Ten painted Cajamarca-style ceramic spoons form the foundation for an investigation of the way that these seemingly utilitarian objects were bestowed with economic and symbolic value both within and outside of the borders of the Cajamarca region, located in the north highlands of present-day Peru. Since the ceramic spoons have been recovered from sites associated with large and powerful societies and states, such as the Moche of the north coast and the Wari of the central highlands, an analysis of the form, style and imagery present on these spoons reveals how these objects transcended cultural boundaries. To assess and evaluate the cultural traits shared by the Cajamarca and neighboring polities, George Kubler’s concept of form-classes, which groups together objects with similar primary traits regardless of chronology, is utilized. The application of the concept of form-classes is significant because of the lack of written language in the region and the dearth of archaeological investigations in the Cajamarca area. Consequently, the form and style of the object is considered as the primary point of analysis and can be compared and contrasted with the form and style of spoons from other pre-Hispanic cultures, including the Wari, Huarpa and Chimu. Perceived as small, utilitarian items, ceramic spoons were actually elite goods traded or carried across thousands of miles for the purpose of establishing new, and reaffirming existing, ideological connections in a period of intense exchange and economic growth.

This thesis combines art historical analysis and creative writing in a collection of essays and short stories centered on the myths of Persephone and Medusa. Ancient art, text, and context is considered in the essays, while the stories approach these subjects on a more contemporary and personal level.

Abstract Close to the Source is comprised of a series of nonfiction vignettes about the artisan, agricultural, and culinary methods of Italy. In Close to the Source the human relationship with nature, food, and art is reexamined while a series of rich characters help bring the material to life. Through interviews, research, and first-hand experiences, the author attempts to archive fading artisan and food-related techniques and rituals. In the process, a cultural critique about the importance of the practical arts in contemporary times emerges. The thesis contains four sections: Terra/Land; Art and Artisans; Pane/Bread; and Compagnia/Company.

There are multiple ways in which language and image share one another’s aesthetic message, such as traditional ekphrasis, which uses language to describe a work of art, or notional ekphrasis, which involves literature describing something that can be considered a work of art but does not physically exist at the time the description is written. However, these two terms are not inclusive to all artworks depicting literature or literature depicting artworks. Several scenes and characters from literature have been appropriated in art and the numerous paintings of Ophelia’s death as described by Gertrude in Hamlet, specifically Millais’ Ophelia, is the focus of this project. Throughout this thesis I analyze Gertrude’s account in three sections—the landscape, the body, and the voice—and compare it to its transmutation on the canvas.

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The context in which any artist creates an artwork is integral to understanding its significance, and one crucial aspect of context is how a work was created. When first looking at how Edgar Degas created his dancer paintings, his process seems simple- he watched the dancers and then painted what he saw. However, that is only a surface examination of a much more complicated system of observation, practice, repetition, mastery, and reproduction. This thesis investigates how Degas bridged the gap between observation and understanding of balletic technique; how deep his knowledge of balletic technique was; and if Degas did have a deep understanding of balletic technique, what process he utilized to gain that knowledge. It reconstructs the process Degas utilized to learn and then reproduce the repertoire of the Paris Opéra ballet by pairing visual analysis of specific works with my own knowledge of ballet technique as a dancer of twenty years. Ultimately, this study reveals that Degas learned how to dance classical ballet by mimicking the process ballerinas used to learn how to dance: first watching, then doing, and finally performing.

There is a clear change in the architectural qualities of builder's houses constructed before World War II and in the postwar years. The primary evidence is in the houses themselves and their architectural qualities. This study focuses on the first 20 years of Federal Housing Administration insured mortgage builders' houses constructed in the Pacific Northwest region, although expanded with some examples from across the nation to illustrate the general application of the thesis and that this was not a regional phenomenon.

Victorian prisoners were increasingly out of sight due to the ending of public displays of punishment. Although punishment was hidden in the prison, prison life was a frequent subject for representation. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Victorian illustrated newspapers, paintings, and photographs mediated an encounter with prisoners during a time when the prison was closed to outsiders. Reports and images became a significant means by which many people learned about, and defined themselves in relation to, prisoners. Previous scholarship has focused on stereotypes of prisoners that defined them as the “criminal type,” but I argue prisoners were also depicted in more ambiguous ways that aligned them with “respectable” members of society. I focus on images that compare the worlds inside and outside the prison, which reveal instabilities in representations of “the prisoner” and the ways this figure was defined against a societal norm. Such images draw attention to the act of looking at prisoners and often challenge a notion of the prison as a space of one-sided surveillance.

Collegiate Gothic architecture can be found on many American campuses, yet its beginnings in nineteenth-century United States are something of a mystery. As the nation’s colleges and universities grew more innovative in their modernized curricula and research, strangely, their architecture became more anachronistic with Collegiate Gothic being the most popular. Around the greens of their campuses, Americans built quadrangles of crenellated buildings and monumental gate towers with stained-glass windows, gargoyles, pointed arches, turrets, and spires, thus transforming their collegiate grounds into likenesses of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Why medievalizing buildings came to represent the archetypal college experience has confounded many educators, scientists, and industrialists, who wondered why some of America’s most revolutionary institutions built libraries and academic halls in a style that seemed to oppose everything that was modern. Scholarship has not fully addressed the reasons why Collegiate Gothic buildings came to occupy so many American college campuses. Authors have not regarded the style in its own right, having its own history within the nineteenth-century’s dynamic developments in higher education, religion, politics, urban planning, and architecture. My dissertation evaluates these relationships by addressing the Collegiate Gothic’s first one hundred years on American campuses from 1806 to 1906.

As the artwork’s title suggests, Penelope Umbrico’s "Mirrors (from Home Décor Catalogs and Websites)" (2001-2011), are photographs of mirrors that Umbrico has appropriated from print and web based home décor advertisements like those from Pottery Barn or West Elm. The mirrors in these advertisements reflect the photo shoot constructed for the ad, often showing plants or light filled windows empty of people. To print the "Mirrors," Umbrico first applies a layer of white-out to everything in the advertisement except for the mirror and then scans the home décor catalog. In the case of the web-based portion of the series, she removes the advertising space digitally through photo editing software. Once the mirror has been singled out and made digital, Umbrico then adjusts the perspective of the mirror so that it faces the viewer. Finally, she scales the photograph of the mirror cut from the advertisement to the size and shape of the actual mirror for sale. By enlarging the photograph, she must increase the file size and subsequent print significantly, which distorts the final printed image thereby causing pixelation, otherwise known as “compression artifacts.” Lastly, she mounts these pixelated prints to non-glare Plexiglas both to remove any incidental reflective surface effects and to create a physical object. What hangs on the wall, then, looks like a mirror in its shape, size and beveled frame: the photograph becomes a one-to-one representation of the object it portrays. When looking at a real mirror, often the viewer is aware of either a reflection of the self or a shifting reflection caused by his or her own movement. However, the image that the "Mirror" ‘reflects’ is not the changing reflection of a real mirror. Nor is it a clear, fixed image of the surface of a mirror. Instead the "Mirrors" present a highly abstract, pixelated surface to meet our eyes. The "Mirrors" are physical objects that merge two forms of representation into one: the mirror and the photograph, thus highlighting similarities between them as surfaces that can potentially represent or reflect almost anything. However, in their physical form, they show us only their pixelation, their digitally constructed nature. Penelope Umbrico’s "Mirrors" are photographs of mirrors that become simultaneously photograph and mirror: the image reflected on the mirror’s surface becomes a photograph, thus showing an analogy between the two objects. In their self-reflexive nature, I argue that Umbrico’s "Mirrors" point to their status as digital photographs, therefore signaling a technological shift from analog to digital photography. Umbrico’s "Mirrors," in altering both mirrors and photographs simultaneously refer to the long history of photography in relation to mirrors. The history of photography is seen first through these objects by the reflective surface of the daguerreotype which mirrored the viewer when observing the daguerreotype, and because of the extremely high level of detail in the photographic image, which mirrored the photographic subject. The relation to the history of photography is also seen in the phenomenon of the mirror within a photograph and the idea that the mirror’s reflection shows the realistic way that photographs represent reality. Craig Owens calls this "en abyme," or the miniature reproduction of a text that represents the text as a whole. In the case of the mirror, this is because the mirror within the photograph shows how both mediums display highly naturalistic depictions of reality. I contend that as an object that is representative of the photographic medium itself, the shift from analog to digital photography is in part seen through the use of the mirror that ultimately creates an absent referent as understood through a comparison of Diego Velázquez’s "Las Meninas" (1656). As Foucault suggests that "Las Meninas" signals a shift in representation from the Classical age to the Modern period, I suggest that the "Mirrors" signal the shift in representation from analog to digital. This latter shift spurred debate among photo history scholars related to the ontology of the photographic medium as scholars were anxious that the ease of editing digital images compromised the photograph’s seeming relationship to truth or reality and that it would be impossible to know whether an image had been altered. They were also concerned with the idea that computers could generate images from nothing but code, removing the direct relationship of the photograph to its subject and thereby declaring the “death” of the medium. The "Mirrors" embody the technological phenomenon with visual addition of “compression artifacts,” otherwise known as pixelation, where this representation of digital space appears not directly from our own creation but as a by-product of digital JPEG programming. In this way they are no longer connected to the subject but only to the digital space they represent. As self-reflexive objects, the "Mirrors" show that there has been a technological transformation from the physically made analog photograph to the inherently mutable digital file.