Twelve year-old Ana Mendieta and her sister involuntarily left their family in revolutionary Cuba to live in an orphanage in Iowa. Mendieta’s art legacy includes an innovative combination of numerous mediums, including her earth-body sculptures, which amalgamated land art, body art, and performance. Realizing the feminist movement of Western (white) society largely neglected women of color, Mendieta explored her Cuban roots. Her work is both semiautobiographical and ambiguously political, appropriating indigenous components of art to address issues of identity, feminism, and ethnicity.
To begin, in chapter one I will analyze Ana Mendieta’s work in terms of a search for her personal identity. Art critics plagued Mendieta throughout her lifetime placing her in identity categories. Mendieta’s struggle to defy social constraints led her to explore identity politics throughout her work. Simone Leigh and Gina Osterloh further Mendieta’s emphasis on identity politics through complex explorations of identity within their works. Politics of identity, specifically fragmentation, cultural and self-identification, shaped Mendieta’s works. Gina Osterloh explores themes of visibility and invisibility, attempting to abstract and obscure the identity of subjects within her work. Like Mendieta, Leigh explores her diasporic roots through numerous media, including sculpture and video. Her practice is very research based and heavily considers feminist discourse and histories of political resistance.
In chapter two I will argue that Mendieta did not essentialize the female body. Her observation that the 1970s feminist movement overlooked women of color plays a significant role in her work as well as in the work of Osterloh and Leigh. All three artists seek to break through social constructions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Gina Osterloh’s performance Prick! is a post-feminist critique on call and response relationships. Mendieta’s work encapsulates third wave feminism, she sought to challenge second wave feminism’s essentialist view of femininity. All three artists address the complexities of feminism within their work explore the social constructions of gender and femininity and attempt to break down boundaries to open dialogues for new discussions about feminism. Gina Osterloh works in Los Angeles and uses photography and video as integrative sites for questions of visibility, invisibility, and perception. Within her constructed paper rooms, the body—whether human, paper-māché, wood cutout—explores the idea of camouflage.
In chapter three I will assess Mendieta’s contribution to body discourse. All of Mendieta’s video works are mute, underscoring the focus on the actions of her body. Osterloh uses abstracted bodies within her paper-constructed rooms as a means to bring awareness about the importance of not making conclusions about people and their affiliations. Leigh uses the body to go beyond Mendieta’s exploration to show the racial and gendered body in a positive light. Mendieta traces the outline of her body in the Silueta Series similar to Osterloh’s use of camouflage. Mendieta, Osterloh and Leigh use their own bodies to explore themes of the displaced, marginalized and disempowered.
This thesis is concerned with the political implications of two of Jacques-Louis David's paintings: Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789). In this thesis, I argue that David’s pre-Revolutionary work contained political anticipations of Revolutionary France articulated in his Neoclassical forms, the classical stories he chose to paint, his own narrative innovations using light, color, gender, unusual scenes and the thematic conflict of the state vs the individual and family.
The aim of this creative project was to explore the ideas of impermanence and transience through the lens of different, largely non-western cultural backgrounds, and to incorporate what I learned into my own work as a painter. As part of this, I focused on the materials, techniques, visual strategies, and philosophies that guided the creation of these works. The project consisted of a discrete research phase, during which time I gathered information and materials related to my topic, and a creation phase, when I focused largely on the production of oil paintings and ink paintings whose technique and/or subject matter pertained to impermanence. Research for the most part was conducted by utilizing online and physical collections of work to analyze the formal elements of the work along with the cultural context in which it was created. Ultimately the creative project resulted in a product of three oil paintings and five ink paintings.
In this project, I analyze representative samples from three different fashion brands’ sustainability-related informational materials provided to the public through their websites, annual reports, and clothing tags that promote the company’s environmental initiatives. The three companies were chosen because they each represent global fashion- they are all extremely large, popular, and prevalent brands. These materials are evaluated against three frameworks for identifying deceptive greenwashing claims. I identify instances in which these frameworks are successful in categorizing deceptive claims from these companies as well as instances in which they appear to be vulnerable. To address the vulnerabilities I discover in the three existing frameworks for identifying greenwashing, I propose six new guidelines to be used in conjunction with these frameworks that will help to ensure that consumers can have a more ample toolbox to identify deceptive sustainability claims.
Each chapter of this thesis closely studies a different object of a different medium to trace relationships between Constructivist objects and Soviet community. El Lissitzky’s PROUN Manifesto illuminates the creation of an artistic community. Alexander Rodchenko’s print Propaganda communicates between a state and its people. Varvara Stepanova’s Sportswear designs facilitate a society of workers. Alexandra Exter’s Marionettes combine common everyday objects and children’s theater. Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, envisions the ideal Soviet society as place in which socialists could convene. And Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonics relates the functional and aesthetic goals of Constructivism from Russia to the international art world. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction each provide the framework for discussing the intersections of art objects and community. Anderson explores nationhood through the lens of language and print media, Latour studies how social interaction on an individual basis might rely upon the physical objects around them, whereas Bourdieu addresses hierarchies in distinguishing objects of art in class-based societies by outlining the conflicts between cultural capital and tastemaking in the analysis of objects.
Through the exploration of each Constructivist object, this thesis explores individual, national, and international communities while considering their changing political, social contexts.
In addition, the artists’ sexualities are reflected in their pieces through their representation of their bodies. Often, this requires the interpretation of subtle visual clues and crucial images of androgyny, cross-dressing, and the dandy aesthetic. Queer artists often embraced clothing and accessories to express their identity and signal to others adept at recognizing such identifiers that they are queer. The painter Gluck exemplifies how androgynous clothing can be used as a statement of her sexuality in self-portraits as visual signifiers to those in queer circles. Through salons held in their homes, or a hidden back room of their studio in the case of Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg, artists created communities to inspire each other’s achievements and unique styles. In this paper I intend to shed light on how the portraits I am explicating are declarations of queerness, and how they present the artists’ deviations from gender norms to the art world and broader society.