In this investigation, I explored the praxes of three Black women multimodal artists--including their perspectives, artistic strategies, and creation of material culture objects--to illuminate the myriad ways their work may inspire teachers and learners across various settings. I examined the complex interplay between art, education, and social justice through the lens of Black women's artistic practices. In this research project, I sought to illuminate the transformative potential these practices hold for formal and informal educational settings and assert the need to recognize and integrate Black women artists' diverse epistemologies and aesthetic experiences into broader educational discourses. A central goal entails recognizing the knowledge these artists draw upon and produce. Therefore, this study centers Black women artists’ multimodal production and creative values from an inter-arts perspective that reckons with socio-political critique and aesthetic sensibilities. Theoretical underpinnings for this research are grounded in interlocking critical discourses involving gender, race, power relations, and education. Using a critical arts-knowledge lens, this arts-based project dialogues with and explores ways to make visible the radical aims, unorthodox practices of belonging (McKittrick, 2021), and artistic strategies of Black women artists to reflect on and reimagine the world as they see and experience it. Employing a critical arts-based research methodology, the research engages with the work and perspectives of three Black multimodal artists—Sable Elyse Smith, Renée Cox, and Nanette Carolyn Carter. By examining their artistic strategies, creations, and the socio-political critique embedded in their work, the dissertation reveals how their art challenges conventional educational paradigms and offers radical curricular and pedagogical possibilities. The study is grounded in interlocking critical discourses on gender, race, power relations, and education, utilizing a rhizomatic conceptual framework to explore the interconnectedness of these themes. This research's findings illuminate art's significant role in fostering critical consciousness, challenging existing norms, and advocating for change. Through the narratives and artistic expressions of Black women artists and Black women art educators, the dissertation underscores the urgency of integrating multisensory and multimodal approaches into educational curricula. Such integration enriches the academic experience and prepares students to navigate the complexities of a multicultural world with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the diversity of human expression and knowledge."Beyond Beauty" calls for expanding curriculum and pedagogy that centers on Black women artists' aesthetic encounters, creative processes, and social justice commitments. I advocate for a more inclusive, dynamic, and transformative educational landscape by highlighting these women's narratives and artistic insights. This research contributes to the ongoing discourses on the importance of art in and as education, pushing for a future where the rich tapestry of human experiences is fully recognized and integrated into the very fabric of learning and teaching.

This thesis examines a selection of eight photographs in the History Portraits series by American photographer, Cindy Sherman, produced from 1989 to 1990. The photographs are based on Renaissance paintings of biblical and secular women painted by old master artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Raphael. Sherman focused on the female types of Biblical mother and femme fatale, as well as wives and models. These types are defined in their relation to men and are depicted by men. In Sherman’s reinterpretations of their portraits, she retells the stories of these women in ways that reaffirm their independence and power that have been shrouded in a history told and controlled by men. With herself as her model, she altered aspects of the images, using the technique of caricature for humor as well as critique. Sherman subverts the idealization of the Renaissance portraits of women by exaggerating features and eliminating aspects of the original portraits to reassert the women’s individuality.

Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop’s expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically prolific, politically charged, and racially diverse hip-hop “scenes” in the world. This focus on regional specificity provides a greater understanding of the impact hip-hop is having on the ground, as an aspect of localized lived practice. Throughout, I make the case for the importance of ethnographically grounded localized research on U.S. hip-hop, which is surprisingly still relatively rare. Most scholars simply stress its continuity within a set of deterritorialized Diasporic African and African-American verbal-art traditions. My aim is not to contest this assertion, but to add to the body of knowledge about one of the most significant cultural inventions of the twentieth century by exploring hip-hop’s racial heterogeneity and its regional specificity. Acknowledging this kind of diversity allows us to reconceive what hip-hop is and how it matters in U.S. society beyond the ways it is usually framed: as either an oppositional form of black-vernacular culture or a co-opted and corrupted commodity form that reinscribes hegemonic values more than it actually contests them. Examining hip-hop within a specific, regionally delineated community reveals how hip-hop’s role in American life is more nuanced and complex. It is neither a pure vernacular expression of an oppressed class nor merely a cultural commodity imposed upon consumers and alienated from producers. In the Bay Area, hip-hop “heads” simultaneously consume mass-produced rap while producing homespun forms of music, dance, slang, fashion, and folklore. Through these forms, they construct individual and group identities that register primarily in expressive, affective terms. These novel cultural identities complicate rigid social markers of race, gender, and class; more specifically, they challenge the widely held perception that hip-hop is solely the terrain of inner-city young African-American men. More fundamentally, a sense of belonging is engendered through localized modes of expression and embodied style that manifest through shared practices, discourses, texts, symbols, locales, and imaginaries. / text

Those scholars who have overlooked the relevance of Fred Kabotie and the Santa Fe Style he developed have missed an important historical segment of early Native American painting. This dissertation underscores the convergence of diverse intellectual, artistic and cultural backgrounds, especially those of Kabotie and Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, his first art teacher, which led to the formation of the Santa Fe Style in 1918. This style was formative for Dorothy Dunn’s later Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School. This first generation of the Santa Fe Style of watercolor painting was empowered by highly educated men and women, who helped to ensure the national recognition Kabotie’s work received. Among Kabotie’s early supporters were Elizabeth Willis and John DeHuff, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edgar Lee Hewett, Kenneth Chapman, Robert Henri, Maynard Dixon, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, John Louw Nelson and George Gustav Heye. By uncovering the multiple discourses connecting these individuals with Kabotie and his work, this study develops a basis for analyzing the many perspectives this new style synthesized and advanced. This dissertation positions Kabotie and the Santa Fe Style within these and several larger cultural arenas, including Hopi culture, modern art and Santa Fe intellectuals, thus providing a multistoried dimensionality overlooked in earlier scholarship. Through evaluating these individuals who informed and empowered the creation of the Santa Fe Style, while carefully considering Kabotie’s response to them in his work, this dissertation initiates a clearer understanding of early twentieth-century cultural and artistic interactions, both locally and nationally. The Santa Fe Style provided a new direction for American Indian art prior to World War II; it initiated a fresh dialogue between the Hopi people and the Anglo government, and it afforded a complex and ongoing conversation for not just Fred Kabotie and his art, but also, through him, the Hopi people. Moreover, it had a profound effect on the development of Southwest Native American painting over the next fifty years.

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 study constitutes the first critical history of dematerialization. Coined by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay, “The Dematerialization of Art,” this term was initially used to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form. Lippard and Chandler believed dematerialization would thwart the commodification of art. Despite Lippard admitting in 1973 that art had not dematerialized into unmediated information or experience, the term has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. While art historians have debated the implications of dematerialization and its actuality, they have yet to examine closely Lippard and Chandler’s foundational essay, which has been anthologized in truncated form. If dematerialization was not intrinsic to Conceptual Art, what was it? By closely analyzing “The Dematerialization of Art” and Lippard and Chandler’s other overlooked collaborative essays, this dissertation will shed light on the genealogy of dematerialization by contending they were not describing a trend limited to what is now considered Conceptual Art. By investigating the socio-historical connections of dematerialization, this dissertation will advance a more far-reaching view of the ideology of dematerialization, a cultural misrecognition that the world should be propelled toward immateriality that is located at the intersection of particle physics, environmental sustainability, science-fiction, neoliberal politics, and other discourses. This analysis then focuses on three case studies that examine singular works of art over a twenty-year period: Eva Hesse’s Laocoön (1966), James Turrell’s Skyspace I (1974), and Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-85). In doing so, this dissertation will accomplish two objectives. First, it looks at how these works materially respond to the ideology of dematerialization and provide a means for charting how this cultural desire unfolds across space and time. Second, this dissertation contends that contrary to Lippard and Chandler’s prognostication, dematerialization—and immateriality—does not correlate to emancipation from capitalization. Rather, it will be shown that dematerialization, its rhetoric, and its strategies can actually be enlisted into the service of the commoditizing forces Lippard and Chandler hoped it would escape.

This dissertation provides the first in-depth examination of American artist Stuart Davis’s early theoretical writings made between 1918 and 1923. These writings are seminal documents in his artistic development. They lay the foundation for the creation of some of his most important works, inlcuding his groundbreaking Tobacco paintings of 1921 to his renowned Egg Beater series of 1927–1928, which Davis claimed set the direction for all his subsequent artistic output. One of the key ideas in these early writings is Davis’s concept of realism. This study traces the origin of Davis’s realism to his interaction with a network of ideas arising from cubism, symbolism, New York dada, and anarchist philosophy. In doing so, this study considers how Davis’s notion of realism informed both the development of his style and his iconography in his works of the 1920s.

This thesis examines the ways in which Frank Gehry’s architectural contributions to Los Angeles’ social and built environment have shaped the region’s “postmodern geographies” throughout the 20th and 21st century. Through a focused exploration of three of Gehry’s postmodernist structures in Greater Los Angeles—a house, a library, and a concert hall—this thesis analyses how Gehry and his designs reflected and affected the artistic and socio-spatial development of Los Angeles’ “decidedly postmodern landscape.”

A presente análise busca uma interpretação acerca da construção identitária da América Latina a partir do modelo de integração das artes, uma das balizas de fundamentação do movimento da arquitetura moderna. O desenvolvimento dos seis painéis de Carybé e Poty Lazzarotto apoia-se na teoria do antropólogo Darcy Ribeiro para a formação dos povos modernos latino-americanos e compõe o acervo do Salão de Atos Tiradentes do complexo arquitetônico do Memorial da América Latina, projeto de Oscar Niemeyer. O estudo procurou correlacionar arquitetura, arte pública, espaço urbano e identidade, numa metodologia multidisciplinar. A série enfatiza os seguintes temas: Os povos Indígenas ou Pré-colombianos, Os Povos Afros, Os Iberos ou Conquistadores, Os Libertadores, Os Imigrantes e Os Edificadores. A pesquisa oferece uma contribuição no estudo da arte latino-americana. / The present analysis aims to make an interpretation about the construction identity of Latin America as of the model of integration of the arts, one of the stalwarts of the foundation of the movement of modern architecture. The development of the six panels of Carybé and Poty Lazzarotto is based on the theory of the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro for the formation of the modern Latin American people and composes the archives of the Tiradentes Acts Hall of the architectural complex of the Latin American Memorial, an Oscar Niemeyer project. The study aimed to correlate architecture, public art, urban space and identity in a multi-disciplinary methodology. The series emphasizes the following themes: the indigenous or pre-Colombian people, the Afro people, the Iberian or Conquerors, the Liberators, the Immigrants and the Constructors. The research offers a contribution to the study of Latin American art.

Esta pesquisa investiga duas experiências contemporâneas de teatro popular na América Latina: o teatro político desenvolvido pelo grupo Filhos da Mãe... Terra, formado por jovens militantes do MST, moradores do assentamento Carlos Lamarca, em Sarapuí, interior de São Paulo; e o Espantapájaros, coletivo teatral comunitário integrado por jovens que pertencem a Corporação Cultural Nuestra Gente, que atua no bairro de Santa Cruz (e áreas próximas), na periferia da cidade de Medellín, na Colômbia. O objetivo principal deste estudo foi compreender como dois grupos sociais distintos utilizam a linguagem teatral, buscando as aproximações entre o teatro político praticado pelos Sem Terra, com forte influência épica-brechtiana; e o teatro comunitário de cunho mais subjetivo desenvolvido pelos jovens colombianos. Além das similaridades, a investigação pretendeu também buscar as diferenças, com o intuito de promover o diálogo entre dois trabalhos que partem de uma mesma premissa: colocar o teatro a serviço do conhecimento e da transformação social. Neste percurso, foi fundamental o entendimento do contexto sociopolítico em que essas experiências se desenvolveram, já que as realidades de Brasil e Colômbia, em grande medida, forjaram o surgimento de organizações como o MST e o Nuestra Gente. A pesquisa pretende também fornecer sua modesta colaboração para desvelar a falta de conhecimento que assola as experiências artístico-sociais em curso na América Latina. / This research investigates two contemporary experiences of popular theater in the Latin America: the political theater developed by the group Filhos da Mãe... Terra, founded by young militants of MST (Without Land Movement), residents of the camp Carlos Lamarca, in Sarapuí, Sao Paulos countryside; and the Espantapájaros, theatrical community formed by young people who belong to Cultural Corporation Nuestra Gente, which acts in the district of Santa Cruz (and surroundings), in the suburb of the city of Medellín, in Colombia. The main goal of this study was to understand how two different social groups use the theatrical language, looking for the approximations between the political theater practiced by Without Land Movement, with strong influence épica-brechtiana; and the subjective communitarian theater developed by the Colombian young people. Besides the similarities, the investigation intended also to look for the differences, with the intention of promoting the dialog between two works that start from the same premise: to put the theater to service of the knowledge and of the social transformation. In this way, the understanding of the social-political context where these experiences were developed was very important, since the reality of Brazil and Colombia, in a large extent, forged the foundation of organizations like MST and Nuestra Gente. The research intends to supply also a modest collaboration to reveal the lack of knowledge that devastates the social-artistic current experiences in the Latin America.