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- All Subjects: art
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
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.
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in the world and one of the most practiced today. It is full of fantastical myths and heroic legends, as well as undercurrents of feminism contrasted with misogyny and patriarchy. Hindu myths are contradictory as stories have evolved over time and have been retold with millions of differing perspectives.
In my thesis, I portrayed the 22 archetypes of the Major Arcana of the tarot through the lens of Hindu mythology as well as the broader pan-Indian culture. I include ancient stories and references to modern social issues. I visually communicated the connections between characters of Hindu mythology and the archetypes of the tarot with 22 watercolor paintings. This project was an opportunity to explore both the tarot through Hinduism, vice-versa. It allowed for the development of a deeper connection with spirituality and religion, along with a greater understanding of visual communication.
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.
Allow yourself to rediscover peace. PAX is aimed to help college students find pockets of peace in their hectic day-to-day. Through art services, students will find avenues to relieve stress and anxiety via creative outlets. With directed art sessions, students will be able to express their creativity in a healthy and healing manner. Our vision is to introduce and instill a stress relieving outlet in the lives of college students.
AIR, being short for the Arts Initiative for Refugees, is a new, self-founded organization that provides refugee youth with sessions, programs, and opportunities to help them achieve artistic and personal success through teaching and mentorship. AIR strives to offer individualized and group mentoring programs to its students designed for their unique interests in the arts fields of their choice. The immediate objective of this organization, which my thesis was founded upon, was to introduce refugee youth at a newcomer school, Valencia Newcomer School, to various new art forms utilizing direct application, to play and have fun, to create a sense of community and support, to create a safe, inclusive environment, to help the students learn more about each other's cultures and backgrounds, and to allow the students to create art work that is genuine to them and their backgrounds. The ultimate goal of AIR is to branch out to become a small-scale, national/international non-profit organization.