<p> During the last half of the nineteenth century, American sportsmen-artists painted hunting-related images that were designed to promote the ideals of sporting behavior, conservationist thought, and the interests of elite sportsmen against non-elite hunters. Upper-class American attitudes regarding common hunters and trappers, the politics of land use, and the role of conservation in recreational hunting played a significant part in the construction of visual art forms during this period, art which, in turn, helped shape national dialogue on the protection and acceptable uses of wildlife. </p><p> This dissertation takes issues critical to mid-century American conservation thought and agendas, and investigates how they were embodied in American hunting art of the time. Beginning with depictions of recreational sportsmen during the era of conservationist club formation (mid-1840s), the discussion moves to representations of the lone trapper at mid-century. These figures were initially represented as a beneficial force in the conquest of the American frontier, but trappers and backwoodsmen became increasingly problematic due to an apparent disregard for game law and order. I explore the ways in which market hunting was depicted, and how it was contrasted with acceptable "sportsmanlike" hunting methods. Subsequent chapters consider the portrayal of the boy hunter, an essential feature to the sportsman's culture and its continuance, and the tumultuous relationship between elite sportsmen and their guides, who were known to illegally hunt off-season. The last chapters address the subject of the wild animal as heroic protagonist and dead game still life paintings, a pictorial type that represented the lifestyle of sportsmen and their concern for conservative catches and adherence to game law. Developments in conservation during the period were significantly tied to class and elitist aspirations, and artist-sportsmen merged these social prejudices with their agenda for game conservation. Their representations of hunting art both responded to and promoted the conservationist cause.</p>

<p> A group of early modern German prints related to relic displays, reliquaries, and collecting, though explored by Heinrich Otte in the mid-1800s, has been ignored in recent art historical literature. Though references to the various prints appear in texts on social, cultural, and religious history, a more in-depth consideration of the works is warranted. This thesis, as a preliminary step, categorizes the prints into two sub-groups, narrative and index. It further utilizes the intriguing relationships embodied in the prints to trace societal and cultural changes, including the rise of event reporting, collecting and organization of knowledge, and changes in religious practices.</p>

An architecture thesis in two parts: Part I examines the social and technical forces which shaped theater buildings in Europe and the United States. Physical relationships between audience and performer are shown to be central in understanding the changing form of theater buildings. Part II proposes a new model for flexible theater structures. It is a design to house the Dallas Theater Center's alternative performances. The design is informed by historical models and rooted in the imperatives of the audience-performer relationship. This combination historical analysis and design project seeks to critique the methodology of the avant-garde and reconsider the built elements that vanguard theater movements use and discard. The goal is to create a renewable theater building that can workably accommodate urges toward change.

'Structures of agency' takes as its model the expanding cone of simultaneous pathways the photon travels through as it propagates through space. That image, together with the expanding cones of Richard Serra's Clara-Clara (1983) provides a framework from which a discourse on form, spectatorship, geometry and mathematics expands. Clara-Clara produces two sets of contradictory views: the conflicting apperceptions never intersect but rather propagate through the force of their conflict. In so doing, they forge a cognitive structure that is parallel. A review of the history of parallelism yields a multiplied reading of the sculpture itself and the cognitive structure it produces. Finally, the notion of contradiction as paradox reveals how formal systems---aesthetic or mathematic---give rise to alternative propositions that extend beyond the system that created them. Conscious experience recognizes, develops, these extensions even as the systems that created them break down in the emergence.

As an artist, physician and social activist, Robert Campbell combined artistic, spiritual, medical and humanitarian work. Through art Campbell engaged his audiences in issues of poverty and injustice, and stimulated social activism in others. This thesis articulates the connections between Campbell's differing media and identifies his strategies for fusing art with social activism. The thesis documents paintings through which Campbell attempted to link personal reflection and meditation to an awareness of others; sculptures that incorporate the viewer's symbolic actions with an expanded consciousness; and installations that explicitly associate compassionate identification with others to social activism. Campbell's artistic and social practice, influenced by Liberation theology of Latin America, sought to reconcile the personal with the social through a process of consciousness-raising. This process included meditations, educational actions and community involvement, and is identified as a key component to the activism and spirituality in the art of Robert Campbell.

The history of the senses will be looked at in terms of a concept of viewing emerging from the visual, and domination that this viewing holds over the other senses (and sensing in general) in architecture. A change in the hierarchy of the senses becomes evident during the late Gothic period, it is institutionalized in architecture by Durrand and in philosophy and art criticism by Kant. What this separation of viewing from vision (as a sense) and the isolation in Kant of the cognitive faculty from the aesthetic, does is impose a severe mind/body split. It is this dialect that informs the very basis of modernity, science, and architecture within the university. Architecture has the power to deny this mind/body split, and this potential has been realized concurrent to the domination of the visual.

In the nineteenth century, Galveston was a highly successful port city; it capitalized on the production and shipping of Texas cotton. The commercial buildings erected during the heyday of its prosperity, many of which still exist today, embody the sense of civic pride the Galvestonians held for their city. Architectural cast iron had been touted and utilized heavily in the Northeast, especially New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Rapidly expanding, provincial cities around the country adopted the material to give their new buildings instant flair, yet allow them to adhere to an established architectural vocabulary. While some of Galveston's iron fronts resembled those adorning buildings in other American cities, the overall look in Galveston was distinctive because it was based on Galveston's unique circumstances and good Texan practicality. This thesis will treat these several topics in detail.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the Menil Collection, a formerly private art collection in Houston, Texas opened to the public in 1987 as a museum designed by Renzo Piano. It addresses the collection as an object, and as a technology of self-fashioning, but also, in the context of modern museums, as an instrument in the formation of a public. I show how the Menil Collection participates in these processes, while pursuing a distinctive project of critique. The 10,000 piece collection has significant holdings of surrealist work; New York School painting; Byzantine icons; African and Oceanic objects; and antiquities. In 1995 it opened a freestanding gallery solely for the permanent exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly, and this year, construction was completed on a chapel built and consecrated to house 13th century Cypriot frescoes that were bought and restored by the collection. Each of these initiatives furthers an intricate moral, political, religious and aesthetic agenda that Dominique and the late John de Menil had given early expression to in their commissioning of the Rothko Chapel in 1964. Their projects are underpinned by a critique of the pervasive disenchantments of modernity, read particularly through the French Sacred Art Movement of the 1930s and 40s and Catholic Ecumenicism. The de Menils embraced a radical religious aesthetic--a sacred modern--by which they sought to rehabilitate an engagement with the material world that at once would allow for an immediacy of experience while fostering the possibility of spiritual transcendence. Hence, I argue, the organization and the exhibitionary practices of the Menil Collection are committed to a poetic rather than a didactic experience of art and they self-consciously seek to foster uncanny traces of the unseen, offering up these realms in the form of incantations.

This thesis concerns the artworks of Donald Judd, particularly those created between 1979-1994 and installed at Fort D. A. Russell in Marfa, Texas and conserved by the Chinati Foundation. A brief examination of Judd's early sculpture and experimentation with serial imagery, as they relate to the Marfa works, is provided as are some of Judd's writings which assisted the development of permanent installation sites. A discussion of Judd's move from a traditional gallery/museum environment to an outdoor site in Texas during the 1970's is provided as well as a history of the Dia Art Foundation which developed partially in response to artists' needs. Two series in particular installed at Fort Russell--one hundred milled aluminum boxes and fifteen concrete groups--are given thorough examination. The ensuing litigation between Judd and the Dia, the creation of the Chinati Foundation, and later permanent and temporary installations in Marfa are also considered.

Odilon Redon looked to Flaubert's novel, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, as inspiration for much of his oeuvre during the 1880's and 1890's. Redon and Flaubert shared a stylistic taste noted for destabilized meaning and deliberate ambiguity. To understand how Redon accomplished the disruption of a single meaning in his artistic productions, I will use a semiotic analysis of several of the lithographs from his Temptation albums to examine the verbal and visual sign systems, as well as the semiotic potential of the medium of lithography. The third part of the paper will focus on issues not previously addressed in art historical literature: the thesis that Redon empathized with St. Anthony to such an extent that he was continually drawn back to Flaubert's novel for inspiration for both his works in charcoal and lithography that he called his "noirs" and, later his works in color.