This dissertation focuses on Chinese contemporary artists conceptualization of spectatorship in the 2000s, the decade when the state started to regulate art production within the parameters of cultural industry. I argue that these artistsCai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Xu Bing (b. 1955), and Yang Shaobin (b. 1962)adopted the visual language and...
This dissertation analyzes the early excavation, classification, and publication of Cypriot sculpture and its collection and display in European universal museums. The author argues that the events and intellectual climate of the nineteenth century profoundly and lastingly shaped the perception of the ancient Cypriot tradition, determining the island conventional place...
Situated in the heart of urban Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (1976) stands as a monument to the eponymous first president of the Republic of China (ROC). Consisting of a main memorial hall, opera theater, Western concert hall, and surrounding gardens, the memorial complex was constructed...
Chambers of Flemish tapestry served as prestigious, portable decoration for early modern courts across Europe. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a number of noble patrons commissioned tapestries that prominently featured highly naturalistic zoological and botanical imagery. Drawing upon zoological treatises, medical and physiognomic literature, fables, printed emblemata,...
This dissertation analyzes the role of the Dutch city Middelburg around 1600 in stimulating the flower still-life production of Ambrosius Bosschaert. The shift in power from Antwerp to Amsterdam as the center of the northern European art market around 1600 has received much attention without recognition of the important role...
This study examines the intersection between art and politics in the salons of Les XX, a group of some twenty, mostly Belgian, artists organizing international exhibitions of art in Brussels, Belgium between 1884 and 1893. The fact that Les XX derived a significant base of support from some of the...
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many images of dwarves, hirsutes, and castrati depict them in the guise of the monstrous, either as jokes of nature or indices of courtly wit. However, there are some Renaissance portraits of physically deformed individuals that transcend these categories. These portraits point to the...
Woodstock—the word is shorthand for the spirit of the 1960s counterculture. Yet the assumption that the 1960s dawned a “New Age” neglects contributions made by earlier generations of Woodstock artists in advancing a utopian vision of emancipated art, life, and labor. From 1902 onwards, Woodstock—a small Dutch hamlet in upstate...
Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 to confront the crisis of anti-black police violence in the Bay Area, the Black Panthers advocated armed struggle against the violences and aggressions of racist American imperialism domestically and internationally. Against interpretations that would deem their image-making to be secondary to their professed political...
"Migration Forms” centers on the place where migration and Morocco meet to tell two stories. One argues for the centrality of migration to the projects of local, contemporary art making and postcolonial nation building, while the other examines the codification, circulation, and contestation through visual form of this North African...