Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and...
This critical/theoretical history of performance art investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and responds to architectural functionalism. Using performance studies as...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
This dissertation considers a rich and diverse material record pertaining to the dynamic between art and the relic treasury in the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire from c. 1100 into the sixteenth century. Across this broad period and region—and even well beyond—real and imagined collections of relics...
This dissertation explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. I analyze televisual negotiations of music-cultural hierarchies to complicate common narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” culture, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing...
Etching flourished as a printmaking medium in Paris during the Second Empire and early Third Republic, the precise timeframe of the city’s drastic transformation due to the state-authorized phase of urban renewal implemented under the reign of Napoléon III by his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This study...
International media immediately lambasted plans to build a Louvre and a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the whimsy of wealthy sheikhs using oil money to “buy culture.” The museums are part of a $27b development project called Saadiyat Island. While Saadiyat is spectacular, dismissing it...
This dissertation theorizes and examines the revival of interest in figure painting (renwuhua) in Republican China (1911–49). I argue that, in this period, figure painting assumed a central role to painters who sought to reform Chinese art, which was commonly understood as “declining.” This investigation will focus on the achievements...
This dissertation examines connections between North and South Korean art during the late Cold War period. Despite the radical social and political differences between the two countries, in the 1980s and early 1990s conspicuous connections emerged between the work of state-sponsored North Korean artists and South Korean artists associated with...