<p> Lynd Ward, an American Expressionist artist, and &ldquo;father of the graphic novel,&rdquo; helped shape the conventions of contemporary artists&rsquo; books. His legacy has influenced the direction beyond the graphic novel in areas such as the use of Expressionism and printmaking in the artists&rsquo; book, breaking graphic conventions, and using the artists&rsquo; book to convey a socio-political commentary. This paper will explain his influence and legacy by comparing his work to four contemporary artists&rsquo; books. Ward&rsquo;s work, however, has only recently been recognized as a significant influence on graphic novels and has yet to be fully acknowledged as an influence on American artists&rsquo; books.</p>

<p> During the 18th century, the novel was criticized for a lack of representation of reality and in turn a public distrust of fiction was established. The epistolary form addressed these issues by presenting a narrative that was bound by a real-life structure that allowed for the illusion of reality and authenticity. Today, this distrust of fiction is nonexistent but the epistolary form is still present and a frequently used literary device, providing the real-life structure for an escape from reality. However, while commercial fiction has embraced the form and moved past the historical justification of the epistolary novel, most artists&rsquo; books have not. This paper will prove how the artist book has struggled to move past the historical epistolary form and what lessons it can take from the world of contemporary commercial fiction.</p>

The high degree of correlation existing between the subject matter visually depicted on Early Dynastic Egyptian objects and the year-names represented hieroglyphically on the Palermo Stone--an historical annal from the Fifth Dynasty--suggests that much Early Dynastic imagery was meant to serve as a dating device, a kind of pictorial year-name, based on the important event or events that occurred within the year. The selection of the historic events referred to in these year-names appears to be based on their compatibility with certain festivals associated with the king. These festivals express the theoretical model of kingship and therefore can be used to reconstruct the king's primary roles and responsibilities during the Early Dynastic Period. Such duties include the unification, protection and expansion of the king's realm--both Earthly and Cosmic; the insuring of the irrigation and fertility of the land; the foundation and dedication of important buildings and temples; and the reaffirmation and magical rejuvenation of his primeval powers as expressed in such festivals as the Sed.

The early medieval abbey church of Conques, located in a treacherous mountain region of southern France, received few visitors until the relics of the virgin martyr Ste. Foy were brought there. Among her abilities, Ste. Foy was credited with the power to provide protection from capture and to free prisoners. The themes of bondage and liberation are found throughout the church in the sculpture, grillwork and especially in the Liber miraculorum. This paper argues that the repetitive imagery of chains and release from bondage had a twofold function which increased the wealth and power of the monks at Conques. First, the images evoked the power of the Ste. Foy to absolve and release one from the bonds of sin through pilgrimage and donation to this church, and second, the images referred to Ste. Foy's renowned power to provide protection and free prisoners, powers especially attractive to those involved in the Reconquista in Spain.

Anne Graham Rockfellow, virtually unknown to history, deserves a place worthy of scholarly attention. Rockfellow's significance to the histories of American architecture, of Tucson, and of professional women is explored. She was the first woman architect academically trained at M.I.T. (the first recognized school of architecture in the United States). In the mid-1890s she made her first move to Tucson, Arizona, a growing southwestern town that already had a long history. When Rockfellow permanently relocated to Tucson in 1915, she was hired by the H. O. Jaastad architectural firm, where she remained until her retirement in 1938. In order to put Rockfellow in a historical context, her biography is juxtaposed with the biographies of some of her female contemporaries who also chose to pursue careers in the field of architecture. Her contributions to the architecture of Tucson and to the development of the Spanish Colonial Revival style are also examined.

The purpose of this research was to explore concepts and perceptions in the area of visual resource management via geographic information systems. A scenic assessment of Interstate 17 was conducted, then a digital database was built for a subset of the study area. Theoretical frameworks were explored and expanded. Review of the current literature resulted in a methodologically alternate conceptual model which utilized spatial analysis. After checking for issues of validity and accuracy, data visualization products were developed which aided in understanding the procedures and results. The results showed that given the readily available data an automated scenic assessment was not currently feasible.

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<p> <i>Community Life</i> by Michi Tanaka was one of eight government commissioned murals created by students at Rohwer Relocation Center in 1944 illustrating the Japanese American evacuation and relocation. The final versions of these works no longer exist. The preparatory drafts, however, remain intact and provide valuable information regarding the artists' experiences at Rohwer. Through an iconographic analysis of Tanaka's mural draft and an exploration of themes and principal elements in her life at camp such as religion, fashion and socialization, this thesis suggests that <i>Community Life</i> illustrates a cultural synthesis between two disparate cultures. This synthesis influenced the development of a bicultural identity, specifically among <i> Nisei</i> (or the American-born children of Japanese immigrants) such as Tanaka. The mural can be viewed as an introspective consideration of Tanaka's incarceration in which the cultural conflict of her Japanese heritage and American citizenry seems to have been resolved artistically.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the art and material culture of the Anglo-American cotton trade in the nineteenth century to consider how these transnational processes influenced different modes of production: artistic, industrial and textile. The Anglo-American cotton trade's importance in the nineteenth century rested on the Atlantic slave trade and its aftereffects. Therefore this study foregrounds the centrality of African American history and culture to the trade's structures of exchange, encounter and transmission as they inflected nineteenth-century British and American artistic production and industrial expansion. In four chapters beginning in 1840 and ending at the beginning of the twentieth century, I juxtapose the work of contemporary artists with historical case studies. I argue that these contemporary artists &ndash; Leonardo Drew, Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare &ndash; offer new interpretive frameworks for approaching the transactional and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century British, American and African American art and material culture.</p><p> Chapter one focuses on the relationship between plantations in the American South and New England, using prints, paintings and textiles that reveal the plantation and factory to be connected landscape. I trace how cotton's movement shaped constructions around place, and materialized connections between communities of labor in antebellum America. Chapter two opens with Lubaina Himid's <i> Cotton.com</i> (2002) and expands the historical relationship of plantation and factory out across the Atlantic. Centralizing Eyre Crowe's <i>Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia</i> (1861) and the export of printed cotton from Manchester, it examines the convergence of the trade in cotton with the trade in slaves. It considers how these market relations shaped the commodification of the enslaved body, British experiences of factory labor, and Manchester production of printed cloth for consumers across the globe. Chapter three begins with Leonardo Drew's <i>Number 25</i> to consider the tensions between materiality and abstraction in the production and commodification of cotton and art objects. I then examine paintings by Edgar Degas, <i> A Cotton Office in New Orleans</i> (1873), and Winslow Homer, <i> The Cotton Pickers</i>, (1876) to explore how these artists negotiated the status of cotton as a global commodity and grappled with the changing networks, of labor, production and commerce in postbellum America. Eyre Crowe's painting of factory workers in Lancashire, <i>The Dinner Hour, Wigan </i> (1874) concludes this section, which examines how the international market for cotton was influencing the representation and experience of industry in north west England. My final chapter, commencing with an installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE <i>Scramble for Africa</i> (2003), focuses on the commercial logic and visual rhetoric of three Southern international exhibitions. I examine how these exhibitions constructed the South &ndash; through visions of cotton plantations and black cotton pickers &ndash; as a space for domestic colonial expansion. Alongside this I look at the ways Africa was being constructed as a new cotton market &ndash; both as a site of cultivation and a site of consumption. In both sections I underscore how the language of commerce, colonialism and cotton shaped particular constructions of space and meanings around the African, and African American body. I conclude with the work of Meta Warrick Fuller to briefly examine how black Americans dismantled these tropes of exclusion, signified by cotton, to project claims for equality.</p><p> The project argues that the art works under examination here draw on an economic language to visualize particular ideas and constructions around labor, production and race in three ways. It traces the contours of a market-driven aesthetic in the ways cotton was used to illustrate or materialize connections to a circulating economy of goods. It describes how cotton's movement shaped the construction of imagined geographies around sites of labor and spaces of consumption. And it sketches out the speculative vision that emerged throughout the nineteenth century in the material and metaphorical associations of cotton, commerce and African American identity. In revealing the representational possibilities of cotton in this way, this dissertation looks at understudied objects to consider the nuanced ways that local cultural forms have, historically, intersected with global processes in the Atlantic world. It centralizes the experience of African Americans, within an Anglo-American culture of exchange and its relationship to a global network of trade and transmission. In doing so it seeks to reframe the ways we might approach historical processes of visuality and perception in the long nineteenth century in order to create a more global, or at least transnational, perspective on the art of this period. </p>