Existence Stories is an interactive activist art project that gathers personal narratives from people about the ways in which their lives have been impacted by the current political climate in the United States, particularly surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath. The project harnesses first-person narrative and audience participation as tools for humanizing the “Other” and building connections between people through the act of sharing stories. As the project has progressed over time, it has evolved in multiple directions and come to incorporate a variety of media, primarily comics, animation, printmaking, and zines. The roles that reproduction, distribution, and communication play in all of these media are also explored within this body of work.

Half in Dream: The Tangle in the Grid discusses the form and content of a physical art installation by the same name. The site-specific installation is a large three-dimensional collage of natural ephemera collected from the area around Amherst, Massachusetts, which interacts with natural lighting conditions to illuminate a gallery-facing image of ever-moving light and shadow. The written work elaborates some of the many details within the structure of the artwork, and reveals the philosophies, embodied practices, and methodologies that informed the visual work's creation. Woven throughout are reflections on phenomenology, walking practice, General Systems Theory, collective making, narrative arts, Zen Buddhist practice, indigenous perspectives, and ecological theory.

Containing portraiture and biography as well as protest text and affirmative text, African- American Illustrated biographical dictionaries made from 1876 to 1917 present Social Gospel ideology and are examples of Afro-Protestantism. They are similar to the first American illustrated biographical dictionaries of the 1810s in that they formed social identity after national conflict while contesting concepts of social inferiority. The production of these books occurred during the early years of Jim Crow, a period of momentous change to the legal and social fabric of the United States, and because of momentous changes in modern American print industries. While portraits within the books simultaneously form, blur, and stabilize identity, biographies convey themes of perseverance, social equity, and social struggle. More specifically, text formed an imagined community in the African-American middle class imaginary. It worked together with image to help create a proto-Civil Rights social movement identity during the beginning of racial apartheid.

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were collected, digitized, and organized into a digital archive and edition. In 1890, Whistler, an American-born, British-based artist known for his arguments with the critics of his day, published The Gentle Art, a collection of previously printed letters and pamphlets. Throughout the book, Whistler refers to people, publications, and events relevant to himself and his work. Persons unfamiliar with those references may find themselves frustrated while reading due to the lost social and historical context referred to on the pages, because those references remain difficult to access. G.A.M.E., makes Whistler’s The Gentle Art more accessible by realizing the proto- hypertextual nature of his book. Like many modern-day websites, The Gentle Art contains numerous references to references – a virtual daisy chain of associations Whistler made to and with his work encircling his artistic philosophy, art for art’s sake. From 1890, when the book was published, until now, Whistler’s “links” have remained dormant on the page. G.A.M.E. activates those links and reanimates The Gentle Art via a hypermediated facsimile text for twenty-first century readers. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a window into the late Victorian art world. G.A.M.E. houses and archives this contextual material in order to resurrect The Gentle Art and reconcile it with the man who created it.

Artist Statement The organic patterns all around me are what intrigues and inspires my textile, glass, and painting compositions. I find beauty within the natural growth patterns of things both large and small. My work references the reverberated growth processes in living things from the macroscopic observation of a plant to the microscopic viewpoint of its cells. Like the beauty found within these organic configurations, my process begins with creating serendipitous marks with a reference to natural patterns. Then, I intuitively respond to what I see in front of me. As I work, I use repetitious lines and shapes and a vibrant, non-naturalistic color palette. My choices of colors are personally motivated, and the combinations and manipulations are intuitive. Pattern and color are both visual languages that affect individuals differently. While my use of both is in response to my own experiences, my works allow the viewer to respond and connect in their own way.

The focus of this thesis is my translation of Le livre qui t'explique enfin tout sur les parents by Françoize Boucher from French into English. Chapter one begins with a brief history and definition of children’s literature, as well as children’s literature in translation. I discuss the subgenre of informational picturebooks—its objectives, characteristics, and current trends. What follows is a short biographic and bibliographic sketch of Françoize Boucher. Then, I discuss the content, format, style, and illustrations of Le livre qui t'explique as well as examine the work’s audience, aims, and values. Finally, I discuss my English translation of the work—providing an overview of the translation strategies and methodologies that I used. Chapter two focuses on specific challenges encountered during the translation process. The chapter begins with the challenge of translating culturally significant topics such as French cultural references, brands, slang, and metric measurements. Then, I discuss the translation of linguistically bound terms such as wordplay, the use of English in a French text, and onomatopoeia. Finally, I discuss the translation of taboo subjects. Chapter three is my complete English-language translation: The Book That Finally Explains About Your Parents.

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution. The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes called “the problem of reference” (how a word comes to refer to something in the world) as well as to the mystery of knowledge (how a human comes to know something). I discuss my own development of the artistic and poetic methods and concepts used in transit. I also inquire into the relationship between the conflicts in the cultures of the region, particularly during the time of the arrival of written language and capitalistic practices from Europe, and my struggle to understand and represent the ways that colonial concepts continue to dominate and frame our culture, even exhibits of art, such as transit, that work to cause thought, emotion, and reflection on other understandings of words, concepts, and knowledge through a physical de-stabilization of text and words.

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

The significant role of the female printer in the American home-based print shops during the colonial and early republic periods has been documented in print history, socioeconomic, labor, and women studies, yet with the industrialization of the printing trade, women’s presence is thought to have disappeared. Contrary to the belief that industrialization of the print shop eradicated women’s involvement in skilled employments such as typesetting, the creation of the Women’s Cooperative Printing Union in California and the creation and chartering of the Women’s Typographical Union in New York, both in the late 1860s, clearly indicate that women continued to work in printing. The assumption that industrialization brought with it the unionization of the trade denies the possibility of non-union shops, as well as the continuation of home-based businesses across the ever-expanding nation as it moved westward. This research has sought to uncover and restore to history women who have been involved in the trade from the early transition of the home shop at the beginning of the 1800s to the signing of the WTU charter in 1869 by union employed compositors, as well as to identify establishments that hired female compositors. Digital newspaper databases have been used as a means of locating both women and opportunities available to them in the American printing trade between 1800 to 1869. Several women significant to this history, both those who have been found to be employed as compositors/typesetters and those who created opportunities for the employment of trained women compositors/typesetters, are discussed.

Fielding is an ongoing exploration of place-making, spaces of learning and relationship building in formal and informal learning environments. The project is comprised of a series of events and workshops that are embodied, multimodal, olfactory and engagement-focused and a mobile cart that helps to facilitate these happenings both in and out of the formal gallery space. I regard my art practice as pedagogical, a blurring of art and life into intentional ways of being in the world; an experience of sharing practices with others and a form of what is regarded in institutionalized art as social practice. I find art to be a powerful lens through which to see, and I strive to demonstrate how it can be applied in all matters of living. The practices of making enable me to contribute towards a more equitable, care-ful, empathic, connected and beautiful earth.