This document is a detailed description of the work produced throughout my graduate study in the Department of Photography and Film at VCU. Topics discussed in relation my photographic process include: stage, memory, character, the forgotten, and nostalgia.

There are two principle arguments in this thesis. First, this thesis will show that Félix Bracquemond had a profound impact on late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century ceramics in America. Second, this thesis will illustrate how John Ruskin’s principle that pottery is “more permanent than the Pyramids” encouraged reform of the ceramic arts and shaped the Art Pottery Movement of the late nineteenth century. After this thesis introduces Bracquemond as an innovator in ceramic decoration and the dissemination of Ruskin’s principle, the thesis will examine two instances in the American Art Pottery Movement in which Bracquemond’s and Ruskin’s influence can be detected. The first is Theodore Davis’s 1879 design for the Haviland-Hayes Service, the White House dinner service for Rutherford B. Hayes. The second case study is the Rookwood Pottery of Cincinnati, which represents the apex of Bracquemond’s influence in America and Ruskin’s principle of the permanence of pottery.

This essay was written largely after the completion of my thesis exhibition which shares its title. An integral aspect of the work was the after-­hours maintenance it required. Below I describe the unforeseen personal significance that labor came to hold and the way in which it functioned as a healing ritual. Through this work, and those leading up to it, I have a reinvigorated awareness of the importance of therapy as an aspect of my art­making, of which this thesis is a testament.

In this project I explore the environment that surrounds and frames my life experiences. Interests in form, architecture, vernacular typographyand community blend into a photographic documentation—communicating my perceptual experience of Richmond barbershops through public exhibition.

The thesis is made up of episodes in which I am in dialogue with myself, sometimes in dialogue with the work, and yet other times I am speaking directly to the reader/viewer. The tense also sways from past to present as frequently as the visual language does. The following episodes are a selection of writings from my final year at graduate school. The episodes express my influences, inspirations, theories, and philosophies as a person and a maker. I think of these things as what allows me to wander and then wander somewhere else completely different within the same landscape. I feel it is important for an audience to experience these wanderings. I feel it is more valid for you to read exactly what I am thinking rather than to tell you about what I am thinking and making, because it is an expression of my relationship with my work. The images are supplemental to the writing. The images and writings fit together in that they inform one another. That is not to say that the ideas do not always transfer literally from image to writing but that they are what is thought about simultaneously through out my creative process. Most importantly I have developed through my graduate experience an intense relationship with the work. This is the most important relationship an artist has, the one with his or her work. It is deep and enriching, at times painful and frustrating, and at its best surprising, amazing, and even glorious. This is what I have to share through my thesis.

Through the development and design of a Mobile Exhibition System (MES) in this thesis, I will demonstrate the benefits and possibilities of a flexible and mobile system within an exhibition environment. A flexible system will be able to adapt to a wide range of content, while at the same time, maintaining a synergy between its form and function. By the reuse and reappropriation of shipping containers as the exhibition envelope, the goal of mobility can be achieved, reaching out to those who might not otherwise experience learning through an exhibition environment.

This diploma thesis "The Art Journal Ateliér from its foundation to the present" goes into the semimonthly art-oriented Ateliér magazine being issued from 1988 to December 2015. The work looks about historical context of period 1980 and 1990 until the first decade of the new millennium. The thesis, in detail, is focused on Ateliér magazine publishing in years 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 2000 and 2008. The most detailed there are analyzed years 2012 and 2015, the crucial years, in light of magazine financial crisis. In 2010 the magazine got into financial trouble that culminated at at the end of 2015, the time the periodical had made a request for liquidation. 1. January 2016 the magazine entered into liquidation. In all surveyed years the attention is focused on the editorial staff, the graphic design and the semimonthly Ateliér magazine content. The most detailed is the magazine analyzed in 2012 and 2015 by using the analyses of all authorial texts there, there will be presented story writers contents from among the editorial staff and externals who had participated in both editions. An attention is paied to those authors writting in the periodicals,on how many there were in total and on how many times they wrote in the magazine in one year. The second analysis aimes only on copyright reviews of...

This paper demonstrates the overall success of bringing non-traditional audiences to a New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) exhibition, "Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present." It also highlights the success of some of its public programs. However, the process of attracting these audiences to the museum falls short in its attempts at developing long-term relationships with NOMA. The first chapter provides historical background on NOMA and offers an overview of the "Passionate Visions" project. Chapter Two describes, in relative detail, the project's community outreach component and implementation of its public programs. It closes with an analysis of short range and long term impacts. The final chapter further analyzes the project experience, inclusive of the management style of the project director, issues surrounding conflict of interest and ethics, and the degree of NOMA's commitment, or lack thereof, to long-term non-traditional audience inclusiveness.

This dissertation examines the powerful role that museums played in constructing national art-historical narratives during the 1930s. By concentrating on Three Centuries of American Art—the 1938 exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for viewing in Paris—I argue that the intertwining of art, political diplomacy, and canon formation uncovered by an analysis of the exhibition reveals American art’s unique role in supporting shared 1930s cultural ideologies. MoMA’s curators created the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the history of American art with works from 1590 through 1938, and with over five hundred architectural models, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and vernacular artworks. With World War II on the horizon, these artworks took on new meaning as the embodiment of the United States. Adding complexity to notions of display, five chapters trace in chronological order how curators, politicians, journalists and art critics reimagined American art in the display, canonization, and reception of Three Centuries of American Art. Chapter 1 gives a synopsis of the exhibition, places it within the larger discourse of American art exhibitions in Paris, and documents how American and French relations developed during this pivotal time. Chapter 2 explores the different meanings ascribed to the artworks during loan negotiations and maps the works’ transportation to Paris. Chapter 3 elaborates on the notion of a unified American art in the 1930s by examining the histories of art created by each of MoMA’s departments. Chapter 4 offers the first substantive historiography of 1930s publications that examined American art across media to determine instances when MoMA curators echoed prior histories and when they deviated from them at a moment when scholars disputed the merit of such disciplinary histories. Chapter 5 grapples with the means by which audiences first learned about Three Centuries of American Art and unearths what American and international critics wrote about the exhibition. In sum, Three Centuries of American Art provides a model to understand how MoMA curators inserted their histories of American art into the emerging art historical discourse and how government agencies invested them with political meaning during the critical interwar period. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Since the latter part of the 20th century to the present, we have seen growing concerns about the potential collapse of socio-ecological systems due to climate change. On the other hand, palaeoenvironmentalists, archaeologists and anthropologists consistently point to evidence of how Homo-sapiens have survived within climate variability underpinned by an embodied/embedded relationship to their environments. Archaeological data shows how indigenous groups such as the Bushman have inhabited landscape features such as caves for longer than 10 000 years and thus survived through periods of climate variability. Another well researched element of Bushman life is their ritual practices. Given the low supply of livelihood resources within the contexts where such communities have survived, this study hypothesised a possible relationship between Bushman ritual practices and their long-term resilience when faced with variability. Using the Holocene habitation of the Wonderwerk Cave as the main case study, this study explored the relationship between people, place and ritual. Furthermore, the study applied phenomenology as the primary data collection method. The resultant first-person experience guided the researcher in engaging with secondary data from archaeology and ethnography. The study found that Bushman ritual practices such as trance constituted a critical adaptation tool in response to perpetually variable environments. Through such practices and their related tools such as art, space and myth, such communities managed to sustain a synchronised dialogue with place thus facilitating for ongoing dissolution of maladaptive behaviour. Another key finding is that our inability to change constitutes a key characteristic of our species today as we have been seduced into the trap of our deep psychic longing for existential continuity. The study argues for an architecture for resilience whose primary role would be to facilitate higher fluidity in our embeddedness to place and allowing for faster and trauma-free transitioning in synchronicity to our changing environments. In conclusion, the study finds that our own contemporary climate change has implications far beyond the techno-scientific understanding which has prevailed so far and is instead calling to be understood as an existential phenomenon to be primarily resolved through relevant/responsive ritual practices to facilitate our own transitioning and continued resilience. / MT2017