The Moche culture (AD 1-800) of Peru's north coast produced a series of poorly understood ceramic vessels that graphically portray deities, humans, and other beings engaged in sexual activity. Analysis suggests that certain scenes involving a deity referred to as "Wrinkle Face" convey themes of agricultural fertility, mythic origins, regeneration, and the veneration of ancestors. Moche artists produced works in a richly metaphorical visual language that was broadly legible. The vessels present a model for the workings of a vital cosmos in which human reproduction played a central role, and broadly shared cosmological themes in the Andes were manipulated to suit Moche ideology.

Looking at the photographic work of Darrel Ellis, I will examine how photographers use personal family photographs as material in their own work and how the afterlives of these materials trouble or inform personal and political identities through a practice of refusal both inside and outside the home. Darrel Ellis was an artist from the South Bronx who, throughout the late 1970’s and 80’s, carried out experimentations using photography, drawing and painting. In 1992 he experienced an untimely death after a battle with AIDS leaving behind a short but rich legacy of work. While involved with a variety of art making practices, this project will focus on the photographic works in which he utilizes family photos taken from his father’s personal collection. His father, Thomas Ellis, was also a photographer who took snapshots and studio portraits of his family and friends and was tragically killed months before Darrel was born. This sets Ellis up for a complicated relationship to both his family history and larger structures of social authority highlighting his positionality as a gay, HIV positive, African American male living in New York. Ellis’s photographic work builds on his father’s photographs and obscures them as a way to explore and understand his personal history as well as trauma. Decolonial frameworks and a practice of refusal will help provide a reconsideration of aesthetics and identity in relation to his father photos, vernacular photography and the afterlives of these images inside the home. Outside the home will provide a space to analyze how these images are then deconstructed and reconstructed as art objects and the processes that are utilized such as repetition, redaction and re-photography.

The scholarship on Martin Wong is marked by ideals of belonging and community, with his mother and friends being the major proponents in the posthumous dissemination of his art. The literature splinters the artist into distinct periods: 70s counterculture, 80s New York, 90s Chinatowns, etc. Yet, Wong’s identity and practice evade these neat and tidy classifications, often marked by ambiguity and a self-fashioning to navigate a conditional inclusion into communities. Visible tensions between the self and community within the artist’s artworks–a secret Chinatown painting and a lack of depicted eroticism after a diagnosis with AIDS–reveal that the artist’s practice extended his social belonging. By reconciling the scholarship with the discursivity of images, I understand the contradictory and paradoxical nature of Wong’s images as negotiating identities to navigate communities: immediate family, neighbors, friends, and the art market. This navigation illuminates how this insistence on belonging as a process of working-towards can perpetuate communion amidst hostile sociohistorical contexts.

Though they are common objects in private and museum collections, moccasins frequently lack substantial provenances, which can lead to errors in basic descriptive elements such as attribution or date. Over time, misleading or inaccurate information can be propagated if a museum’s interpretation serves as a reference for the visual identification of artifacts in other collections. This thesis focuses on a pair of alleged seventeenth-century moccasins from the Connecticut River Valley in the collection of the Historic Northampton Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, investigating the validity of that claim and proposing a probable point of origin. Ostensibly belonging to an ancestor of the donor, I examine the moccasins in the context of New England’s cultural landscape during the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, focusing on Anglo-Indigenous interactions, the role of clothing in identity formation, and the conditions in which Indigenous objects like moccasins would be collected. Archival documents and published accounts relating to the donor’s family were used to reconstruct the family’s history and establish the most likely period for the moccasins’ acquisition. This thesis shows that despite the considerable contact between colonists and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Connecticut River Valley during the late seventeenth century, the moccasins are unlikely to date from either that time or place, but instead are of Haudenosaunee origin, likely purchased as souvenirs in western New York in the early nineteenth century.

Using the historical background of the New Deal era in the United States, this research focuses on a set of photographs from the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and examines how these images could be indicative of the unique nature of the boarding school within the broader context of American society. Taking into account the history of federal boarding schools for Native students, the treatment of indigenous arts and crafts, and the role of photography within New Deal policies, this manuscript aims to illuminate how American Indians during this time period were not just passive subjects, but were active participants in the formation of simultaneously Native and American identities.

This dissertation asks how artists working in European styles in North America from approximately 1750-1860 participated in their local ecosystems. Relying on materials collected from daily life, from bones to potatoes, rag-based paper to eggs, artists moved materials through cycles of consumption, waste, and reuse. By focusing on these materials, this project offers an expanded framework for considering artists’ role in the environment around them. Common materials, whether food, non-edible supplies found in or near the home, ingredients used by non-artist segments of the population, or substances that traveling artists encountered on the road, offer important links between artists and their environment. Examination of the many ways that artists considered food as a material for making their work connects them to larger narratives involving colonial conditions and land stewardship. Examples of artists turning to non-edible, commonplace supplies further underscore the importance of quotidian materials in forming perceptions of artwork as well as artists’ close ties to household and other daily modes of consumption, waste, and reuse. By utilizing common materials, artists situate themselves among larger segments of society implicated in using and producing these materials and among many non-artists engaged in similar practices. These contexts provide an expansive basis for understanding artists’ roles in the material and environmental conditions of their time. Revealing these relationships not only expands current understandings of the role of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in the North American environment, particularly in established eastern art centers, but also proposes a broader framework for studying art through an ecocritical lens. Looking beyond these settler geographies through the perspectives of artists traveling far beyond their studios, however, further demonstrates the many ways that quotidian art materials can also function as a focal point for the problems, biases, and limitations of colonialism. With growing environmental crises at hand, this project insists that making art is not only about communicating concepts; the physicality of the process bears meaning for both the past and today.

At the turn of the twentieth century, art and cultural critic Sadakichi Hartmann was deeply invested in fostering an indigenous American modernism. Although he is generally allied with Alfred Stieglitz, Hartmann wrote on a variety of topics outside of modern photography. This thesis explores Hartmann's criticism of the American painter Thomas Wilmer Dewing. While Dewing is often considered a Gilded Age artist, Hartmann's consideration of his work identifies what the writer calls "a suggestive style" or "suggestivism," which draws influences from French Symbolism and classical Chinese and Japanese art. For Hartmann, this suggestivism was essential to creating a national modernism. This thesis presents suggestivism as a means of broadening the scholarship on both Hartmann and Dewing, as well as the historiography of American modernism.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois believed that through the use of visual arts, Black Americans could cultivate a new collective social identity. It’s through the intentional and collaborative utilization of the visual arts that gifts one the agency to shape their own individual future. While he urged us to direct our understanding of the collective history of Black Americans here in this country, which he distinguishes as the intersection of being both African (Black) and American, he also urged us to seek insight from other cultures. This master’s thesis employs Du Bois’s views of the role art has in society. It examines the commonalities between Black Artistic expression in relation to critiquing one’s place in society and navigating the future, embodying themes within Afrofuturism, which is a theory that expresses notions of the individual Black identity, within the intersection of art and technology, to ultimately envision a liberated future. It can be argued that Black Americans, are having a semiotic experience with Japanese Anime and Manga when viewing them. Semiotics is a form of analysis focusing on how meaning is created, understood, and communicated between people. After their semiotic experience, they then take action by using visual arts and media to subvert preexisting narratives rooted in fatalistic realities.This thesis focuses on the prevalent and intentional use of signs and icons presented within Anime and Manga series, that are internalized by Black American Anime fans (Otaku), who then take an Afrofuturistic approach to how they perceive their place in the world, as well as envision possible futures. It is separated into three chapters, with the first being historical as it analyzes W.E.B Du Bois’s work. The second chapter points to contemporary Black Artists whose work is influenced by Japanese culture, Iona Rozeal Brown and John Jennings. Lastly, the final chapter defines what are both Anime and Manga and their influence today on Black Americans. To conclude, if one embarks on this internal journey, one can contribute towards creating a new collectively acceptable social identity that is not synonymous with fatalistic realities, through their appreciation of Anime, Manga, and Japanese culture.

This thesis claims that between 1928 and 1934, technological developments, along with cultural shifts in the acceptance of machines in American society, led the studio away from the abstract style of their silent films toward the naturalism that would work to create the illusion of the fantasy worlds of Disney’s full-length feature films.

Diego Rivera's History of Medicine in Mexico: The People's Demand for Better Health mural has been interpreted as a representation of the Social Security Institution in Mexico, ancient and modern medicine, or mythological indigenous iconography relative to fecundity. Interestingly, the mural's descriptive title overshadows Rivera's gritty commentary embedded within the depiction of ancient and modern societies of Mexico, specifically Mexico City. The overall narrative chronologically demonstrates a generational shift from the indigenous Nahuatl or Nahua medicine and myth, mainly reproductions of early colonial imagery, to the modern nineteen fifties urban landscape and hospital setting. Highly regarded as a creative interpreter of Mexican tradition and culture, Diego Rivera was not necessarily focused on representing accurate depictions of the ancient societies of Central Mexico. Scholars must reconsider how to approach Rivera's art representing indigenous communities, in this case Nahua mythology and the social need for social security, and analyze their relationship relative to the push for modernity throughout the industrial era. Rivera's artistic vision, coupled with his polemic character, produced a final mural that strongly conveys a multilayered dialogue between the artist, the viewer, and the past. The mural History of Medicine in Mexico: The People's Demand for Better Health actively engages with the viewer through the ongoing regeneration of thoughts, movements, and actions that channel the fluctuations of modernity itself by questioning the institutionalized system and the organic indigenous perspective. Interaction with the mural is necessary to open one's comprehension of not only Rivera's own personal struggle and realizations, but a nations' choice to move forward towards modernization. Ultimately, Rivera's visual articulation of ancient and modern medicine allows the viewer to interact with, exchange ideas and potentially manifest the dynamic yet fragmented essence of an ambiguous modernity.