Chana Orloff, a prolific sculptor during the first half of the twentieth century, completed hundreds of portraits of her contemporaries during her lifetime. Scholars have examined these portraits more generally within the overall context of her work. Still, however, the scholarly discourse on the artist herself is limited, lacking an extensive analysis on the portraits themselves. Utilizing a selection of Orloff’s portraits, this thesis seeks to understand her work in terms of the reconciliatory role played by portraiture in expressing various aspects of the artist’s own identity. In particular, this analysis hopes to better understand the artist’s personal and professional contacts in Paris as well as in Palestine. As an artist, woman, and Jew, Orloff’s portraits grant insight into her own relationship with these categorizations and alignment with various trends within a feminist discourse as well as French and Zionist political movements. As such, this thesis takes into consideration multiple methodological approaches, making use of a bibliographical, formalist, feminist, and social art historical perspectives. Ultimately, this investigation hopes to reveal a fundamental intersection between Orloff’s self-conception and the characterization of her surroundings.

Buster Simpson is a Seattle-based artist who creates work that revolves around environmental issues in public settings. His ecological messages reach local communities through works that are often funded by percent-for-art programs, non-profit organizations such as schools and museums, and other public institutions. By using recycled materials or by purifying water, Simpson's public art draws attention to the local environment, and his works provide examples of ways that people can care for their local surroundings. My thesis sheds light on Simpson's public and environmental work, detailing the creative manner in which he incorporates history, education, and artistic complexity into his sculptures. Through their aesthetics and their real-world utility, Simpson's works nurture neighborhoods.

In 1905, Caravaggio was resurrected as a figure of historical importance when art critic Roger Fry designated him as the harbinger of modern art. In his commentary on the artist, Fry declares that: “He was, indeed, in many senses the first modern artist; the first artist to proceed not by evolution but by revolution; the first to rely entirely on his own temperamental attitude and to defy tradition and authority.” Fry’s assertion of Caravaggio’s modernity is derived from early-modern biographies on the artist, which claim that Caravaggio self-consciously broke from the art of the past in a deliberate act of artistic revolution. The conflation of the artist’s biography with his work has remained a constant in Caravaggio scholarship since its inception. Modernity’s Caravaggio is a character with many guises – a painter, a sodomite, a pimp, a murderer, a fugitive, and a knight – all of which have molded our perception of a man who died centuries ago. Caravaggio’s modern appeal is evident in the numerous exhibitions, movies, miniseries, novels, and even a ballet, produced in celebration of the artist Fry proclaimed “one of the most interesting figures in the history of art.” This dissertation traces Caravaggio scholarship, as well as popular manifestations of the artist, through the twentieth century to present day by probing the theoretical and methodological trends that have shaped the discourse. My aim is to demonstrate that modernity’s Caravaggio is a construction derived from the most prevalent historical, aesthetic, and philosophical debates of the twentieth century.

As any architectural historian would argue, historic buildings are the most accessible, yet illusive documents of their founding culture, and as the relevant historiography argues, the early Mormon pioneer built environment in Utah is no exception. In fact, many Mormon architectural historians posit that due to the exclusivity and unusual circumstances of many Mormon settlements, their original structures have an exceptional ability to comment on the culture that erected them. The first permanent settlement in Cache Valley, Wellsville, provides a particularly lucrative opportunity to discover a great deal about the founding pioneers who established it due to the city's time and place within the context of Mormon colonization, the plethora of original domiciles that remain standing, and the wealth of genealogical documents that still exist in the community shedding light on the lives and skills of the community's original craftsmen. While the voices of vernacular builders are often lost, leaving only their structures to testify of the culture, the incorporation of personal histories and interviews with descendents and acquaintances of three specific builders grants this argument a distinct foundation. This thesis explores the change in housing designs in Wellsville from vernacular styles to nationally popular housing patterns at the turn of the twentieth century by examining three specific structures. By contrasting a stone saltbox and clap-boarded Georgian house, both built in the 1860s, with a bungalow built in 1914, and investigating the lives of their respective builders, I demonstrate how housing design practices mirror the social and political transition of the Mormon church during this period. At the same time that late-nineteenth century Mormons sought to change their image by emerging from isolation, gaining statehood, and assimilating into a more national identity, a modern housing movement proliferated throughout the western United States. By participating in this transition of domestic structures, the Mormons discarded the vernacular housing traditions brought by Mormonism's founding community of diverse converts from Europe and New England in favor of popular designs readily available in widely published plan books. Had the national transition in housing happened even a decade earlier, it is plausible that the still-insular and strictly traditional Mormon culture region would have resisted such a change. Thus the alteration in housing serves as evidence of the transition in Mormonism toward the national mainstream at the turn of the twentieth century. While a vast historiography concerning Mormon sacred structures exists, this thesis strengthens the discourse regarding the religion's understudied domestic built environment. Furthermore, by illustrating the important role that historic houses in Cache Valley play in both discovering and remembering the foundation of this valley, I hope to foster the desire to both appreciate and preserve these structures as crucial pieces of cultural history.

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