Developmental dyslexia is a learning disability caused by neurological differences in language processing, affecting approximately 5-10% of the U.S. population’s ability to speak, read and write. Difficulties with literacy within this culture have social and emotional implications that can influence a sense of otherness. Artmaking is a significant form of expression for students with dyslexia during early education, and influences emotional and social development, such as identity formation. There are findings indicating that the development of an artistic identity during adolescence has implications for the continued cognitive, emotional, and social growth during higher education. This multiple-case study examines the educational experiences and artistic practices of three visual art graduate students with dyslexia. Patterns of cognitive and instructional experiences are considered, such as dyslexic characteristics, learning strategies, special assistance, educational environments, subject interests, and artistic identity formation. Emotional and social experiences that contribute to psychosocial development during education are discussed, such as the students’ experience realizing their difference from peers, the sense of social otherness, being misunderstood by educators, labeling, harassment, exclusion, and stigmatization. Coping strategies, such as artmaking, are discussed, along with the importance of the sense of social belonging during education. Participants’ artistic development is considered in terms of the significance of being an exceptional artist, the arts as an emotional outlet, and their orientation towards figuration during high school and college. In college, participants’ artistic development is compared to post-formal patterns of development, such as dualism, multiplicity, relativity, multiple conflicting commitments, and social awareness. Findings show the significance of the visual arts during identity formation and social development, and of participants’ ability during college to continue progressing towards their potentials. Implications for ideal educational environments, the full immersion of the visual arts into all classroom subjects, and significance of the arts for self-actualization for dyslexic students are discussed.

Both artists and business executives state the importance of intuition in their professional practice. Current research suggests that intuition plays a significant role in cognition, decision-making, and creativity. Intuitive perception is beneficial to management, entrepreneurship, learning, medical diagnosis, healing, spiritual growth, and overall well-being, and is furthermore, more accurate than deliberative thought under complex conditions. Accordingly, acquiring intuitive faculties seems indispensable amid present day’s fast-paced multifaceted society and growing complexity. Today, there is an overall rising interest in intuition and an existing pool of research on intuition in management, but interestingly an absence of research on intuition in the field of art. This qualitative-phenomenological study explores the experience of intuition in both professional practices in order to show comparability and extend the base of intuition, while at the same time revealing what is unique about its emergence in art practice. Data gathered from semi-structured interviews and online-journals provided the participants’ experience of intuition and are presented through individual portraits, including an introduction to their work, their worldview, and the experiences of intuition in their lives and professional practice. Framing outcomes through concepts of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, theology, noetic sciences, quantum physics, metaphysics, and art theory, resulted in the emergence of five themes that offered perspectives on the purpose of intuition, optimum conditions for intuiting, spiritual aspects of intuition, conduits for intuitive knowledge, and suggested connections between art and intuition. The findings of the study suggest that the artists experienced heightened levels of intuition that the business executives did not. Data indicate that experiences of intuition are enhanced through methods of quieting the mind, which can be found in Eastern practices and that show similarities to processes in art practice, such as transcendence, focus, non-attachment, visualization, a body-mind-spirit connection, and intention. The findings suggest that distinct qualities of art practice allow for alternative knowledge-making methods that can create preferable conditions for intuition to flourish in art education, such as generating inclusive dialog, increasing self-awareness, processing emotions, developing focus, refining the senses, and fostering ethicality, all of which may awaken and strengthen abilities of intuition.

This dissertation was conceived as an addendum to two self-published catalogs that American artist Chris Burden released, covering the years 1971–1977. It looks in-depth at the formative work the artist produced in college and graduate school, including minimalist sculpture, interactive environments, and performance art. Burden’s work is herewith examined in four chapters, each of which treats one or more related works, dividing the artist’s early career into developmental stages. In light of a wealth of new information about Burden and the atmosphere in which he was working in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this dissertation examines the artist’s work in relation to West Coast Minimalism, the Light and Space Movement, Environments, and Institutional Critique, above and beyond his well-known contribution to performance art, which is also covered herein. The dissertation also analyzes the social contexts in which Burden worked as having informed his practice, from the beaches of Southern California, to rock festivals and student protest on campus, and eventually out to the countercultural communes. The studies contained in the individual chapters demonstrate that close readings of Burden’s work can open up to formal and art-historical trends, as well as social issues that can deepen our understanding of these and later works. Benefitting from access to the artist’s estate, as well as archives collected at various institutions in Southern California, this dissertation is the first authoritative coverage of Chris Burden’s early career.

This study is about play. It is about some of the forms of play you may have engaged in as a kid and are now integrated in the art practices of three artists, Núria Güell, Jordi Canudas and Nicolás Dumit-Estévez. Their practices defy the traditional conceptions of both art and play as ends in themselves. This study is contextualized as phenomenological research that aims at understanding what role play can assume in socially engaged art practices, and in what ways it provides a dynamic filter or trajectory for carrying each work forward. It is centered on the experiences of three artists who have developed practices that are participatory, presented in public spaces, open to diverse audiences, and whose design seeks at questioning, transforming or experimenting with new forms of sociability. The study presents the artists’ narratives through interviews and intertwined with the researcher’s experience with the data and documentation, acting as a site for shared meaning making. The findings of the study suggest that essential to play is movement, and that play’s integration in socially engaged art practices opens up transitional or permeable spaces in which previously discrete identities become border crossings opening to the potential emergence of new ideas about self and society

An integration of the researcher’s own experience as a creative professional with that of other artists suggested that there are occasions in a creative practice that are experienced as pivotal, moments when something opens up and an apparent change takes place. Looking beyond art practice, researchers such as Land et al. (2010), Mezirow (1997), and Cranton (2016) have addressed the concept and importance of transformational learning in adults, leading toward a significant shift in the perception of a subject. In order to understand the moments that trigger pivotal experiences for artists, two qualitative studies took place: a pilot study (Alarcón, 2012) and the present study, which includes the narrative accounts of three women painters residing in Tacoma, United States; Paris, France; and Cape Town, South Africa. The research question assumes that artists experience Pivotal Moments in the ongoing development of their work and asks what the narrative accounts of three artists reveal about: (a) the moments that trigger their experiences of creative change or transformation; (b) the nature of these pivotal moments; and (c) how the moments coalesce within the dynamics of the creative act itself. Analysis of the interview data suggests that moments of change are revealed in terms of a set of four Pivots or turning points. In Chapter V, the Pivots are examined as they emerged within the artists as a group, then explored as experienced by each artist individually. The nature of these moments of change is revealed through preparation, location, process, and disruption, and a set of Sub-Pivots housed under each of the main ones. The thematic analysis in Chapter V also revealed the characteristics of these pivotal moments as ritualistic, interconnected, and dynamic. It was also unveiled that they express an inherent dynamic in the ability to turn things around in a creative practice such as painting. Pivotal Moments coalesce within the dynamics of the creative act through the ongoing development of the artist’s work. Finally, this study reveals multiple perspectives on content and suggestions on how we can support the richness of Pivotal Moments as related to Art Education.

The requirement for a written element in the B.A (Hons) Arts degree has been in place since the Coldstream Report of 1960. Since that time, there have been discussions, scholarly articles and further government committees addressing the way that this component is delivered by universities and colleges. These discussions centre on the content, the assessment of the content and its relationship to students' own practice. There are many divergent views about how the subject, variously called contextual, critical or complementary studies, should be presented by the students in a way that has academic rigour and enhances studio practice. However, I have identified a gap in that literature: there also is a rich history of artists and, more recently, designers writing about their own and others' practice. I sought to establish whether or not the writing of established practitioners could be useful in improving students' own efforts and encouraging a synthesis between the written work in their final year journals, (an alternative to the traditional dissertation) and their studio practice. The methodology that seemed most appropriate was an instrumental case study, with data from interviews (transcriptions), text analysis and analytic induction of the writings by established practitioners and the students' writings about their own work and the work of others. Experience and by now conventional practice suggests that all students refer to the work of established practitioners, not always from their own chosen discipline. Although the students are not necessarily asked to research and write about other established practitioners, inevitably they will do so to engage with, identify and contextualise theory and history. There was a general lack of understanding about the complexities of the intended learning outcomes and, importantly, the sub-assessment criteria that was realised to be more difficult to explain and understand than the more traditional, essay method of the dissertation. This difficulty was mainly owing to the students' lack of experience in critical thinking and poor research skills when writing about their own work. The task for third year students was burdensome for some, but easier for those students who had critical studies embedded in their studio practice. In only one discipline were the tutors optimistic about the abilities of their students to understand the criteria and therefore likely to be successful in the assessment of the journal. This finding was mirrored in their students' responses. The lack of interest and wide knowledge of some tutors in comparison with other colleagues lead to a tension between what is currently learnt in the studio and what is learnt from non-studio teaching. I explored the relevant writings using the three themes of production, content and consumption. A comparison between students' and established practitioners' writing, using the criteria for the intended learning outcomes for the critical studies module, found that there were both some similarities and some important differences. On the basis of the evidence, the journal could provide the students with a more insightful understanding of their studio practice if there is: • A revision of the assessment criteria, using the saturation points of established practitioners writing in my analysis tables; • Much greater fostering of interest into the reading of established practitioners' writing; and• A team of tutors who are able and willing to teach critical studies/research alongside the studio work. These findings have implications for the training of the staff as well as the structure of the degree courses in art and design.

In response to growing German propaganda during the First World War, the British Government formed a special Propaganda Department, which used visual art as a means of boosting up the morale of civilians and British soldiers on the Front. The War Artists‟ Scheme brought into being under the auspices of the Propaganda Department in 1914 allowed some of the most promising British artists to produce memorable paintings. The works documented the numerous sites of the Western and Eastern Front. In addition, the artists employed under the scheme presented the nation with portraits of notable military and political figures engaged in the war effort. This thesis investigates how William Orpen, an established society portraitist and A.R.A., fits into the War Artists‟ Scheme. His position was problematic: as a painter working in an early twentieth-century descriptive vein and older than other artists at the Front, how did he fare in this troubled context? Orpen‟s work on the Western Front (France and Flanders) has been so far neglected and considered to be of little relevance in comparison to what other avant-garde artists produced during the same time span. The thesis investigates how Orpen, although painting in an early twentieth-century representational style considered slightly passé, embedded in his works innovative means of expression, creating vivid, haunting imagery, adding to a body of work which was supposed to be documentary a depth reminiscent of ecclesiastic artistic practice. The thesis attempts to re-evaluate Orpen‟s war oeuvre, an aspect of the artist‟s rich imagery hitherto left to oblivion.

This thesis is a critical study of the poetry and practice of Thomas A. Clark. It constitutes the first extended critical study of Clark's work. This thesis orients Clark within a network of influence, both historic and contemporary. It does this in order to contextualise and investigate Clark's innovative use of form, theme, and materiality. In Clark's work, form is used to explore and engage with the natural world. These interactions reveal the primacy of close attention in Clark's work, and his understanding of the ethical relationship between form, content, and the natural world. This thesis isolates four geographic features in Clark's work as lenses through which to explore his practice: the Field, the Garden, Concrete, and the Mountain. Thus, the thesis follows the structure of a walk through Clark's work, designed to echo Clark's own walking poetry. These four chapters explore different facets of Clark's influence: The Field chapter investigates Clark's reputation as a pastoralist, and his links to Romanticism, as well as to Charles Olson's open field poetics. Chapter two, 'Composition is a forgotten art': The Garden, explores Clark's engagement with 'domestic nature', and the parallels he creates between the space of the text and the space of the garden, and how this parallel allows for intense formal experimentation in a small space. Additionally, the Garden chapter investigates spaces of rest and recuperation in Clark's work. Chapter three, Thomas A. Clark and Concrete Poetry investigates Clark's relationship with concrete poetry, and how his post-concrete poetics have developed in relation to the broader post-concrete and conceptual art scene in Britain. Finally, Mountain Tasting: Zen and the poetry of Thomas A. Clark examines Clark's relationship with Japanese Zen poetics, and the way in which the 1960s interest in Zen which influenced Objective poetry and minimalism has profoundly influenced Clark's understanding of the ethical function of a text.

Review of LIFE STORIES OF WOMEN ARTISTS, 1550–1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 504p. bibl. index. $99.95, ISBN 978-0754654315.

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