This dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue. / text

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" examines the construction of the South Bronx in the American imagination during the 1970s and 1980s--a time when the South Bronx was synonymous with the failures of urbanism. The project attempts a multidisciplinary excavation of the cultural manifestations of urban ruin as articulated through the histories, literatures, and visual arts produced within and inspired by the ruins of the Bronx. The dissertation contends that Bronx ruins offered a site for visual artists, writers, and photographers to create new ways of understanding the production and perception of urban environments, while shaping the forms and styles that these creations took. The project theorizes the emergence and legacy of these forms alongside what it terms "municipal art": public works of city governmental bodies which, themselves, responded to ruin, and that might also be read as art. The dissertation's first part places the building cuts of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in dialogue with the trompe l'oeil window decals of New York's "Occupied Look" program. It argues, on one hand, that Matta-Clark's artworks employ the tactics and effects of trompe l'oeil, and, on the other, that the seemingly failed "Occupied Look" project presents, upon close examination, vastly more interesting questions about temporality, duration, stasis within the built environment. The dissertation's second part views 1980s New York City Department of Finance tax assessment photographs within and against documentary and conceptual art contexts to reveal aesthetic debts owed by photographers and artists to "administrative" or systematic modes. The dissertation argues that these tax photos, despite their empirical intention, are inevitably productive of narrative, and demand an empathetic model of viewership that gestures at historic ruin-gazing while puncturing mythological understandings of urban ruin. The dissertation's third part examines how the popular fiction of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo imagined the Bronx built environment. The dissertation argues that the infrastructures that animate these portions of their fiction--abhorred in one and celebrated in the other--bind the South Bronx to city, making it less an alienated nowhere than one that is intimately tied to the world around it.

Zugl.: Trier, Univ., Diss., 2003

My final thesis exhibition, Fashionable Art, opens up a link between art and fashion. I used clay as my primary medium to create hyper-realistic handbags in the style of Trompe l'oeil. I am interested in placing art in fashion settings and fashion in art settings. In the show, I placed many purses on pedestals for a gallery setting, in a glass case for a purse shop setting and also placed large photos in a fashion photo shoot setting. I am concerned with creating an environment that celebrates the handbag from just an accessory to an art object. By using clay as my primary media, the purse becomes a more permanent representation. I am able to freeze in time a small piece of our cultural timeline. I am interested in creating these hyper-realistic works because I want the viewer to be led into thinking these are real purses and to explore the idea of fashion being more than just a piece of clothing or accessory, but also the history and affect it has on each of us, big or small.

Diss.--Faculteit der Letteren--Leiden--Rijksuniversiteit, 1989.

Cette thèse pose la question du positionnement identitaire difficile qui marque la trajectoire littéraire de l’écrivaine belge Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992). Le tiraillement vécu par l’écrivaine entre sa vocation artistique et la nécessité de préserver une image de soi conforme aux normes du milieu social dans lequel elle s’inscrit se reflète dans les scénographies construites par ses œuvres littéraires, mais également dans son discours réflexif et paratextuel ainsi que dans la manière dont son œuvre est accueilli par la presse de l’époque. Le premier volet de cette analyse s’attache à circonscrire la position occupée par Suzanne Lilar sur la scène littéraire belge, dont la proximité avec le centre parisien a toujours entretenu la menace de l’assimilation, et sur la scène de l’écriture féminine. Le deuxième volet de cette thèse porte sur l’analyse des scénographies construites par les textes de fiction et les textes à tendance autobiographique de Suzanne Lilar. Les doubles scénographies que donnent à lire ces œuvres montrent que la démarche esthétique de Suzanne Lilar, sous-tendue par le besoin de légitimation de son entreprise, est basée principalement sur la multiplication des perspectives et des moyens d’expression. Le dédoublement de la scène énonciative des récits, la mise en abyme de la figure auctoriale ainsi que le travail d’autoréécriture témoignent de la nécessité de se positionner dans le champ littéraire, mais également de la méfiance de l’écrivaine envers l’écriture littéraire. Le troisième volet de cette recherche analyse l’éthos et la posture que Lilar construit à l’aide du discours réflexif et paratextuel par lequel elle assoit sa légitimité sur la scène littéraire et sociale. Enfin, la dernière partie de cette thèse capte les échos de l’œuvre de Lilar dans la presse de son temps. L’image de l’auteure construite par les médias permet de placer Lilar au sein de l’institution et du champ littéraire, mais également au sein du groupe social dans lequel elle s’inscrit. L’accueil réservé à l’écrivaine par la presse de son époque semble suivre les fluctuations de la posture construite par l’écrivaine elle-même. Cela confirme l’hypothèse selon laquelle Lilar est une auteure qui a éprouvé de la difficulté à assumer pleinement son rôle. Le positionnement en porte-à-faux – dont témoigne la figure du trompe-l’œil qui définit sa poétique – semble avoir représenté, pour Lilar, la seule manière d’assumer l’incontournable paratopie créatrice. / This thesis investigates the difficult positioning of identity in Belgian writer Suzanne Lilar's literary trajectory. The conflict between the writer's art and her need to project an image consistent with her environment is reflected not only in the set-pieces of her literary works, but also in her essays and paratext, and in the way her works were received by the press of the day. The first part of the analysis describes Lilar's position in Belgian literary circles, whose proximity to the mainstream was always threatened by assimilation, and within feminist writings. The second part analyzes the storylines in her fictional and more biographical works. The parallel viewpoints in these works demonstrate that Lilar's aesthetic approach, which is based on the need to legitimize her enterprise, is based mainly on multiple perspectives and forms of expression. The duplication of the plot line in her stories, the mise en abyme of the author's voice, and the constant rewriting illustrate her need to make a place for herself in the literary landscape, but also her mistrust of literary writing. The third part of this research analyzes the ethos and position Lilar constructs through her essays and paratext, upon which she bases her literary and social legitimacy. The final part of the thesis reports on how Lilar's work was received in its day. The image of Lilar propounded by the media positioned her within the literary establishment and also within her own chosen social stratum. The press of the time viewed her as she variously presented herself. This corroborates the hypothesis that Lilar had trouble in fully assuming her role as a writer. Her presentation of herself as being out of step with society − in the trompe-l'oeil manner of her poetics − appears to have been the only way for Lilar to shoulder the displacement essential to her creative work.

Längst ut på piren i Värtahamnen har jag velat skapa Operastaden, en mikrostadsdel som är en egen värld helt uppbyggd kring opera. Hit skulle alla operarelaterade verksamheter flytta, såsom operahögskolan och baletthögskolan.  Mellan byggnaderna skulle folk springa i sina scenkläder, dekorer skulle lastas in och ut, och sångarna skulle värma upp sina stämmor på gården. Platsen skulle genomsyras av operaproduktion, och ta intryck av den dramatiska omgivande produktionsmiljön i hamnen. Inåt platsen skulle allt vara smyckat som dekorer, och scenografier och olika miljöer skulle vara uppbyggda för att vara experimentscener, där det blir oklart om vem som är besökare och vem som är skådespelare. Ta ett bad poolen i Mallis-miljö, eller picnica vid sjön bland tonerna från Verdi, operans förtrollade värld gör att du inte längre behöver bry dig om vad som är fantasi eller vad som är verklighet.  Opera är inte längre begränsat till om du har råd att betala en biljett, eller om du är för rastlös för att sitta i stolen genom alla tre akter.