abstract: This thesis discusses the significance of the casta naming process depicted in pinturas de casta or casta paintings created in eighteenth-century colonial New Spain. These paintings depicted family units, each member named by a racial label designated by the sistema de castas, the Imperial Spanish code of law associated with these paintings. In the genre, the labeled subjects were hierarchically ordered by racial lineage with pure Spanish genealogies ranked highest and all other racial categories following on a sliding scale of racial subjectivity. This study focuses on casta paintings' label coyote, which referred to colonial subjects of mestizo and indigenous heritage. Policies of the casta system, when matched with casta paintings' animal label created a framing of indigenous colonial subjectivity; those labeled coyote were visually positioned as one of the lowest members of the casta and of questionable quality as humans, given their comparison to wild canines. Beyond the general discussion of racial hegemony at work in these paintings this thesis exploration individually questions the meaning of the casta label coyote by analyzing how the colonial namer and the named colonial subject related to this word and title. Deep-seated beliefs about the undomesticated canine were at work in the imaginations of both the Imperial Spanish namer and the named colonial subject, evidenced in European/Spanish renderings of wolves and indigenous art depicting coyotes in Mesoamerica. To uncover the imaginations that informed the creation and reception of the coyote label this study examines the visual development of wolf as a symbol of wildness, evil, and racial impurity used to hail the human Other in both peninsular and New Spanish colonial arts. Additionally, images of coyotes will be considered from the position of the colonial named, vis à vis indigenous arts and beliefs that coyote acted as a sacred symbol of power through centuries of human development in the Mesoamerican world. Varied understandings of coyote were at work in the New Spanish colony, evidenced in eighteenth-century paintings of mestizo artist Miguel Cabrera. Analysis of his paintings of the La Divina Pastora and of his casta painting De mestizo y india nace coyote reveal the instability of coyote as symbol and human label amid the mestizaje mechanisms of New Spain. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2014

<p> This research examines the role of the Moroccan rulers, the political administration, and the Moroccan people in shaping Moroccan cities, mainly Fez, during the nineteenth century. It studies the role of trade and the interaction of Moroccan merchants with France and England between 1830 and 1912. In this study, I offer an analysis of a group of factors that influenced the development of Fez. More specifically, I analyze the impacts of war, drought, famine, epidemics, and unrest, which culminated in a massive migration from rural regions to urban cities, Fez in particular. The death and hardship of the era resulted in social and urban changes that made Fez the center of thriving trade and building projects.</p><p> These dynamics of change and socioeconomic factors reshaped the built environment of Fez. Accordingly, this dissertation examines several social and economic layers of urban change in Fez. This study challenges the notion that cities in Morocco represented a backward culture and stagnant past. It also articulates that the importance of Morocco comes not only from its relations with Europe, but also from its own political, social, and economic ideals. </p><p> As trade flourished during this period, Fez rose to be an important stage for wealth and urban change. It played an essential role in the economy and political balance of Europe. As a result, a new class of powerful and wealthy merchants, Muslims and Jews, formed the new political elites of Fez. These merchants influenced the socio-economic and built environments of Fez and Morocco at large. In addition, the interaction of the wealthy merchants with Europe increased their wealth and political presence, which impacted Morocco and facilitated the presence of European powers in the country. As a result of this transformation, a struggle for power heightened and the gap between the wealthy and the poor widened. These consequences transformed the built environment of Fez; the wealthy built palatial residences and the poor struggled to survive in cramped spaces. </p><p> This study posits that the slow and cautious progress of Morocco suggests the good intentions of the rulers to promote progress and development in a variety of domestic sectors. In addition, the increased wealth from trade and investment in properties and the continuous building and renovation activities reveals that Morocco was a land of change, and Fez was a vibrant, productive urban center during the nineteenth century. Fez&rsquo;s production at the time is characterized by increased wealth from trade, land development, investment, and renovation.</p><p>

<p> American composer Jake Heggie wrote <i>Camille Claudel: Into the Fire</i> in 2012 for the Alexander String Quartet and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. As Heggie is known for his operas <i>Dead Man Walking, Moby-Dick,</i> and most recently, <i>Great Scott,</i> it is not surprising that his seven-song cycle about this passionate female French sculptor is of operatic dramaturgical and musical quality. Due to the complexities and bias that surround Claudel&rsquo;s life story, and the relative novelty of Heggie&rsquo;s music within the art song genre, there is a lack of literature regarding the presentation of an authentic performance of this cycle. This project report concentrates on providing the singer with an interpretive framework based on how Heggie&rsquo;s musical influences and tendencies, along with Gene Scheer&rsquo;s historical, first person narrative, reflect Claudel&rsquo;s life, work, and fiery personality. Through a deeper understanding of Heggie&rsquo;s music in correspondence with Scheer&rsquo;s poetry, a singer can effectively embody the unparalleled passion, artistry, and voice of Camille Claudel.</p>

This dissertation examines the intersection of art, dance, and queer sociality though Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and their lesser-known contemporary, Fred Herko, a dancer and choreographer. Traversing art history, dance studies, and queer theory, this study uses analyses of movement, gestures, and embodiment as a bridge between the artistic and the social. In film, photography, and dance, these artists not only made art as queer artists, but their work stemmed from the form of sociality of their communities—the social and creative labor spent on seemingly unproductive ends, such as lounging together on a sofa, posing in performative-social studio sessions, or dancing in an improvised performance-party. Gestures and embodied experience became both the site of the art, and the site of the production of queer subjectivity in this watershed decade for art and queer histories. To unpack their cultural significance, I draw on the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss on “techniques of the body,” and recent scholarship on embodiment and subjectivity. I propose queer gestures as dances of “inefficiency” in the Maussian sense, that is, as techniques of the body that do not confirm or sustain the social scripts of somatic norms. Given the contemporaneous debates about work, leisure, and alienation in the 1960s, inefficient techniques—as represented in the recurrent motif of the recumbent, languorous male body, for example—can also be read as a critique of industrial efficiency and heteronormative definitions of (re)productivity. Through this focus on bodily techniques, I open up a dialogue between this “underground” body of work with contemporaneous artistic milieus in which the body played an important role, including in 1960s sculpture, proto-feminist practices, postmodern dance, photography, and experimental theater. Throughout I also foreground the intertwinement of dance culture and queer culture. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this study interprets artistic practices through a reparative lens, drawing together a queer repertoire made up of inefficient moves—just as the artists’ engagements with, and making of, dance culture and queer culture were reparative: an accretive practice of assemblage for imaginative and embodied sustenance. / History of Art and Architecture

Abstract not available.

Taking as a guiding thread the idea of absence or emptiness as a constitutive trait of all images, this dissertation reviews how this idea has been defended or ignored throughout diverse iconoclast moments in Western Christian civilization, focusing on the possible consequences that the basculating movement of acceptance-rejection of the image's emptiness might have for contemporary approaches to the image. The iconoclast debate from the eighth century, and the works of Freud and Lacan will be used as paradigmatic moments to penetrate into the difficult relationship man has had with images and the imaginary throughout an extended period of Western Christian history.

In the northeastern United States--as elsewhere--an overemphasis on cultural-historical ceramic typologies and ceramic decoration by archaeologists has stymied research along other axes of ceramic variation. For example, little attention has been paid to the sequence of choices made by potters during the production process. The goal of this study is to examine the complex relationships among technical choices, historical context, and society during the Late Woodland period (1000-1600 A.D.) in the middle or Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut Valley. Ceramic assemblages from two New England Algonquian sites and one Mohawk Iroquois site are examined using an attribute analysis of technical choice. The attributes selected for analysis reflect choices made by potters along the production sequence: paste characteristics, vessel morphology, construction techniques, surface treatments, and firing conditions. Differences between Algonquian and Iroquoian ceramic attributes are interpreted as embodiments of profound differences in technical systems, which include intended function, the context and scale of production, and stylistic signaling. Since the two groups were interacting and sharing information during the Late Woodland period, Connecticut Valley Algonquians had access to similar kinds of cultural knowledge and technologies. Nevertheless, rather than becoming sedentary farmers, forming extensive and rigid social structures, and producing large, thin-walled, cooking pots like the Iroquois, Connecticut Valley peoples maintained fluid and mutable subsistence, settlement, and social relationships that are reflected in the their diverse and flexible ceramic traditions. Instead of assuming that New England Algonquians were not as culturally or technologically advanced as the Iroquois, I suggest that they can be understood as active agents of their own social change. As such, they made decisions concerning subsistence, settlement, and social structure. As potters, they made choices in ceramic production that both reflected and affected these decisions.

Scholars have hailed David Cox (1783-1859) as one of the pillars of English landscape painting of the early nineteenth century, together with John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Working primarily in watercolor, Cox celebrated the English landscape in naturalistic pictures that exhibited both a reliance on and a radical departure from the earlier topographical tradition. This dissertation contextualizes and brings into sharper focus the means by which Cox’s naturalism was primarily achieved, through a roughness of brushwork and a mastery of color. He perfected a style that was based on both the topographical and the picturesque traditions while going beyond their theoretical strictures to incorporate the effects of atmosphere, wind, and light. The resulting body of work privileges both an accurate depiction of actual places and of these transient “effects,” as Cox described them. This study argues that Cox’s naturalism was informed by two aspects of his life that have largely been overlooked in the literature: his experience as a theatrical scene painter and his deep and reverent religious faith. The dissertation engages in an analysis of historical, cultural, and biographical circumstances that explains how Cox negotiated a hybrid place between the theoretical debates over ideal landscape versus picturesque landscape painting. Drawing from primary sources, it posits Cox’s compositions as derivative of elements of both schools, refined by copying Old and Contemporary Masters, yet pursuing independent choices in depicting nature truthfully and without the manipulations of antecedent schools and models. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 13, 2018. / Book of Nature, David Cox, English landscape, naturalism in landscape, theatrical scene painting, watercolour / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Neuman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Eric Walker, University Representative; Jack Freiberg, Committee Member; Adam Jolles, Committee Member.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's a series of art censorship cases occurred in the United States. Seemingly out-of-keeping with American culture and policy, these episodes beg much explanation. Censors generally cite obscenity or blasphemy as reasons for the silencing of artists and their work. Beneath these publicly noted justifications exists an alternative explanation; as marginalized populations within American culture gained some degree of power over the last 40 years, the traditionally powerful fought back to maintain their own positions and privileges. I argue that art censorship is a symbolic battle in which the center identifies artists and their work as enemies of the culture, and social problems from which American society needs protection. The data for these assertions is based on case studies and content analysis of recent cases of art censorship. The fields of sociology and cultural studies provide the necessary theoretical framework.

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