This thesis explores changing perceptions, theory, structure and policy within art exhibit and collection catalogues of First Peoples' objects from the Pacific Northwest Coast. This work looks at emerging viewpoints on material culture and its display over forty years as they present themselves in catalogue entries, textual content and labeling of Native groups and individuals. Early concepts based on salvage anthropology such as Native cultural demise and the degeneration of remaining people weakened as scholarship changed from a predominantly anthropological understanding of the objects to an aesthetic understanding based in art history. Political actions by Native groups have demanded policy changes within Canadian museum structure that includes the Native voice in curatorial decisions and textual discussions on both old and new objects. These very policy changes bring with them increased responsibility for the museum as well as new challenges of representation of the objects and their makers. The theme explored in this thesis is the changing role and responsibility of academia in the representation of the Other.

This paper is about the subjectivity of the body, and what this means in terms of my artistic practice. Composed in two sections, the first section addresses issues of personal history as content, the use of language in relationship to visual art, and experimental language as a tool to communicate visceral knowledge. I discuss the feminist critique of cultural, artistic and academic hierarchies, and explore how these themes inform my work. The second section examines the body of work I have developed within the MFA program. I explain the artists who have influenced my development, and give specific examples, whenever possible, of formal and conceptual influences. I use images of my own paintings, studio, and exhibitions to illustrate the progression of my practice. In conclusion, I contemplate the upcoming thesis exhibition, and explain my intentions regarding its completion. / vi, 56 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm

This thesis examines the intersections of visual culture with processes of folklorization in Maritime Canada between 1964 and 2007. Throughout this thesis, I explore how visual culture helps make history public in the Maritimes for local and tourist audiences alike. Ultimately, I question which visions succeed when it comes to looking at this “region’s” past in order to visualize its future. I outline chapters that consider how Nova Scotia’s first provincial gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), labelled the cultural production of local self-taught artists “folk” art and, by collecting these objects, became the foremost expert in a category of artistic expression it had itself created; how the provincial state ideologically and economically invested in a certain “folk” aesthetic by gathering objects under the authority of a few prominent collectors; how those institutions and collectors who sought to develop contemporary folk art for the art market also became concerned with the new confrontation of a global mass culture by the last few decades of the twentieth century; how the AGNS transformed self-taught artist Maud Lewis from a local tourist attraction in the 1960s into an internationally recognized cultural icon by the 1990s through the institutionalization of her life story’s public history; and how those with state and corporate authority came to brand the Maritimes for global tourism at the turn of the twenty-first century, by employing what they understood to be the region’s strongest cultural resources. Part of my rationale here is to explore what it means to label the cultural production of self-taught artists “folk” art and the implications of state and corporate investment in this cultural form for the public narrative associated with the experience of culture in Maritime Canada. I posit a complex hegemonic relationship here between relatively powerful artworld professionals and relatively powerless self-taught artists that speaks both to the inequities and contradictions of a capitalist liberal order. In doing so, I also tackle the broader implications of writing “the history of region” in an age of “global” analyses. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-25 13:45:16.05

This dissertation traces the presence of installation-based practices among artists of Aboriginal ancestry via selected exhibitions across Canada. It begins with a methodological perspective on Canadian art history, federal law, and human science, as a means of establishing a contextual backdrop for the art under consideration. The rise of an Indian empowerment movement during the twentieth century is then shown to take on an international voice which had cultural ramifications at the 1967 Canadian International and Universal Exhibition. Nascent signs of a multi-mediatic aesthetic are distinguished in selected works in Canadian Indian Art '74, as well as through Native-run visual arts programs. First Nations art history is charted via new Canadian art narratives starting in the early 1970s, followed by the development of spatial productions and hybrid discourses in New Work By a New Generation in 1982, and Stardusters in 1986. The final chapter opens with a history of installation art since the Second World War, as related to the pronounced presence of multi-mediactic works in Beyond History in 1989. Post-colonial and postmodern theories are deployed to conclusively situate both the artistic and political concerns featured throughout this study, and lead into the analysis of selected installations at Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives and Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada. These 1992 shows in the national capital region ultimately confirm the maturation of a particular socio-political aesthetic that tested issues of Canadian identity, while signifying Aboriginal sites of difference.

The cultural venue of European exhibitions in the late-nineteenth century enabled the promotion of the modern nationhoods of imperial powers. This study examines the official attempts of Britain to project its imperial power and modern nationhood through exhibits of colonial Indian “tradition” in London. It traces the historical dynamics of such Indian displays in three exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, and the 1924 Empire Exhibition. The juxtaposition of Indian “tradition” and British “modernity” at the exhibitions denoted India’s inferior “difference” from Britain, and thus the necessity of imperial rule in India. The exhibitions also evidenced the tensions of such notions with those of Indian modernity, especially by the inter-war period. Chapter One examines how the spatial and architectural landscapes of the exhibitions made visible the hierarchies of British imperial rule in India. Chapter Two discusses exhibits of India’s supposedly pre-industrial socioeconomic conditions. Chapter Three assesses the ethnography of the exhibitions, and how they denoted the racial inferiority of Indian “natives” at the same time that they recognized the political power of Indian princes and middle-class elites.

Die Ausstellung zeigt rund 150 von rund 4000 Handschriften, Büchern und Grafiken, die der Sammler [Walter Putz] 2005 der SLUB geschenkt hatte.

Curiosity, it can be said, alerts us to the interface between art and science, with the ‘object’ being suspended somewhere between the two. Curiosity interfaced with photography and collections are the main components of this thesis. This thesis is organized around two principle outcomes: a written component and an artistic component. The written component investigates how the use of photography as a method of inquiry into the secondary manipulation of ready-made material results in objects that become sites of new meaning and encourage new interpretations. The artistic component was comprised of a photographic installation titled ‘herbarium imaginaire’ (imaginary herbarium), which featured hand-built pinhole cameras and auxiliary photography equipment used in the production of a photographs, as well as featuring an open-house and presentation of botanical specimens and plant collecting processes that was held in the University of Victoria Herbarium.

This thesis explores the conditions of painting artists in the former GDR. The conclusion after studying rather many artists excepted paintings is, that they had a very personal style within the figuration, considering the official prescription of Social realism. The main objective for the study is common motives and changes over time. It showed a development against greater freedom in expression. A closer analyse of one painter´s work (Susanne Kandt-Horn) and of the exhibitions in Rostock Art Museum during the 80´s illustrates the circumstances under which the artists lived.

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