Mural Painting and Social Change in the Colonial Andes, 1626-1830
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Eloise Quinones Keber
Mural painting in colonial Peru (1534-1824) grew out of both indigenous Andean and European pictorial traditions that coalesced into a hybrid art form deployed to serve a variety of functions. Unlike paintings on canvas and panel, for which there existed no precedent in the Pre-Columbian Andes, mural painting was practiced in South America for at least 2,000 years before the Spanish invasion in 1532. Murals produced in the post-conquest period retained continuity with pre-Columbian traditions in terms of their technical aspects, while their iconography and style shifted dramatically to suit the needs of the Spanish colonial enterprise. First and foremost, colonial Andean mural painting served as an important visual tool in the religious conversion of indigenous peoples by encasing the interiors of churches with didactic illustrations of Catholic doctrine. In addition to their religious aspect, however, murals also transmitted social and political values to their local communities.
Passive Fascism? The Politics of Austrian Heimat Photography
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation focuses on Austrian Heimat [homeland] photography during the 1930s. Seemingly apolitical, this regional and popular photography of bucolic landscapes, quaint villages, peasants in traditional dress, skiers, and mountaineers was fundamental in shaping Austrian identity. Both the pre-war fascist and the postwar democratic governments easily appropriated and encouraged its dissemination. It fully fit within the vision of building a new Austrian nation comprised of distinct regional identities.
Trecento Visuality and the Visual Arts: The Role of Glass and the Influence of Optics on Italian Art of the Fourteenth Century
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This project explores several facets of Trecento visuality as related phenomena and argues that the theoretical and spiritual conceptions of vision were inextricably linked to developments in optical technology, the practical experience of vision, and the visual arts. It does so by elucidating the role of sight and light in private devotional practices by examining religious art, especially reliquaries, which incorporate transparent glass.
María Izquierdo: Religion, Gender, Mexicanidad, and Modern Art, 1940-1948
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
This dissertation examines the religious imagery in the art of the Mexican painter María Izquierdo (1902-1955). Among the first women in Mexico to earn her living as a professional painter, Izquierdo was an internationally renowned artist in her lifetime and remains one of the most notable artists in twentieth-century Mexican art history. Hers is a legacy that was not easily attained; working within a profession and nationalist discourse that was intensely masculine, she was persistent in her efforts to carve out a legitimate and respected space for women and for herself. Between 1940 and 1948 Izquierdo produced many paintings that incorporated popular and traditional Catholic artifacts and iconography that likewise touched upon feminine cultural experience, such as still-lifes of domestic shrines to the Virgin Mary and portraiture that evoked Madonna and Child motherhood imagery.
The Church and Convento of Santo Domingo Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca: Art, Politics, and Religion in a Mixtec Village, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Eloise Quiñones Keber
The mission-building campaign undertaken in the Americas in the years following the Spanish conquest (1521-1546) is the largest and most ambitious evangelical and artistic enterprise in the history of the Catholic Church. In the span of just a few decades, Spanish mendicant friars, at the head of the missionary efforts, established hundreds of conventos (missions) in both colonial cities and provinces. These institutions did not merely accommodate friars. Planned to carry out doctrinal, educational, and liturgical activities, they soon became booming economic and cultural centers.
Photography as Process: A Study of the Japanese Photography Journal Provoke
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation evaluates the significance of a series of four critical Japanese photography publications, referred to here as Provoke. First published in 1968, Provoke consisted of a run of three quarterly journal issues, each bearing the same title as the series: Provoke. The series ceased publication in 1970 with the fourth Provoke publication, entitled Mazu tashika rashisa no sekai o sutero: Shashin to gengo no shisô [First, abandon the world of pseudo-certainty: Thought on photography and language].
Four Parts Together, or Shaping Shapelessness: The Cultural Poetics of Inka Spatial Practice
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Eloise Quinones Keber
Abstract
Female Book Owners in the Valois Courts, 1350-1550: Devotional Manuscripts as Vehicles for Self-Definition
Year of Dissertation:
2010
An examination of the books owned by noblewomen from the Valois courts reveals how significantly they contributed to the cultural and spiritual character of the period. They were responsible for commissioning a vast number of manuscripts, some of which were aesthetically equal to the books made for the dukes and kings. In fact, certain manuscripts now considered the most lavish and important from this period belonged to women. These women often married into noble families from regions far from their native lands. When they arrived at their new homes, they brought their own customs, knowledge of artistic styles, and aesthetic sensibilities, which affected book production in western Europe. Appendices 1-7 show the complexity of relationships between nobles from Burgundy, France, Spain and England for eleven generations, and include all of the individuals discussed in this dissertation. These charts reveal the matrilineal connections between generations and include many women who do not appear on ancestral charts in other studies of the late medieval nobility in northern Europe. As demonstrated in the charts, marriages could result in the solidification of certain regions within a generation, causing genealogical ramifications in subsequent generations. This ancestral web shows the mobility of women in western Europe in the late Middle Ages, resulting in their desire to preserve some of their childhood traditions through commissions of devotional manuscripts.
A NEOCLASSICAL CONUNDRUM: PAINTING GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN FRANCE, 1780-1825
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Advisor:
Patricia Mainardi
This dissertation analyzes Greco-Roman mythological subjects as a thematic subset of French Neoclassical painting between 1780 and 1825. This style and time period are better known for moralizing and heroic subjects from Roman history and Napoleonic conquest, while amorous and fantastical mythic subjects have remained marginalized. By highlighting this thematic subset, however, my dissertation emphasizes the complementarities between mythological subjects and the more widely studied themes of virtuous action within French Neoclassical painting in particular, as well as continuities with traditions and new directions in French painting more generally.
Antoine Claudet, A Figure of Photography, 1839-1867
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Up to now, the early decades of nineteenth-century photography have been narrated in terms of "great" individual achievements and have tended to characterize the histories of photography in England and France as separate but parallel chronological paths. Equally, scholars have usually split their object of study between two opposite disciplines: that of science and that of art. I propose instead a lateral approach that considers the ways in which both photography and individual photographers interconnected within an expanded network of international cultural forces, primarily commerce, technology, science, and art. I aim to do this through a close study of the career of Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (1797-1867), a French-born photographer operating a daguerreotype portrait studio in London from the early 1840s to the late 1860s.