Senior Thesis
The senior thesis in art may be an art historical study or a creative project.
Studio art theses also involve a substantial written component, a discussion of the development of the project and its historical and theoretical context, averaging 40 pages in length (and some pushing past 100). The latter may be installed in the Feldenheimer Gallery in the Art Building, Vollum Lounge gallery or another location on or off campus.
Studio Art Theses Gallery
Art History Theses
2022
Roxie Carman
Jes Fan's Speculative Relations
Cece Chiappini
Breaking the Habit: Architecture, Dress and Liminality in Early Modern Italian Convents
View thesis
Emma Jane Haas
Architecture, Dress and Liminality in Early Modern Italian Convents
View thesis
Sophia Raccuia
Googleplex: A West Coast Pathology and Corporate Utopia An Architectural Analysis
View thesis
Victoria Xiao
We Imagine Ourselves into Belonging: Using Nostalgia and Cuteness to Construct Asian American Space
View thesis
2021
Emma Ganger-Spivak
A Poetics of Description: Alt Text and The Museum
View thesis
2020
Bailey Bast
Art of Materiality: The Allure of the Body in Matter
View thesis
Tatiana Zancajo-Lugo
For an Aestheticization of Nausea in Virtual Reality
View thesis
2018
Eden Chinn
Am I a Sterotype? Self-Representation, Social Media, and Corporate Surveillance
Caleb Codding
Coming Together: Community-Building and Queer Inheritance
Zhe Li
Mirror, Finger, Transformation: Understanding Relics Through Famen Temple Crypt
Ava McRitchie
PARA FASHION: An Auxiliary Mode to the Contemporary Hyper Fashion System
2017
Eric R. Bohrer
Friendly confines : construction of the stadium experience
Stella C. Cilman
Visualizing black and blackness : the paintings of Jack Whitten
Dylan Failla
Entangled in the landscape photograph
Jack Timothy Finerty
Scenes of irresponsible engagement in twenty-first century Britain
Neil Edwin Magruder Gibson
Sonic abolition
Will Foster Greenberg
Forms of government on Portland's playgrounds and park
Forrest James Wilson
The soul that pines for eternity shall outspan death : animate corpses in art c. 1400-1980
2016
Alexandra Aldersley
John Marin: Making Sense of Place
Kaitlyn Bryan
Happy Island: Artistic Responses to Fukushima Re-mediations on Superflat and Japan's Post-Bubble Society
Henry Gerba
The Ecological Approach to Videogame Preception
Moira Hicks
Princess Trouble: A Way of Seeing Women in Medievalism
Alessandra Leitmann
A utopia for you and me and no one else: an analysis of Yokohama-e woodblock prints at the end of the Edo period
Nita McDaniel
Pattern and Break: Divergent Historicisms of Watts '65
Francesca Michel
Periodizing spectacular entertainment in La dolce vita and The great beauty
Chloe Truong-Jones
Privacy, Legitimation and the Secret of Transaction
Mia Uribe Kozlovsky
Satisfied Desire: How Two Collections Shape the Memory of Frida Kahlo
Lucy Weisner
De(homo)sexualizing Germany: A Study of Triumph of the Will and Homosexual Politics
2015
Anneke de Bont
Spaces of Memory: Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater and Lady Anne Bacon Drury’s Architext
Christopher Falcone
Fascist Ecclesial Urbanism in Rome, 1936-1955
Melissa Fisher
The Post-Crisis Aesthetics of Afterlife
Nora Fisher Campbell
Dead Space: Fear and Creativity in the Paris Catacombs
Vita Haas
Impossible Goals, Terms in Flux, and Uncommon Ground at The 9/11 Memorial Site
Kathryn Jarvinen
Life in the Dreamhouse
Georgia Miller
Reassembling Authenticity: The Museumification of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses
Dwayne Okpaise Jr.
The Hour of Noise and Looking: Sadistic Performance Art in Argentina in the 1960s
Harrison Salton
The Introverted Eye: Modeling Böhmean Visual Systems
Genevieve Ward
Historical Veils in the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp
Samuel Yehros
Militarized Architecture and Mutable Landscapes
2014
Anna Baker
The object of Moscow conceptualism
Jessica Wong Camhi
Basket cases : ahistorical display of American Indian art objects in North American museums
Eleanor Ford
The ambient and visual arts : a study of gallery space, web browsers, and unproductivity
Benjamin Phillip Friars-Funkhouser
Camouflage : imaging poetic landscape, 1480-2006
Kathryn Isabelle Lawrence
Cyber corpus
Alexandra Park
Performance and mental illness in the art and life of Yayoi Kusama
Maxwell Smith-Holmes
Objects of laughter : Ad Reinhardt, Claes Oldenburg, André Cadere
Vladimir Vince
Group EXAT-51 and performance of alternative forms of socialist collectivity in communist Yugoslavia
2013
Caleb D Allen
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It's a silly place : Eric Rohmer and the postmodern medieval
Marvin Hamor Bernardo
The continuity and evolution of Chinese design
Chandler French
The Museum of Modern Art and the exhibition of futurism : the founding years through 1961
Nicholas C Irvin
On diagrams and diagrammatic aesthetics : Mark Lombardi, Hanne Darboven, Thomas Hirschhorn
Allison King
Infringement : a study of the impacts of copyright law on new media art
2012
Elizabeth Bidart
Walid Raad : the fantastical encounter and the possible community
Margaret Abreu Cárdenas
The mythic narrative of the Los Angeles residence : a study on the architecture of Charles Moore and Rudolf Schindler
Mary Emily O'Hara
Occupational aesthetics : the history and resurgence of the Art Workers Movement
Charlie Renison
To be re-presented anew : into the time of Walid Raad's oeuvre
Rebecca Ellen Ryan Roberts
Modernism in post-war Los Angeles : "Arts and architecture" and the Case Study House Program
2011
Gena Naomi Beam
Fashioning the renaissance body : dress, identity, and space in sixteenth-century Italy
Anna De Filippi
The difficulty of the artists' multiple : positive ambiguity and aspirations of mass reception in "shit must stop"
Solomon Salim Moore
Out of the cauldron : witchcraft in the artwork of Hans Baldung Grien and David Teniers the Younger
Lara Pena
Picturing the past : the photographic visions of Chin-San Long
Rebekah Sternbach
Politics and religion in Shitao's (1642-1707) early work
Allison Woodward Tepper
Discerning dust : alchemy and cartographic possibility in Melvin Edward Nelson's "Photo Genetics"
Faces of judgment : Roman imperial portraiture, the image of Christ and the rise of Christianity
2010
Laura I Fisher
The golden haggadah : visualizing history and the Passover holiday in 14th-century Spain
Olivia Rose Maki
Reification of nature : New York City earthworks
Sara O'Keeffe
Fractured and whole : light and the cinematic spaces of Frederick Kiesler and László Moholy-Nagy
Alexandra Lane Saxon
The body presented : grotesque imagery and the transcendence of performance art in the work of Leigh Bowery
Diana Van Wagner
Tomorrow never knows : issues in the conservation of modern and contemporary art
Lauren D White
Visualizing nature : the artistry of scientific images
Kelsey A Ziff
Egyptian enigmas and papal power : the Pamphili Obelisk in Rome's Piazza Navona
2009
Europa Christina Babbini
The dawn of morphological empiricism : Vesalius' methodology of image reception in "De humani corporis fabrica libri septum"
Zarina Bell
Good bye Lenin : the fate of political monuments in the German Democratic Republic during the revolution of 1989
Angela Kimberly Frey
Beloved reconstruction : our tenuous yet powerful relationship with objects as seen in the Bargello's exhibit of Donatello's bronze "David"
Owen Reed Kolasinski
Forging purity : food photography and the mythology of American cuisine
Natalie Pellolio
Reality check : vision and truth in Walker Evans' subway portraits, 1938-1941
Leah Christine Peterson
Fantasy and control in the Forbidden City : the "Trompe-l'oeil" theatre murals in the "Juanqin zhai" or lodge of retiring from hard work
Zoë Roller
Beyond reality : the fantasy worlds of Simon Rodia and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Alexandra Schmidt
Abject internet : the new natural : an analysis of Ryan Trecartin's "A family finds enternainment" (2004)
Greg Vielhaber
INTERROGATION : "Harvey Birdman, attorney at law" and the semiotic expansion of Hanna-Barbera cartoons
2008
Ashley Cribbins
Cultures and context : Asia in the American museum
Lily Jean Goldberg
Realms of the real : appropriation, imagination and weather in Henry Darger's panoramic watercolors
Ryan Holm
On the margins of their world : Lloyd Reynolds and the transformation of classroom content into cultural capital
Ryland James Ianelli
Modernity and sequential art : the American comic book
Lucy Kang
Magic in Black Rock Desert : space and time at the Burning Man Festival
Caitlin Kirkpatrick
Rescuing the image from history : the art of witnessing the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing
Lindsey M Maser
The imaging of abundance : food and status in a society of plenty
Nansi Ada Singh
Cries of pain, cries of pleasure : rock icons and abject bodies
Alivia-Anne Zappas
The empire strikes back : Italian visual vernacular representations in Italian colonial Africa
2007
Maya Jenny Bartel
The 1960s American body through sculptural movement and static dance : the work of George Segal, Allan Kaprow and Yvonne Rainer
Sheena Margaret Campbell
Constructing subjectivity : the adolescent body and female sexuality in the art of Suzanne Valadon
Christopher Drelich
The Uruk vase
Jesse Boardman Kauppila
Robert Davidson and Wole Soyinka : aboriginal experience in "Third spaces"
Kristen Lavavej
Fit it then knit it : a revolutionary knitting pattern system
Eleanor Ray
Politics and old lace : iconographic innovations of the Vologda school of lacemaking in the 1930s
Emily Elizabeth Rohrabaugh
The changing representation of experiments in art and technology and its implications for the study of new media art
Joseph Willis
Pop media : purveyor of culture
2006
Michelle David
Sequential art and cyclical trauma : "In the shadow of no towers"
Megan Driscoll
Picturing sex : art and pornography in contemporary visual culture
Brian Michael Hyman
Der zeitgeist der zukunft : Andreas Gursky beyond the postmodern condition
Leela Outcalt
Manet, Flaubert, and Modernism as a delayed symptom of modernity
2005
Sirius Bonner
Too other : black women in French art of the 19th century
Ashley Elizabeth Bowen
Politicizing the everyday : the role of the "Arbeiter-illustrierte zeitung" in interwar Germany
Dhyana L Cabarga
Death, photography & Sally Mann
Brianna Dahlberg
Prophecy and witchcraft in Rosso Fiorentino's "Allegory of salvation"
Emily Susan Hamilton
Reading the "Vie de St. Denis" manuscript as a historical document : urban representation, social reality, and historiography in 14th-century Paris
Robert Justin Holt
Theatricality in the art of Barnett Newman
Ariel Stuermer Jacobs
Intertwining images : art's role in Qianlong's vision of Sino-European relations
Kathryn Reid Moore
Naïve genius : understanding the work, ideas, and implications of Umberto Boccioni's futurism
Debra Rolfe
Picturing the metropolis : representations of urban space in the photography of Rut Blees Luxemburg
Kathleen Moir Tahk
(Re)building a nation : architecture and memory in post-Soviet Latvia
Laura Eileen Weiser
A reconsideration of the Wiener Werkstätte and Adolf Loos and the place of women's fashion in turn-of-the-century Viennese design
2004
Laura Diamond
Demolished and rebuilt communities : Leonard Nadel's photographs of Aliso Village and Pueblo del Rio
Amanda Fray
She is risen : the shameful Magdalene made shameless in Titian's "Penitent Saint Mary Magdalene"
Jennifer Rose Hughes
Refiguring the past : three case studies of postmodern appropriation
Michelle A Kollmeier
Refashioning the advertisement : the art of Benetton and Diesel
Molly A E Sjöberg
Where practice and theory converge : Guo Xi's "Early Spring"