in an associative manner to articulate racial advancement. Chapter three documents the aesthetic legacy of Metropolitan A.M.E. Church by considering the sanctuary’s stained glass window program, mural commissions executed by two rarely-discussed African American artists, donated art objects and the circulation of images of the religious site. Chapter four explores the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1’s 1957 purchase of a 1925 Colonial Revival ecclesiastical structure. This assessment contextualizes the lived interventions of a radical congregation to understand how shifts in material and visual patterns expressed cultural identity. Chapter five critically explores the aesthetic history of the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 that begins with the Black Madonna and Child (1967) chancel mural by Glanton V. Dowdell. As the conclusion indicates, African American churches contain visible but hidden histories that expand African American art by introducing new iconographic considerations and revealing new art communities.

Finding appropriate and unique repertoire for the developing singer is a daunting task and ongoing challenge in the teaching profession. There are limited resources to help guide teachers in selecting varied, yet suitable repertoire that falls outside of the standard Western European musical canon. The early years, ages 17–21, are crucial to establishing a healthy and well-rounded vocal approach to singing, while also introducing the student to a wide variety of music. African-American art song is a great option for developing singers. Repertoire should allow a student to grow musically, vocally, and artistically according to the singer’s specific stage of learning and interests. Selecting repertoire through established criteria that considers the student’s personal and cultural interests (in addition to pedagogical needs) allows for a good foundation to support a healthy vocal development. Consideration of numerous elements, such as historical, musical, physical, emotional, and vocal characteristics offers a framework for a comprehensive approach in the selection process. In Literature for Teaching: A Guide for Choosing Solo Vocal Repertoire from a Developmental Perspective, Christopher Arneson provides a wonderful base for further study, and application into repertoire selection. Through the utilization of Arneson’s suggestions, I have created a rubric that quantifies key criteria important to the evaluation of repertoire. Through this rubric, a clear evaluation and assigned difficulty level is provided for each song in the collection. This compilation of songs is only the beginning to a proposed anthology entitled: African-American Art Song for the Developing Singer. Each song offers a historical and pedagogical summary that includes the following: composer and poet biographies, text and translations, basic form, original key and other keys available, performance notes, range, tessitura, suggested voice type, tempo suggestions, difficulty level, and other available editions. This unique anthology of African-American art song offers teachers with a resource that evaluates appropriate repertoire for developing singers, between the ages of 17–21, that is clearly accessible.

Adolph Gottlieb’s (1903–1974) mature career in abstract painting has been described in previous scholarship in terms of three phases: the time of his Pictograph paintings, beginning in 1941; a period of transition primarily involving his Imaginary Landscape paintings, beginning in 1951; and the time of his Burst paintings, from 1956 until his death. Dividing the artist’s career into early, transitional, and late periods has provided scholars with a clear and tidy narrative as a basis for interpretations of his work. However, in this thesis I argue that this schematization, created in hindsight, has obscured the character of Gottlieb’s working process as it occurred in real time. By nature, Gottlieb would not have been content to produce only a few narrow varieties of painting over a thirty-year period. I thus advance a new conception of Gottlieb as an inventive and constantly adventurous artist. ----- To make these claims, I examine Gottlieb’s written and spoken statements in order to define his central terminology (words like “feeling” and “self-discovery”) and to investigate his interests in myth and alchemy. I find that his work in painting was deeply intuitive and literally experimental—Gottlieb could not predict whether a painting would succeed until he had completed it, and so his career was an iterative process of painting, observing the results, and then painting again. I go on to consider Gottlieb’s paintings themselves as a record of how this experimental process functioned in practice. By presenting his diverse body of work in its full breadth, I demonstrate that the artist was not limited by his major styles, and indeed that he always presented himself with multiple possibilities. I conclude that Gottlieb’s work remains vital because he worked without an end goal or predetermined outcome in mind, and instead gave himself over to a continuous process of creativity and discovery. / text

<p>This dissertation investigates how non-academic agents (i.e. artists, curators, and institutions) helped construct the current canon of Latin American art. It takes as case studies key exhibitions held in Brazil in order to examine how the central concepts of anthropophagy, geometric abstraction, and the political came to characterize the art of the region. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this work traces a local genealogy, thus offering a different starting point for understanding the Latin American art canon that has been recently institutionalized in such places as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the global turn in art history.</p><p>Citing their different language and colonial history, Brazilian artists and critics have tended to view their art production as distinct from that of the rest of the continent. This dissertation, by contrast, recognizes Brazil as a fundamental player in the shaping of both a Latin American cultural identity and an expanded notion of the Americas. This expansion of Latin American art influences how artists represent themselves and how such production is actively being inserted into collections around the world.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States. As a genre aligned with the goals of nation building, landscape maintained a privileged artistic status for much of the nineteenth century. Yet as frontier development, land speculation, environmental change, and other factors slowly rendered its conventions meaningless, landscape became the site through which American artists most urgently sought to come to terms with the modern world. This argument is anchored by unorthodox artworks, from landscapes resembling banknotes to paintings made out of bird feathers&mdash;limit cases that allude to the failure of landscape in sustaining American cultural goals. Chapter One concerns Albert Bierstadt's aesthetic struggles in post-frontier America. During the 1890s, Bierstadt's anxieties about landscape surfaced in the particularities of objects that fold and unfold, from butterflies painted by chance to expanding railway cars&mdash;objects that might be considered the subconscious of a genre built upon expansionist ideology. Chapter Two argues that Martin Johnson Heade's tropical and marsh paintings of the 1870s and 1880s used &ldquo;groundless&rdquo; conditions to express cultural insecurities about traversable land and its representation. The pictorial blockages and interferences in Heade's paintings challenge both the compositional legibility espoused in the blockbuster canvases of his mentor and rival Frederic Church and the physical accessibility promised by the period's environmental interventions. Chapter Three proposes that Ralph Blakelock's nocturnes and money paintings—produced in the context of rampant land speculation, volatile art markets, and representational doubts surrounding paper currency—attempt but fail to overcome landscape's monetary entanglements. Blakelock's paintings theorize the value of labor and material accumulation in the increasingly abstract economic world of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four reconsiders the trope of the "figure in the landscape" using Abbott Thayer's turn-of-the-century representations of animal camouflage. In these mixed-media artworks, Thayer's attempts to visualize invisibility demonstrate the ways in which camouflage proved irreconcilable with landscape's figure-ground principles. Together, these episodes trace pictorial attempts to resolve spatial problems arising with modernity, and in so doing, they signal a shift toward new paradigms of representation. / History of Art and Architecture

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-180).