This thesis is a recounting of processes and works manifested in the studio between 2011 and 2013. The bulk of this text, however, is composed of various written personal and autobiographical vignettes, future hopes, and experiences. I use these not to find traces of their influence in the work (although they exist), but more importantly as a way of looking forward, hoping that discovering them might take me somewhere deeper in my future of making.

My work gives physical form to the ephemeral sense of memory. Memories shift and fade as life passes. The subtle and constant changes in the atmosphere give visual form to the passage of time. The time I spend working is marked by each stitch, each knot, each repetitive act of my hands. I construct and deconstruct my materials to show a suspension between formation and falling apart, the acts of remembering and forgetting, and to represent time passing and time stopped. I explore the visual aspects of how memories appear in our brain, and how the brain changes as memories are lost. An imagined landscape reflects the vastness of our mind. The unspecified topographies I create leave a sense of mystery about the place formed by the materials.

In his 2001 publication Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium, independent curator James Putnam coins the term ‘museum intervention’ to describe a type of artwork created by some artists as a means to critique organizing principles of the museum. Putnam’s book analyzes examples of museum interventions, including his own 1994 exhibition, Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art, but fails to offer a definition for the term. This thesis analyzes the trajectory of exhibition practices leading to the publication of the new term through an examination of historical changes in museum display. The paper then analyzes examples of museum intervention included in Putnam’s book in order to develop a definition for the term. The paper examines Time Machine in relation to the new definition and, contrary to Putnam’s assertions, concludes that the exhibition is not a museum intervention.

The Beekeepers complements a film/digital video of the same name. It documents my process in creating alternative films/digital videos while pursuing my MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. It starts with my first film/digital video, “Redemption,” and traces my progression over two years culminating with the 25 minute experimental documentary, “The Beekeepers

In 1902, Larz Anderson III, a Washington diplomat, and his wife, Isabel Weld Perkins Anderson, a Boston author, commissioned the Boston architects Arthur Little and Herbert W. C. Browne to design their winter residence in the District of Columbia. Completed in 1905, this Beaux-Arts mansion now serves as an historic house museum and as the national headquarters for the Society of the Cincinnati, a patriotic organization established by Revolutionary War officers in 1783. Larz Anderson was a member and a descendant of one of the founders of the Society. The fact that Anderson House was designated a national historic landmark in 1996 indicates that it is worthy of national recognition, yet the architectural and historical significance of this socially and politically important building has not been fully investigated. This dissertation examines the edifice by focusing on its patrons, families, architects, design, art collection, and mural paintings.

The experiences of Southern women during the American Civil War are often represented through the publication of their journals, diaries, and memoirs. This project consists of the transcription and annotation of the journal of Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Maxwell Alsop Wynne, written from March 4, 1862, through March 20, 1878. During her most intense period of writing from 1862 to 1866, Lizzie Alsop recorded the effects of the American Civil War on an extensive network of friends and family in the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, and at her home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lizzie’s journal offers valuable insight into the wartime politicization of adolescent women, courtship, religion, the changing relationship between enslaved African Americans and slave-owners, the effect of Union occupation on Southern civilians, and the social ties among family and friends during and after the war. The journal is among the Wynne Family Papers at the Virginia Historical Society (Mss1 W9927 a) and recorded in nine blank books. Transcribed for the first time in its entirety, Lizzie’s journals add her voice to the relatively small number of records left by female adolescents describing the dramatic experiences at the epicenter of civil war and growth into womanhood in its aftermath.

As a student enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Craft/Material Studies' Master of Fine Arts Graduate Degree program, Jacob A. Vincent's sole obligation to the world for the time period beginning in September of 2010 and continuing through April of 2012 was to dwell on things, and to eventually produce something tangible as a result. Having charged himself with the burden of indulging in the task of re-contextualizing all of existence, and ensuring that his peers and professors knew how vitally important that is, this thesis outlines select aspects of his research methodologies and provides a glimpse into the resultant conclusions.

When Pliny the Elder wrote Naturalis Historia around 70 A.D., the idea of natural history contained and connected biology, geology, and mineralogy with the history of painting and sculpture. Art was an extension of the natural world as its materials were extracted from plants, animals, and, particularly, mined and quarried pigments, stone, and metals. In my developing body of work, Incidents of Naturalis Historia, Reconstructed, I combine wasps’ nests, architectural fragments, and other found objects excavated from my surrounding environment with elements of glass that resemble lichen, crystallization, and geologic specimens. These works simulate artifacts of an alternative history; one in which the divergent histories of art, craft, biology, and geology are again united.

Prefabricated post disaster housing

The presentation of a variety of research pertaining to the graduate work of Thomas Jefferson Simon and his thesis show "Full Export".