Matching Items (2)
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- All Subjects: Contemporary
- Creators: Afanador-Pujol, Angélica
Description
Many contemporary artists have turned to the past in order to negotiate and make sense of their relationship with the present. Similarly, museums have begun to look back in order to push forward and through a revisionist lens they scrutinize their collections and reveal ignored object histories. A prominent method some museums implement is allowing contemporary artists to comb through the vaults and present new relationships between their objects to their visitors. Through a psychological analysis of memory, and theorists’ dissection of nostalgia, object agency, and contemporaneity, I argue that artists Spencer Finch, Do Ho Suh, Newsha Tavakolian, Solmaz Daryani, Malekeh Nayiny, Mitra Tabrizian, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Gala Porras-Kim function as revivalists – or artists whose works use memory and nostalgia to bring the past back to life. By attempting to retrieve memories, create nostalgic experiences, and question histories, they make their works tools for remembrance, reconciliation, and renegotiation with the past and present. The concerns these artists bring to the surface through their works build an understanding of how memory and nostalgia function as devices for personal meaning-making, trauma processing, and human-object relationship building.
ContributorsZiesmann, Hannah Grace (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Lineberry, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
The Past in Front of Us: Imagining Black Diasporas in the 21st Century seeks aesthetic connections between Black artists working around the world today. This project prioritizes aesthetic perception and affect in relation to Black Diasporic studies and reimagines the canon of work by Black artists. This project does not relegate aesthetics to surface or formal analyses, but understands aesthetic motifs as intelligent entities which communicate the experience of existence. This project affirms Black Diaspora as a dynamic imaginary. I extend traditional analyses of Black Diaspora from the continental edges of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. I look horizontally and create juxtapositions between artists working in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. I use transdisciplinary terms from art history, psychoanalysis, semiotics, philosophy, rhetoric, trauma theory, and critical race studies. Analyses build on multiple discourses because Black Diaspora is a mutable concept that shifts and evolves. This project is one of the first investigations of twenty-first century artistic production by Black artists globally. Until now, these artists’ work has been covered primarily in magazines, exhibition catalogues, and art reviews in the popular press. Chapters, organized by themes rather than regions, focus on emerging artists Dannielle Bowman, Sandra Brewster, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Kambui Olijimi, and Frida Orupabo. In addition, this thesis contributes a new theoretical frame to existing scholarship on artists Sammy Baloji, Sanford Biggers, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Cauleen Smith. As a speculative work, this thesis articulates a vocabulary and uncovers a multitude of aesthetic connections between art practices globally. A significant component of this work is to foreground Black artists’ historically sidelined insights about being in the world.
ContributorsLawson, Dhyandra (Author) / Hoy, Meredith (Thesis advisor) / Afanador-Pujol, Angélica (Committee member) / Grabski, Joanna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021