African objects first appeared in Western collections in "cabinets of curiosities" in the sixteenth century. Following their "discovery" by modem European artists in the early twentieth century, African artifacts began their journey from ethnographic museums to major art museums. My study will explore the dramatic shift of Western attitudes towards African art through a critical overview and summary of selected scholarship on the subject and related exhibition catalogues. My thesis will show that the controversy generated by "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, helped forge a new direction in the display of African art based on agreement that greater emphasis must be placed on the diversity of African cultural traditions in addition to Western aesthetics. Exhibitions and related critical scholarship of the last century have shown that African art can be appreciated both for its inherent aesthetic qualities and as a part of the culture from which it arose. This thesis will also connect a contemporary exhibition of African art in a Florida museum with international developments in the field. My study will further emphasize that future exhibitions of African art should recognize African contributions to world cultural traditions.

I am interested in the ways that one remembers, what triggers the retrieval of a memory and the associations made throughout that process. Using photography, I explore my personal memory and the connections that are made with certain objects. By constructing environments specific to each object, I attempt to create a narrative of the life and significance of them. Using a dollhouse as a stage, a dialogue is created between the objects and the place in which they reside. The images heighten the relevance a home and the longing for a consistent environment have played throughout my life.

The term modern is associated with the twentieth century, especially in the first fifty years. However, by the century's close a rise is seen in the term postmodern which, like modern, is also used to describe the overall social condition. There are many factors that contribute to the character of an epoch. The factors that shape this character begin with, but are not limited to, our cultural concept of time and how we respond to it. The characteristics that are associated with an epoch can be found in complex arrangements within a chronology, sometimes clustered, sometimes isolated, often with varying points of origin. These complex patterns can be as random and misleading as they are organized and defining. Using a cross-disciplinary approach this thesis will provide an analysis of characteristics of modernism and postmodernism as they are manifest in areas such as art, science, and politics. It will also locate points in time where the concentration of markers suggests that modernism is dwindling and the postmodern paradigm is taking hold. While some critics have advocated that single moments in time mark the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, a series of events or moments in time may actually be more practical for the study of epochal convergence. The time period that may be most accurate in marking that shift is 1968-1973 when the frequency of postmodern markers increases to the point that they can no longer be considered incidental.

Since the beginning of time, men have dominated the creation, theorization, and evaluation of art. And though women have also been creating art throughout the centuries, they have typically been relegated to the realm of decorative and applied arts, and therefore their work has largely been ignored and overlooked. It is true that women would occasionally be successful at breaking into the male-dominated art world and achieving some measure of recognition and even fame, but these success stories are few and far between. Fortunately, this begins to change in the twentieth century; women finally have a slightly better chance at eking out a name for themselves and making a substantial contribution to the art world. But the gender-related obstacles female artists faced were compounded when they were married to male artists. It is only natural that two artists involved in a day-to-day relationship have mutual influence on one another's artistic ideologies and styles, but the female is often accused of copying her husband and producing a pale imitation of his work. The marriage between Abstract Expressionist painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock serves as a prime example of this additional discrimination. Ignoring the volumes of gossip and myth that surround the highly publicized marriage of Krasner and Pollock, and instead focusing solely on their development as artists and the work that they produced, I sought to discover for myself whether Krasner deserved her reputation as a second-rate artist. After careful research and analysis I determined that neither artist was superior, but rather each was vitally important to the development, success, and impact that Abstract Expressionism had on the rest of the art world.

Hildegard von Bingen was a nun in the twelfth century who, despite extraordinarily severe circumstances, grew to be one of the most influential and respected people that we still know today. At the age of eight, she was dedicated, by her parents, to a monastery where she became an 'anchoress,' or person consigned to one of the harshest forms of religious purification. She lived in a small, isolated cell, void of human interaction, save for another anchoress who was her tutor. Hildegard remained imprisoned in this state until she was about fifteen or sixteen years of age. Hildegard wrote in her autobiography that she was extremely frail in health and that she experienced spiritual visions from about the age of three. Today these visions are medically recognized to have been migraine headaches. I agree with this, but I also think that Hildegard, in addition to the migraines, had a compulsive condition known as Hypergraphia, which fiercely influenced her character and motivation. Although the migraines may have been pre-existent at the time of her dedication into the monastery, I believe that the Hypergraphia stemmed from her experiences there. This study will examine Hildegard' s life during and after her confinement and the repercussions, such as the evolving migraine auras and Hypergraphia. The migraine auras are found symbolically within the imagery of her illuminated manuscripts. I have compared the characteristics of migraine auras with the imagery found in Hildegard' s illuminations. I have also examined the similarities between Hildegard's philosophy and her high amount of productivity with characteristics of Hypergraphia.

For the purposes of this thesis, an operational definition of totem is explored to reflect totem structures in the traditional sense, as compared to totem sculpture as portrayed in the television show Northern Exposure. Totem: A totem is a memorial, identifying, or ceremonial sculpture made of any materials, in any shape, and of any size. It may be commissioned by someone and made by an artist or the artist could create it for him/herself. It is introduced into the community with ceremony that gives it power and life. This power could be supplied by a formal or informal dedication in a spiritual sense or by turning on a switch in a literal sense. Based on this definition four artworks are compared and contrasted in the television series Northern Exposure and various types of Northwest Coast Native American totem poles. I chose the Northwest Coast Native American totem poles for the comparison and contrast because Northern Exposure is set and filmed in the Northwest Coast region. In order to make these relationships with Northern Exposure, I researched the totem poles of the Northwest Coast Native Americans. The following groups are emphasized because of.their contribution to totem poles carving: Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Coast Salish. Each group has a different style of carving totem poles as well as creating different types of poles for varying purposes. The ritual of the potlatch, or give-away, where the totems are introduced and unveiled, is also described as are the totem poles and totem pole carvers today. This brings the Northwest Coast totem art to the same time period as Northern Exposure. Northern Exposure is a Universal Studios television series shown on CBS from 1990-1995. Many artworks are created on the show by different characters. Four artworks, considered totems by my definition, are compared and contrasted with. traditional totem poles of the Northwest Coast. This evaluation is made after the plot, characters, and each of the episodes containing the artworks were summarized. The examples of totemic artwork in Northern Exposure are as varied as the purposes of the Northwest Coast Native American totem poles. In many ways, the totemic sculpture of Northern Exposure is like the traditional totem poles of the Northwest Coast. The purposes for the sculptures are inherently similar. The differences lie in the appearance of the sculpture and the degree of elaboration and presentation in the pot latches or dedication ceremonies for the sculptures. The totem art, in both cases, celebrates individuals, connects families, tells stories, records histories, and communicates ideas. The unifying trait between the totem poles of the Northwest Coast, traditional and contemporary, and the totem sculptures in Northern Exposure is the apparent need for people to create art that identifies, memorializes, or commemorates people, events, concepts, and achievements.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide insight, from an art historical perspective, into the complexity of Pre-Columbian beliefs and aesthetics by discussing the masking traditions of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec. This thesis also explores the iconography of ancient masking among the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations. A focus will be on the shamanism associated with the masking traditions.

Assembled together are the recent people of my life, a body of portraits that is, in the phrase of Alice Neel, "a collection of souls." This thesis serves to contextualize the work, as well as reflect the process by which it was made, as both an explanation of the portraits it contains and a portrait of myself as the artist who made them. The work is considered from the same viewpoints that humans are: as minds, bodies, and souls, and works to communicate the theme of empathy between humans through the act of painting on each of these levels. Contemporary portraiture as a process for the cultivation of empathy is indebted most notably to the accomplishments of Alice Neel, and now enters a realm of interdisciplinary discourse. As such, my pictures may be "read" as performance, as therapy, as propaganda, and as narratives in or outside of the context of Art History. Further, my work rejects the "male gaze" and suggests a new kind of looking - gayze - which is an act of identification with and eroticization of the bodies I paint. Gayze is a reciprocal exchange of power, vulnerability, and permission to look, in which men paint men as both desirous and desiring. Finally, the paintings are ritualistic, meditative pictures that reinforce the commonly held spiritual idea of connectedness and sameness between all things, echoed in the profoundly creative process of painting.

Portraits of my family and friends in their bedrooms and personal spaces investigate the way we construct our identities in the context of family and community and give physical form to my understanding of these abstract sets of relationships. Such images examine the relationships that constitute a family, suggesting coherence among those photographed. The domestic landscape is an ideal site for autobiographical reflection and can reveal intimate details about those photographed. Color, furniture, and personal objects are symbolic suggestions of a relationship between the individual and their personal space. My portraits capture expressions that concurrently disclose and question characteristics of the human condition. In the context of the series, the photographs closely relate to self-portraiture. Subtle expressions of anxiety or self-consciousness allow for empathetic exchanges between the individuals photographed and the viewer. An emotional experience is revealed. The images communicate varying degrees of intimacy alongside levels of detachment and vulnerability.

In short, I would argue that our notion of the artist's book came about not through a singular definitive change in the practical mode with which an artist might choose to express himself, as for instance in the familiar Marxist model of greater distribution and economy of the art object through mass-production, but rather in a fundamental and decisive change in the consciousness of both author and reader as a concrete corollary of many different factors. Thus the difficulty of defining precisely what sort of classification one should impose or how to exclude, include or segregate into category the many different tribes of book that might satisfy a particular brief is essentially brushed aside. The familiar skirmishes between the modernist protagonists of mass-production and the paladins of craft over content are immaterial; it is the reader who, just as much (if not more) than the artist/author, establishes the conditions with which the book will become meaningful. "Tropes" by Paul Claydon In PutAbout: a Critical Anthology of Independent Publishing (Maria Fusco and Ian Hunt eds. ) London: Bookworks, 2004. p124. The Everyday Press began its life as a proposal for a Fine Art Practice-based Doctoral Research at the University of Kingston. This research practically questions how publishing artists' books can be considered an art practice in and of itself, it articulates a series of problematic associated with the position of the artist as publisher and the effective conditions of reception of the said books within the field of Artists Books. The Everyday Press is a publisher of artists' books. This means that the practical, actual, critical and historical commitments of The Everyday Press to artists' books are its project. How this is arguably achieved is documented in part by this thesis and made evident by the publications themselves. The present thesis contains all the publications of The Everyday Press to date as well as four contextual volumes that approach the work of The Everyday Press from different perspectives. Through a process of mise en abyme each volume includes one another in a condensed, reflected form. In this four volumes thesis I will specify my use of mise en abyme as a self-reflexive structure and a working model for the research. Together the thesis forms an expose of The Everyday Press as a work in itself. The contextual volumes are organised as follows: Volume One proposes an outline of the field and defines an area of knowledge and professional experience of the publisher. This is done in order to first expose on the one hand the conventional relationship of the press to the field and on the other its attempt at expanding the category through practical publishing. This first volume sets The Everyday Press in a critical and historical moment informed by precedents. Volume Two endeavours to describe the publications, their context of production and content. It constitutes a catalogue of the publications to date and problematises the intentions of the publisher against the actual publications and their possible reception as artists' books. The writing here should at times be understood as a parody of some authoritative interpretive modes related to artists books, particularly those seeking affiliation and original contributions. Those intentions are as laden with problematic a priori conceptions, unshakable because they are always already present to the interpretive paradigm that bypasses the reader and his ability to make his mind up for himself. Volume Three marks the traces of the passage of a few artists' books through time and space and produces an account of the field through revealing anecdotes and encounters. This account of the field is also where some of the networks of dissemination of the books are exposed as productive sites and encounters rather than as neutral vehicles for distribution. The books are released through distributive networks, bookshops, museums and the Internet. The research documents and interrogates how such networks may have been formed in the past and how the channels of distribution constitute an essential part of the Field of Artists Books. Volume Four is a bibliography of books and catalogues on artists' books. The bibliography takes stock of a wide variety of publications on artists' books to draw attention to the kind of documentary trace of distribution, circulation and reception they represent That overlooked history of the practice of exhibiting, publishing, disseminating and collecting artist's books during the last forty years is primarily focused on bibliographic data where the main criteria is bibliographical information rather than critical writing or texts on artists' books. My research gathered and compiled these documents in order to provide an aspect of the field often ignored. In its final form it aims to be a source book of exhibition catalogues, collection catalogues, monographs, dealership catalogues and other lists published to inform, promote, describe, show, distribute and circulate artists' books. A series of exhibition of that material and the works of The Everyday Press further the work of public dissemination of the present research. Although this is not stated repeatedly in the thesis, the material presence of The Everyday Press publications should be assumed throughout. The reader can take for granted that books were exchanged, gifted and pushed on anyone remotely interested in the subject of artists' books I came in contact with in the course of the research. My long-standing experience as an art book dealer provided the background knowledge and direct connections to doing the work of production, distribution and research necessary for the PhD. That background no doubt played a role in wanting to produce new books with other artists, possibly wanting to make the kind of books I didn't see because they didn't exist. While all the people contacted for the purpose of this enquiry were aware of my being an artist undertaking a work of research related to artists' books also consisting in a publisher, they welcomed my questions and the books I came with as a genuine publishing project. Explaining what I was doing was not always easy and The Everyday Press publications were also a calling card for me to contact artists, publishers, dealers, editors etc. Paradoxically it is the work of research itself (for example interviewing a publisher or an librarian, or looking for reference books in a dealer's basement) that represents a practical insertion of The Everyday Press into the field (where publishers compare notes, the librarian gladly accepts a new free book and dealers sometimes share some knowledge). As we will see in the thesis, the category of artists' books is full of those contradictions and paradoxes: to begin with artists' books are viewed and received as Art but released as books.