Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Essen, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-265).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-154). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ67721.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

This is an exploratory case study of Creativity Explored (CE), a non-profit art center in San Francisco, California, that serves adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The purpose of the study is to address the following questions: How does Creativity Explored facilitate personal and professional growth in adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities? Using Creativity Explored as a model, what can we learn about best practices in community-based art programs that serve adults with disabilities? Multiple methods of data collection were utilized, including examination of pertinent literature and documents, visual documentation, observations, and interviews with administrators and staff, who were selected to provide a breadth and depth of knowledge about various aspects of the CE program. Conclusions were drawn about four major areas of the program: its “art community” model; its benefits for participating artists; the values, practices, and strategies that have contributed to its longevity and success; and the challenges that it has confronted as an organization. / text

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Thesis (M. Tech Degree. Fine Arts) Tshwane University of Technology 2012. / The topic for this study was sparked when a colleague observed that many of my artworks expressed certain Zen philosophies. As I examined the works of artists who influenced me, the Zen principles were highlighted and thus began a process of examining these principles. The study follows the spread of Buddhism from India, where it originated, to China, where it later spread, and finally to Japan, where Zen philosophies are still practised today. Confronted by words in foreign languages and new philosophical terms, this study seeks to clarify and demystify complex Eastern traditions, rituals and practices in order to explore Zen principles, such as dualism, spontaneity, non-action, the interconnectedness of all phenomenon and beauty in its natural form. The study begins with an introduction to Buddhism and proceeds to explain the link to Daoism, highlighting the aforementioned Zen philosophies and practices like the tea ceremony and demonstrating their influence on Andy Goldsworthy, Anish Kapoor and Peter Voulkos, through an analysis of a selection of their artworks.

The dissertation studies sixteenth-century German artists' manuals (Kunstbüchlein), a new kind of book that addresses certain types of artistic practices. The Kunstbüchlein testify to and shape transformations of knowledge in early modern Europe. Disseminating practical knowledge in printed form, they endowed craft know-how with a form of authority until then reserved for the liberal arts. They aimed also to reconcile theoretical and practical knowledge, what Albrecht Dürer (the crucial forerunner to the authors of the Kunstbüchlein) termed respectively Kunst and Brauch. Authors Sebald Beham, Heinrich Voghterr, Heinrich Lautensack, and Erhard Schön sought to provide accessible, useful knowledge. Focused on a limited set of topics, they pretended to be closer to practice and to respond more effectively to the needs of their apprentices than Dürer and others in their publications. In fact, the Kunstbüchlein did not mediate Brauch, but show instead what their authors understood Brauch to be. Emphasizing the hands-on acquisition of knowledge through looking, reading, and doing, the Kunstbüchlein placed the printed image, whether as schematic diagram or finished illustration, at the core of the didactic process. / History of Art and Architecture

Arts organizations are moving toward a more open space through community outreach programs. This space allows for art-focused dialogue to occur that facilitates interaction between people. This dialogue then opens the door for new relationships to transpire. The move toward dialogical and relational space in arts organizations is based on demographic, economic, and ideological changes in arts fields that reflect a growing opportunity for democratization through the arts. This study utilizes a website and mission statement review, survey responses, and a case study to explore how arts organizations (including museums, arts centers, artists' communities, arts councils, and art and craft schools) are serving community needs by creating a relational and dialogical space within and outside of their walls.

The "encyclopedic imagination" describes an artist's conviction that a work of art must be expansive and inclusive to a point of total embodiment. The artist (or dramatized artist figure) implies that the work of art must give a total account not only of the subjective life of the artist but of the reality to which the representing self responds. The focus of this study is not on any work's encyclopedic achievement (for the artist's inclusive ideal always remains well outside the actual capacity of the work), but on the relationship of the ideal of aesthetic all-inclusiveness to a problematic ideal of encompassing selfhood for the representing personality. / Following an introduction that establishes modern and postmodern conceptions of the notion of aesthetic totality, this dissertation describes, in six Canadian works, the (untenable) radicalization of the self through the "encyclopedic" ideal. Chapter one considers Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) and notes that the protagonist's drive towards total representation is costly to his sense of authentic temporality. Chapter two identifies "total embodiment" as the governing poetic principle of P. K. Page's The Hidden Room (poems c.1942-1997), and suggests the relation of this ideal to Page's apparent creative crisis. Chapter three examines the ethics of all-inclusive representation in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966) and argues that the novel's vision of the world incorporated into a single body is a reflection of both the totalitarian politic of One Man and of apocalyptic-beatific "total identity." Chapter four looks at Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988) in terms of the trope of the "perverse museum" in Atwood's oeuvre. The novel's treatment of representation as exhibition figures identity as a matter of insatiable demonstration. Chapter five considers the "life-long" poems of Louis Dudek (Continuation c.1971-2001) and bpNichol (The Martyrology 1967-1988) as particularly marked cases of works that must continue until they have enfolded a coherent world-view into an all-encompassing subjectivity. / Each chapter stresses the counterintuitive quality of the "encyclopedic" ideal and demonstrates that a total yet coherent representation of the world seems inversely proportional to a coherent yet total representation of the self.