Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Bernard L. Herman, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Sc. (Hons))--University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, 1998. Thesis (Master of Social Ecology (Hons.)) -- University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, 1998. / "Three part presentation of the research thesis. "Between the worlds : women empowering ourselves through re-imaging our spirituality and creativity. "1. "The wheel of the year" : an exhibition of artquilts at Fibre Design Gallery and Studio, 9 Montague Street, Goulburn, NSW. ; 2. "The wheel of the year : seasons of the soul in quilts" : published in limited edition by Pentacle Press, 38 Heather Road, Winmalee, NSW; 3. The research text". "September, 1998." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-196). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-196). Also available on the Internet.

According to current models, 19th century American quilts are presented as simple objects of cultural heritage or considered for their similarities to other forms of modern art. This thesis follows a three part approach in order to study these objects which are valuable sources of historical information in their full context. This approach includes the historical, social/aesthetic, and material contexts of the objects. The topic of the study is the quilts of the Bethel and Aurora colonies, 19th century Christian "utopian" sects in Missouri and Oregon. While societies such as the Bethel and Aurora colonies shunned many aspects of modernization, quilts appear to be an area of connection with the outside world. The quilts serve as material evidence for the tension between communal and secular worldviews in the colonies.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, Florianópolis, 2014 / Made available in DSpace on 2015-02-05T21:11:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 329137.pdf: 1103202 bytes, checksum: 76086ed233f11435bb9940ab47477983 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Mulheres e escravos não tinham acesso à educação formal nos Estados Unidos no século XIX. Por outro lado, costurar era uma atividade obrigatória até mesmo para meninas da mais tenra infância. O exercício da costura proporcionava também resultados subjetivos, sendo prescrito para acalmar as mulheres quando se irritavam com os deveres domésticos. No entanto, as mulheres transformaram o peso das obrigações em oportunidade. Enquanto se encontravam para fazer quilts, elas se fortaleciam como grupo, discutindo tanto assuntos domésticos quanto públicos, como a confecção de uma colcha de núpcias ou o direito das mulheres ao voto. Assim, elas encontraram nas agulhas o meio de expressão negado na leitura e na escrita. À época do bicentenário da independência dos Estados Unidos, os quilts foram redescobertos pelos historiadores e pelo mundo da arte, e adquiriram o status de arte. O passo seguinte foi a descoberta da relação entre quilts e a escrita feminina, bem como a aplicabilidade dos quilts como metáfora da textualidade. Na segunda metade do século XX, o movimento feminista foi criticado por não contemplar as necessidades de todas as mulheres, mas dirigir-se a um grupo específico: mulheres brancas, da classe média e com educação formal. Em resposta, surgiu o conceito de interseccionalidade. Com relação à arte, Alice Walker tem abordado a questão da criatividade das mulheres negras nas gerações anteriores ao indagar como elas mantiveram viva a criatividade sem ler e escrever, e sem ter consciência da própria criatividade. As narrativas de Walker analisadas neste trabalho, The Color Purple e "Everyday Use", tratam a costura e o fazer quilts principalmente como atividades favoráveis ao fortalecimento dos relacionamentos interpessoais. Além disso, considera-se que essas atividades constituem instrumentos de expressão que contribuem para a descoberta da criatividade, das subjetividades e das identidades das personagens, e consequentemente, de seus respectivos processos de emancipação.<br> / Abstract: Women and slaves had no access to writing or reading in the United States in the nineteenth century. However, sewing was a mandatory activity even for very young girls. More than bedcovers, sewing also provided subjective results, being prescribed to compose women when they got irritated with their duties in domestic life. However, women turned the burden of duty into opportunity. While they met to quilt, they grew stronger as a group. They discussed domestic as well as public issues, ranging from the confection of a bridal quilt to women's suffrage. Then, they found in their needles the medium for the expression they lacked in writing and reading. At the event of the Independence Bicentennial, quilts were rediscovered by historians and the art world, and acquired status of art. The next step was the discovery of the relationship between quilting and women's writing, as well as its applicability as a metaphor for textuality. Together with the rediscovery of quilts, the feminist movement in the second half of the twentieth century was criticized for not addressing all women's needs, being directed to a specific group: white, middle class, educated women. As a response, the concept of intersectionality emerged. Concerning art, Alice Walker has approached the issue of creativity of black women in the previous generations by asking how they could keep alive their creativity, once they could not read or write. Walker also states that these black women were not aware of their own creativity. Alice Walker's The Color Purple and "Everyday Use" analyzed in this research deal mainly with sewing and quilting as a favorable circumstance for the strengthening of interpersonal relationships. Also sewing and quilting act as instruments for the discovery and expression of the characters' own creativity and identity, and consequently, for their emancipation.

This dissertation examines material cultural productions as meaning-making practices that memorialize migrant lives within a context that creates and sustains the conditions for migrant deaths. I explore the Migrant Quilt Project to understand the rhetorical force and function of memorializing quilts in neoliberal contexts where migrant lives are devalued and migrant deaths appear insignificant. Since the US Border Patrol first implemented the tactic of Prevention Through Deterrence, migrant deaths have increased, totaling almost 3,000 migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona since 2000. As a response, activist quilters with The Migrant Quilt Project carefully craft quilts from clothing left behind by migrants crossing the desert. Each quilt documents migrant deaths from a specific year, as recorded by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, and includes the name of each migrant or "unknown" or "desconocido" for unidentified migrants that died that year. The quilts memorialize and humanize migrants to bring awareness to migrant deaths in the Southern Arizona community. I examine the quilts of the migrant quilt project and incorporate insights from interviews with quilters. This analysis reveals that the quilters carefully compose their quilts and employ particular rhetorical strategies to accomplish three goals: to humanize migrant lives through (counter) narrative, to memorialize migrant lives to resist erasure, and to raise awareness of what the quilters term the "reality" human migration. I argue that these three goals ultimately function to challenge dominant narratives of migrants and teach viewers about the ill effects of immigration policy. To theorize quilting as a method, this dissertation also focuses on my experience creating a quilt for the Migrant Quilt Project and explores the value of composing text(iles) as contributing to scholarly inquiry. Quilting as a method challenges traditional concepts of research and rigor to expand those concepts, which allows my particular project the opportunity to consider myself implicit in the plight of migrants. Quilting as method also facilitates a dialectical research process, which promotes an always changing perspective and research trajectory. This dialectical process expands understanding of the migrant experience and facilitates a thoughtful awareness when composing data representation. I argue that quilting as a feminist qualitative research method facilitates a nuanced understanding of the research questions about migrants and migrant representation. Ultimately this dissertation considers the productive possibilities of studying text(iles) and also of making text(iles). In completing this research, I argue that studying and composing quilts promotes tactile research methods to value various literacies and qualitative data representation. This research also provides pedagogical tools for rhetoric and composition scholars to value various ways of knowing and to study overlooked histories in their classrooms. Lastly, this research provides the possibilities for people to learn about the experiences of migration and the ill effects of immigration policies on fellow humans.

This paper supports the exhibition entitled Uniform Series, on display in Slocumb Galleries at East Tennessee State University from March 17 to March 21, 2008. The pieces in the exhibit explore the processes of dyeing, printing, and stitching on cottons and sheer silks. The imagery contained in the pieces springs from the use of the artist's first grade school uniform which functions as a symbol of the images, memories, and themes suggested by the artist's life review process. The redemption of the past in order to arrive in the present mirrors the repeated processes involved in dyeing, discharging, and over-dyeing the cloth. The thesis discusses artistic influences and the integrating role of life review. The author explores the culture of the "art quilt" and its relationship to the artist's personal life.

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.

This thesis will explore a theology of place and placemaking that is focused on the participatory role of humans in both creation and redemption, while suggesting the central and paradigmatic role of artistry in our construction of and identification with place. Building on the most recent theological and philosophical engagement with place, this thesis will argue for a theology of place that takes seriously the doctrines of creation and incarnation, focusing on a particularly redemptive understanding of placemaking in the material world. In its study of scripture and theology, it will focus on God's blessing of people to participate in the making of places, along with the role this human making has in relationship to divine presence and the divine plan for creation and redemption. After developing a theology of place and placemaking more generally, the second half of this thesis will consider the practical, constructive, and transformative capabilities of placemaking as witnessed through the arts. Relying on theological engagement with the arts, it will argue that artistic making of all kinds and attention to place go hand in hand. Exploring a selection of artistic genres, including the photography of Marlene Creates, the quilts of Gee's Bend, and the literature of Wendell Berry, this thesis will suggest that imaginative and “artistic” placemaking practices can give us a deeper understanding of the creative, redemptive, and transformative work of Christ in Creation, while also elucidating our calling to participate in it.