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This thesis examines the display of Navajo baskets and examines some of the possible meanings Navajo baskets can reveal. Acknowledging that the meaning of a work of art changes when it is placed in different environments, the thesis explores what meanings are revealed and what meanings are concealed in basket displays in three venues: the trading post, the natural history museum, and the fine art museum. The study concludes that the fine art museum has the most potential to foster a dialogue about the contemporary Navajo, whose identity is a product of continuity and change. Chapter one discusses the basket's connotation as one of continuity and change, a meaning essential to understanding the contemporary Navajo. It becomes clear that when looking for the meaning of tradition and adaptation, the institutional utterance of an exhibition venue must be one that allows a complex modern Navajo identity to emerge. Chapter two examines the institutional utterance of the trading post. In such a setting, meanings of a mythical past emerge from the basket. The environment of the trading post reveals a romantic view of the Old West that hides the meaning of the contemporary Navajo from patrons and viewers. Chapter three focuses on the natural history museum and the effects of its institutional utterance on the Navajo basket's significance. In this learning environment, the Navajo basket acts as an artifact and meanings emerge about Navajo ritual and history. However, natural history museums often educate audiences through means like curiosity cabinets and living history displays that distance the contemporary Navajo. It is the fine art museum that has the most potential to reveal the adaptive, contemporary Navajo, discussed in chapter four. Art museums validate baskets as art objects when they exhibit them with Western painting and sculpture. Such displays can hide the contemporary Navajo in a discussion of formal elements. However, when an art museum exhibits a basket as a meaningful object, it allows the basket to reveal the Dine's desire for cultural continuity and the long Navajo history of adapting to changing environments.

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<p> The study of an architecture of autonomy consists of theoretical investigations into the realm of building types where a sole use or purpose is manifest in a structure that could, site provided, be constructed. However, provisions that conventional architecture traditionally provide are not present in these explorations. Technological advancements such as indoor plumbing, electric lights, and vertical conveyance systems in the form of elevators and escalators are excluded. Platonic geometric form-making are instead thoroughly investigated, imagined, and manipulated for the purposes of creating new spatial experiences. The desired resultant is an architecture of singularity, an architecture of fantastical projection. </p><p> Through a series of two theoretical ritual-based investigations, three-dimensional form manipulation and construction of proportioned scale models, the essence of elements that compose a spatial experience contributed to a collection of metaphorical tools by which the designer may use to build a third imagined reality: the re-imagination of the archetypal museum. A building whose purpose is not solely to house ancient objects in a near hermetically-sealed environment, free of temperature, humidity and ultra-violet light aberrations, but is a re-imagined. A structure meant to engage the presence of two seemingly divergent communities: the local patron/visitor and the extreme distant denizen. </p><p> This paper also examines key contemporary global artists&rsquo; work and their contributions to the fragmentation / demolition of architectural assemblages for the purposes of re-evaluating the familiar vernacular urban landscape while critically positioning the r&ocirc;le of both the artifact and gallery in shaping contemporary audience&rsquo;s museum experiences. </p><p> The power of the internet and live-camera broadcasting of images utilizing both digital image recording and full-scale screen-projections enable the exploration of &ldquo;transporter-type&rdquo; virtual-reality experiences: the ability to inhabit an art work&rsquo;s presumed original <i>in situ </i> location, while remaining in Chicago as a visitor within a vernacular multi-tenant masonry structure: vacated, evicted, and deconstructed for the purposes of displaying art amidst a new urbane ruin. The complexities of this layered experience is meant to simultaneously displace and interrupt a typical set of so-called <i>a priori</i> gallery expectations while providing the expectant simulacrum that video cameras and screens provide, whetting a contemporary patron&rsquo;s appetite.</p>

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 A95 / Master of Science

<p> Research on Judy Chicago&rsquo;s <i>The Dinner Party,</i> (1974-79; completed with the assistance of more than 400 volunteers), is abundant and generally focuses on the monumental table of thirty-nine place settings acknowledging the contribution of women throughout Western history. Scholars have examined, praised and criticized the installation from various feminist and formal aesthetic perspectives. By contrast, this thesis considers what has essentially been overlooked until now, Judy Chicago&rsquo;s curatorial framework for the entire <i>The Dinner Party</i> exhibition experience. Using my own interviews with the artist, team members, and contemporary curators, as well as consulting the artist&rsquo;s installation manuals from Harvard University Archives, and examining the reception of the curation, I highlight the essential curatorial features that made <i>The Dinner Party</i> such an international phenomenon. The artist&rsquo;s curatorial elements were research-oriented, inclusive and activist-leaning with interactive, multi-media structures to achieve her feminist message. Considering <i>The Dinner Party</i>&rsquo;s current installation at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, my thesis argues that Chicago&rsquo;s successful yet overlooked methods offer the most proactive, critical and approachable curatorial presentation. The current installation that has been stripped of these curatorial elements, while perhaps institutionally practical, compromises much of the message and feminist intent. This study contributes to the field by focusing on this notable exhibition, providing discourse into Chicago&rsquo;s curating and offering considerations for contemporary curating practice, with the goal of contributing to the growing area of curatorial research focused on feminist artists and curatorial projects.</p>

<p> Mobile devices have become increasingly more visible within classrooms and informal learning spaces. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the impact of mobile learning (m-learning) tools to support student learning during teacher-led field trips. Specifically, the research questions for this study are: (a) What conditions affect student satisfaction within an m-learning environment? (b) What impact does an m-learning environment have on levels of motivation and engagement of students? and (c) How do m-learning tools facilitate student knowledge acquisition, participation, and collaboration? The hypothesis of this study is that mobile learning materials can improve students&rsquo; engagement and participation. This design-based research (DBR) study relied on a combination of pre- and post-assessments, teacher interviews, and behavioral observations, in two iterations. The participants for this study included three teachers and 112 students, between 11 and 12 years old, drawn from a sixth grade public middle school in San Antonio, Texas. </p>

No description available.

<p>This thesis introduces the concept of living exhibitions:continuously evolving museum exhibitions that are cooperativelydeveloped and evaluated by teams of museum professionals andvisitor representatives. The author argues that the livingexhibition design process should draw its inspiration frommultiple resources, including current research on museumlearning, interaction principles and technology. As acase-in-point, the thesis provides a description of how suchresults have inspired the design of The Well of Inventions, apublic installation at the Museum of Science and Technology inStockholm. Furthermore, the thesis describes how an evaluationmethodology from cooperative design was adopted andsuccessfully applied within the museum domain. The ultimate aimof the work is to increase the opportunities for communicationbetween museum professionals and their audiences.</p>

<p>The purpose of this paper has been to shed light on the ways the history represented at the City Museum of Stockholm can be used in education at the Gymnasia level. I have made use of the following set of questions to attain this purpose: 1) How is the City Museum's activity vis-á-vis the gymnasia organized and what is the purpose of this activity? 2) What positive results do the interviewees see in the collaboration between the schools and the Museum? 3) Why did the teachers represented in this paper choose to make use of the Museum in their education? The bulk of the study is based upon three interviews with the First Curator at the City Museum of Stockholm and two teachers, from Viola Gymnasiet and Skogsgårds Gymnasiet respectively. My method is qualitative and interpretative with hermeneutic features.</p><p>In my interpretation of the source material I have made use of historian Klas-Göran Karlsson's classifications regarding the needs for various forms of history, use of history, users and functions of results. In this way I have been able to establish how the Museum and the teachers represented in the study make use of the history that is represented at the Museum. The Museum and the teachers both use history according to their needs to reconstruct and discover, the latter represented by the research undertaken by the Museum. Hence, it is a scientific usage. The parties also have a need illustrate, make public, and debate; and in this way to make pedagogic use of history. The Museum also makes commercial use of history, which means it is in their interest to increase the value of history.</p>