The dissertation is a case study of the Chinese-born, globally working contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang. My exploration of Cai Guo-Qiang’s career building from the period of 1986 to 2008 traces his migration from China to Japan to the U.S., paying attention to the ways in which…
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As the devastating effects of the Anthropocene become ever more acute, contemporary artists are increasingly concerning themselves with ecology: the study of relations between organisms and their environments. In this thesis I examine several projects that address these critical…
The U.S. Census Bureau defines “rural” as “any population, housing, or territory NOT in an urban area.” At the most basic level, then, the rural is defined by what it is not. The definition comes with real consequences for rural places in the U.S., which receive disproportionate…
Contemporary art from China has gain international and domestic attention not only for its commercial success, but also for the related activities in various social sectors, with the unprecedented economic growth in recent decades. The complexities of distinctive criteria, toget…
For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with understanding who I am. What makes me is something I try to make sense of through art. When I started working on this my graduation show, the idea behind it was to make a portrait of the Mexico I know, but when the pandemic hi…
The following thesis is an artist’s wandering reflection on their photographic practice. The artist, a recent Master of Fine Art graduate, explores topics in visual culture, photography, art history, identity, and nostalgia. Formatted in short and non-sequential chapters, each s…
This research is concerned with the appropriation of personal photographs within contemporary art practice. The scope of the investigation ranges from the study of history and theory of photography to the making of experimental artworks with vernacular photographic artefacts and…
The history of Western fiber art—from new tapestry works to American fiber movement of the 60s and 70s—is one that is inseparable from the parallel development of craft’s cultural and political history. Activists and leisure craft circles alike employed fiber for its hybrid stat…
This paper aims to outline a series of thoughts around the topic of fascist aesthetics. In 1981, Benjamin Buchloh argued that the revival of representational forms after abstraction signaled a political regression toward authoritarianism. It is the hope of this analysis to expan…
In December 2018, Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa reopened to the public, five years after closing for an extensive renovation. Rebranded the AfricaMuseum, the institution was eager to shed its colonial image and highlight its new “focus on decolonization.” To do so, t…
The thesis examines the different ways in which artists have engaged with parafiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Parafiction – a fiction experienced as fact - has become an important mode of practice within contemporary art, with this shift concurrent to the expo…
There is growing recognition for contemporary artists whose works and lives are affected by mental health conditions. The increased visibility is due to a societal paradigm shift reflected in changing attitudes and approaches in the realm of mental health disorders. Within the w…
This thesis analyzes Signal Fire, a Portland-based arts organization founded in 2008. The organization produces extended, reading-intensive, and practice-oriented backpacking artist residencies in wild places. My own participation as both artist and researcher in a summer 2019 p…
Trans Self-Representations: Non-Binary Visual Theory in Contemporary Photography, is an interdisciplinary trans visual studies approach to contemporary lens-based self-representations produced by trans and non-binary people. This project is committed to rigorous interdisciplinar…
Clothing articles are used each day more by contemporary artists. They utilize fashion related theories to establish in their artworks messages about political, economic and social issues. Through the analysis of artworks from two contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei and Doris Salced…
The work presented in this paper investigates the presumption that objects relating to humans are part of a more significant philosophical discussion. Using the philosophical framework of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the theoretical foundation, the thesis ex…
This graduate thesis describes in-depth research and artworks produced by Isaac Trujillo from 2018-2020. His MFA works created at Colorado State University expresses and captures the importance of traditional printmaking, digital photography and twenty-first-century interpretati…
Mental illness and narratives of cultural ‘sickness’ have often been a theme in Chinese history. Not so long ago, Lu Xun’s madman reminded us that metaphors of cultural illness do not stop at the bio-physical level, but often entail psychological pathologies. Today, artist Guo H…