This study investigates the presence of ambivalence as a strategy of cultural politics from modern to contemporary art in Brazil. It focuses on the development of modern art leading to the work of Hélio Oiticica, whose approach to avant-garde practice in Brazil was concurrent with intense articulations between the forces of social change and re-evaluations of the legacy of Modernism. The thesis has a strong historiographical emphasis and is organised in three parts: Part one attempts to view the emergence of Modernism in Brazil beyond the prevailing interpretations that emphasise its inadequacy compared to canonical paradigms. Part two discusses the development of abstraction in Brazil, particularly that associated with the constructivist tradition and its relationship with the prevailing positivism of a nation that saw modernity as its inevitable destiny. Such a relationship, between art and ideology, implicitly questions the purported autonomous nature of modern art. Again, what emerged were definite regional distinctions, themselves based on seemingly universal theoretical propositions. The context of Hélio Oiticica's emergence as a constructivist-oriented artist is discussed in order to establish the theoretical foundation for his subsequent articulations between notions of avant-garde and Brazilian popular culture. Part three deals with Oiticica's theoretical and artistic proposals. It centres on the artist's transition from a position concerned primarily with the aesthetic questions of art, to one in which art became engaged on a social, ethical and ultimately political level. Oiticica's relationship with concurrent developments in theatre and later in music and cinema is given particular attention. The artist's questioning of the divides between such fields of specialisation, socio-cultural borders or categories of creative production is argued to have arisen out of Oiticica's lessons from Neoconcretism as well as his individual creative approach to relations of friendship. The latter integrated the wider concept of participation that eventually drove the work through the apparent equivocation between national culture and avant-garde practice. The study concludes with an analysis of the artist's posthumous dissemination and its relation with today's contemporary Brazilian art.

My thesis project involved organizing, curating, designing and mounting a temporary traveling exhibition of recent work by Robert Colescott, a nationally-known black American artist. The Eye of the Beholder: Recent Work by Robert Colescott was installed at the Marsh Gallery of the University of Richmond September 7-28, 1988. It included 12 large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas and four framed drawings completed since 1981. Colescott's figurative paintings are known for their satirical commentary on society in America and on the history of Western art.

This thesis explores Cleopatra as presented in the work of three nineteenth century American sculptors: Thomas Ridgeway Gould, Edmonia Lewis and William Wetmore Story. It illuminates their work in the context of the nineteenth century and within the history of Cleopatra's image. Victorian opinions of Cleopatra's nature are exposed by examining the Egyptian Queen in essays and literature of the period, including works by Anna Jameson, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Theophile Gautier. By studying the role of Cleopatra in these literary examples, the notion of some recent scholars of Cleopatra as a feminist symbol is dispelled and a light shed on a deeper interpretation. Cleopatra's ethnicity is taken into consideration against the political climate of the United States before and after the Civil War. Eroticization of the female body through an association with the Orient is examined against the contemporaneous American Suffrage movement. The role that complexion and hair coloring has sometimes played in the temperament of female heroines is explored through the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorne and Gautier, as is the female "sexual monster" returned from the grave in the work of Bram Stoker and Poe. Strong willed women and their tendency towards "indirect suicide" is investigated through the writing of Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Henry James. These diverse factors and events are taken into account in order to reveal the significance of Cleopatra and her legendary sexuality and suicide to the Victorian artist and audience.

Louis Comfort Tiffany began his career as a painter in the 1860's, illustrating his love of color and nature through genre scenes and landscapes. Unfulfilled as a painter he established a successful interior design firm, L. C. Tiffany and Associated Artists, designing interiors for America's rich and elite, all the while trying to bring his vision of beauty within their reach. He is greatest remembered by his contributions to the industry of colored glass and the development of Tiffany Studios. Inspired by the colors in the stained glass windows of the twelfth and thirteenth century and by the lack of quality glass available to American glass artisans during the close of the nineteenth century, Tiffany devoted his life to the development of new colors, textures and patterns in glass and techniques in leading of windows. His salesmanship, desire to meet the needs of his clients, as well as his reputation for being a perfectionist helped him to create colored glass windows with subjects ranging from purely decorative to religious and mythological imagery and landscapes for churches, businesses, and homes in the fifty states and many countries abroad. The cities of Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia house over fifty Tiffany Windows in their churches and cemeteries. Much of the documentation on these windows is limited or lost consisting of mainly brief mentions in Vestry and Session Minutes. A major find was the discovery of an original black and white drawing of one of these windows. This paper will discuss these findings in order to document, catalog, describe and analyze these windows.

The intention of this thesis is to investigate correspondences which exist between the Kabbalah and the recondite world of William Blake's imagery. Particular attention will be paid to the symbiotic relationship or word and image and the dialectical approach to salvation which is common to both Blake and the Kabbalah. The attempt will be made to locate correlations between depictions or several or Blake's characters and components or the kabbalistic Tree of Life. In doing so, this writer hopes to show that Blake's familiarity with the Kabbalah was instrumental in enabling him to give form to the visionary experience upon which his mythological system was based. Certainly, a full understanding of Blake's symbolism must acknowledge not only his indebtedness to the Kabbalah, but also the significant role that esoteric tradition as a whole played in the development or eighteenth-century English thought.

Exemplified in the oeuvres of photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin, the photographer's wife is a distinctive subject in twentieth-century American fine-art photography that fuses the domains of public and private life through the conflation of art and marriage. The transgressive nature of this juncture can be located in a confluence of gazes - the artist's, the subject's, and the viewer's - that are embroiled in constructing subjectivities. The phrase "photographer's wife" underscores an assumed imbalance of power reflecting a binary of active/passive, artist/model, and husband/wife. It is this study's contention that the complexity of the wife's role in the inspiration and production of her husband's creative output and the fluid nature of this interdependency are significant factors in images of her made by him and that they undermine the efficacy of this binary. A discursive examination of the subject, with an emphasis on Gowin's Edith series, will determine how perceptions of marriage affect the viewing of those images. Since the early 1970s, Gowin has guided the critical reception of his photographs with a distinctly anagogical reading of the works. This study contrasts Gowin's narrative with a discursive reading, allowing the works to be examined suprapersonally as a means of determining the larger dynamic traditions from which they derive. The subject implicates numerous discourses that are examined within the areas of gender and power, portraiture and self-portraiture, representation and identity, and viewer reception. Additionally, images in the Edith series often traverse the genre formations of photography. By defamiliarizing family, snapshot, documentary, and art photography, Gowin's images create intervals between genres allowing them to be viewed intertexturally as contained by the boundaries of genre formation and outside of it. This aspect of the work illustrates how images of the photographer's wife can be viewed at the interstices of the public and private worlds of art and marriage, as well as across photographic genres. Viewed discursively, the photographer's wife can be examined as a dynamic production of knowledge that is shaped and reshaped over time.

According to the tile historian Thomas Bruhn, the period between 1870 and 1930 was the only period when tiles had a significant role in American ceramics. One of the leading tile companies during this period was the American Encaustic Tiling Company of Zanesville, Ohio, which created high-quality art tile. Virginia Commonwealth University has a virtual gallery of American Encaustic tiles in a four-block range along West Franklin Street. In particular, Virginia Commonwealth University has embossed tile fireplace surrounds in three houses that can be matched up to the American Encaustic catalogue of ca. 1890. Two of these houses have tile surrounds that are attributable to Herman Carl Mueller. The University also has encaustic tile pavements in various locations. This thesis will tell the story of American Encaustic tiles, especially in relation to Virginia Commonwealth University; will examine the lives and works of three of the firm's designers, Herman Carl Mueller (1854-1941), Léon Victor Solon (1872-1957), and Frederick Hurten Rhead (1880-1942); will refine the firm's history and acknowledge previously unknown American Encaustic employees via the discovery of patents; and will identify American Encaustic tiles at the Mosque, now the Landmark Theater, and tentatively attribute them to Rhead.

Children's art has been acknowledged as an important influence on twentieth-century art. Robert Goldwater states that the interest among artists in children's art during the early years of the Twentieth Century marked "a movement away from the exotic primitive toward indigenous sources of primitive inspiration." This new evaluation of children's art as a source of inspiration can be seen in the work of a number of artists including Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet; their work, in particular, suggests the accent, freshness and energy inherent in the art of children. The child’s way of making art, which is not based on illusionism, seems to offer possibilities for communicating new and stimulating ideas. In addition, the use of various figures, symbols and forms from the repertory of children’s art by twentieth-century artists like Miró and Dubuffet represents a desire to return to the child’s world—a world filled with excitement and awe. This return, achieved through the adaptation of children’s devices, has fairly specific visual and emotional meanings; a closer examination of these devices borrowed from children will make clearer the meaning of the work of Miró and Dubuffet.

Between 1768 and 1780 Captain James Cook led three epic voyages from Britain into the Pacific Ocean, where he and his fellow explorers- artists, naturalists, philosophers and sailors, were to encounter societies and cultures of extraordinary diversity. These 18th Century South Pacific encounters were rich with performance, trade and exchange; but they would lead to the dramatic and violent transformation of the region through colonisation, settlement, exploitation and disease. Since those initial encounters, museums in Britain have become home to the images and artefacts produced and collected in the South Pacific; and they are now primary sites for the representation of the original voyages and their legacies. This representation most often takes the form of exhibitions and displays that in turn choreograph and produce new encounters with the past, in the present. Drawing on Alfred Gell's term 'technologies of enchantment' my practice reconceives the structures of exhibitions as 'technologies of encounter': exploring how they might be reconfigured to produce new kinds of encounter. Through reflexive practice I critically engage with museums as sites of encounters, whilst re-imagining the exhibition as a creative form. The research submission takes the form of an exhibition: an archive of materials from the practice, interwoven with a reflective dialogue in text. The thesis progresses through a series of exhibition encounters, each of which explores a different approach to technologies of encounter, from surrealist collage (Cannibal Dog Museum) and critical reflexivity (The Hidden Hand), to a conversational mode (Modernity's Candle and the Ways of the Pathless Deep).

The point of departure of this dissertation is a few words extracted from “Agesilaus Santander,” an autobiographical fragment Walter Benjamin wrote in 1933 while in exile on Ibiza. The first version reads: “...I came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of hesitation and delay ...” He later revised the latter clause to: “the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays...” Through processes of suspension, obstruction and potentiality implied by ‘delay,’ ‘hesitation,’ and ‘detour’ as ‘methods’ of thinking through art, this thesis revisits aspects of Benjamin’s understanding of time, history, origin and the artwork through conditional readings of selected contemporary artworks. Specifically, I am interested in understanding certain contemporary art and theoretical practices as modalities of resistance to modernist art historical and critical frameworks. In this tactical resistance, immanent in Benjamin’s reading of modernity, ‘delay,’ ‘hesitation’ and ‘detour’ are seen as characteristic of a form of critical thinking through and about art and history. ‘Hesitation,’ ‘delay’ and ‘detour’ are then understood as unconventional ‘methods’ that seek to break away from prescribed, or disciplinary, pathways of reading and interpreting works of art. In order to explore these general issues, I sketch out critical constellations for three artworks, each of which both engages and resists pedagogical structures and processes. This underlying pedagogical theme is signposted by the titles of the three chapters: I. “Lecture: ... of delay in Robert Morris’s 21.3, (1964/1994)”; II. “Study: ...of hesitation in Bethan Huws’s Origin and Source I-VI, (1997)”; and III. “Essay: ...of detour in The Otilith Group’s Otilith III, (2009).” I offer ‘slow,’ conditional readings of the particularities and relational contexts of these works, re-inscribing Benjamin’s creative approach to critical research work embedded in the processes of both making and writing through art. Since my approach is tempered by structures of incompletion and indeterminacy embodied by delay, hesitation and detour, I address questions concerning the borders of the process of ‘reading’ artworks and of categorizing both the ‘artwork’ and the ‘artist’ as bounded conceptual unities. My engagement with these questions signifies both a resistance to and an opening out of the limits of representation.