OU - Theses

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https://hdl.handle.net/11244/23528

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Open Access
Artist Power: Donald Judd's Museum and Foundation
(2018) Mogilka, Monique; Bailey, Robert; Rushing III, William Jackson; Fields, Alison
This thesis examines the Chinati and Judd Foundations, established by Minimal artist Donald Judd, to demonstrate how artists can use organizations to wield power and influence in the art world. The Chinati Foundation, a museum, calls for art historical and museological methods to understand its role in the art world, while the Judd Foundation, a nonprofit organization, calls for a multidisciplinary approach where I utilize organizational sociology and participant observation. I argue that the Chinati Foundation uses discursive power in the conceptual break between East Coast and West Coast Minimalism, while the Judd Foundation, a reinstitutionalized museum, exercises power in preserving Judd’s artistic and historical legacy. This thesis builds theories on the form of the artist foundation and how it is becoming institutionalized, a previously understudied phenomenon. Further, it establishes the need for a multidisciplinary approach to understand new organizational forms and demonstrates two types of organizations that artists can create to wield power in an increasingly bureaucratized world.
Open Access
Collecting During the Indian Craze: Analyzing the Harry L. George Collection of Native American Art
(2018-05) Monahan, Kerrie L.; Rushing, W. Jackson; Swan, Daniel; Price, B. Byron; Fields, Alison
This thesis examines the concepts of primary and secondary markets utilized by artists and collectors of Native American art at the turn of the 20th century. This time period was coined by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson as “the Indian Craze.” It describes the time period in which large quantities of Native American material culture was collected by anthropologists, museums, and private collectors, who feared the Indigenous artists and their cultures would certainly perish. Missouri collector Harry L. George systematically collected material culture from a variety of Indigenous cultures around the United States. However, for the scope of this project, my research investigates how George acquired Lakota material culture from primary markets (curio catalogs and directly from artists) and secondary markets (other collectors and dealers). My personal interest in Lakota material culture, paired with what I feel is a gap in the literature, adds to this case study. As I demonstrate, Lakota materials were discussed and described in a unique manner that resonated with collectors because of the Lakota peoples complicated history with the United States government and their romanticized image within popular culture. Lakota artists were able to mediate this imagined expectation by promoting their material culture in a way that worked to their advantage. My study is supported by archival research, visual analysis, and textual examination. Utilizing archived correspondences between George and other collectors, curio-dealers, and Lakota artists, I explore how artists and collectors mediated their and other people’s identities in order to drive market demands for Indigenous material culture. I argue the George collection gives scholars important access to understanding the understudied networks for collecting Indigenous material culture during the Indian Craze.
Open Access
The Consumed Bite Back: Issues of Cultural Cannibalism and Appropriation in Andrea Carlson's Windigo and VORE Series
(2021-05-14) von Gries, Olivia; Fields, Alison; Bailey, Robert; Duncan-O'Neill, Erin
Since contact with Indigenous peoples, Western colonizers and settlers have formed and relied upon created differences rooted in misinformation. By labeling Indigenous groups, including Native Americans, as “cannibals,” Western oppressors produced the evidence that they felt was necessary to justify the colonization and settler colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies. Yet, during these processes of oppression, Western settlers and colonizers themselves acted cannibalistically; by appropriating and destroying Indigenous lands and lifeways, Western oppressors have engaged actively in “cultural cannibalism.” Contemporary mixed-media artist Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe, b. 1979) identifies and challenges this “insatiable hunger of settlers” in her Windigo and VORE Series. By consuming and incorporating museum objects, “cannibal boom” films, and themes from Western art history in her compositions, Carlson engages in anthropophagy to flip past Western accusations of Indigenous cannibalism back onto their projectors. In both series, Carlson stresses that settlers in the United States, acting as windigos, or monsters that consume without consequence, have and continue to cannibalize Native America without hesitation or regard for Native lifeways. An examination of how Carlson addresses and consumes past culturally cannibalistic practices in her Windigo and VORE Series leads to a better understanding of how power and cultural exchange can operate in settler colonial situations.
Open Access
Decolonizing the Concrete Wave: Visual Sovereignty in Native American Skateboarding Culture
(2017-05-12) Fisher, Clarissa; Bailey, Robert; Rushing, W. Jackson III; Fields, Alison
This thesis focuses primarily on skateboard deck graphics and the cultural and political implications of skateboarding within the context of settler colonialism in the contemporary United States. It examines the intersection of skateboard deck graphics, appropriation, and the expression of Native American visual and geographical sovereignties. In the past decade, three important art exhibitions have highlighted the innovative ways in which Native American artists and skaters are combining art and skateboarding. These exhibitions were Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, curated by the staff at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, Ramp it Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America, which ran from December 2009 until June 2010, also at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, which opened at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2012. Artworks included in each of these exhibitions drew direct connections between skateboarding and Native American visual sovereignty. Compared to other topics in art historical scholarship, careful studies of the visual and cultural aspects of skateboarding, and of skateboarding’s connection to Native American visual sovereignty, are relatively rare. Scholarly studies of skateboarding do exist, but their focus typically is not art historical, but rather medical, architectural, or sociological in scope. Iain Borden’s monograph, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, as well as scholarship by Becky Beal and Lisa Wiedman, interrogates contemporary constructions of the urban environment and authenticity in American skateboarding subculture, respectively. My thesis draws upon this scholarship, and incorporates the concept of visual sovereignty from the field of Native American art history. This concecpt, visual sovereignty, was first articulated in 1995 by Tuscarora artist and scholar Jolene Rickard to describe the intersection of political and geographical sovereignties and representations of Native peoples. I apply this concept to my own research in order to discuss the history of skateboarding, beginning with the Indigenous Polynesian origins of surfing, and the political and cultural valences of skateboarding within the context of contemporary settler colonialism in the United States. The issues, conflicts, and controversies surrounding land use and ownership in North American are always influenced by the history of settler colonialism: the entirety of the North American continent is by rights Indigenous land, and ongoing issues of political and geographical sovereignty are freighted with the history of genocide and dispossession that are the mechanisms of settler colonialism. These issues remain both relevant and urgent, and yet these issues are not thoroughly addressed in the current scholarship on skateboarding in the United States or in art historical discussions of skateboard deck graphics. In this thesis, I argue that the cultural and artistic practices surrounding skateboarding – specifically the design of skateboard deck graphics by contemporary Native American artists, the creation of skate parks on reservation land, and the support of skateboarding among Native American youth by organizations such as The Stronghold Society – both expresses visual sovereignty and enacts land-based sovereignty within the context of North American settler colonialism.
Open Access
How to Conceal an Atomic Bomb: Indigenous Art, Political Truth, and the Atomic Age
(2021-05-14) Wise, Elizabeth; Bailey, Robert; Skerritt, Henry; Fields, Alison; Duncan-O'Neill, Erin
In this thesis, I examine artwork made by Indigenous artists who challenge ongoing harms from atomic testing on Indigenous lands. I argue that the visual arts have proven to be an important site for political agency for Indigenous peoples wronged during the Atomic Age. As case studies, I investigate work by artists in the U.S. and Australia such as T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), Debbie Hansen (Spinifex), Will Wilson (Diné/Navajo), and Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha/Nukunu) to illuminate the critical role visual art plays by inserting voices and conversations previously censored out by government propaganda concerning nuclear testing and its consequences. While grounded in art-historical methods for analyzing the form and meaning of artworks, I also situate the art I examine within relevant historical contexts, which involve economic, scientific, ecological, and political factors. The thesis is divided into three chapters, following an introduction. Chapter one focuses on three of T.C. Cannon’s artworks that utilize the iconic mushroom cloud, an image made iconic through U.S. government “peaceful atom” propaganda. Chapter two closely analyzes Debbie Hansen’s painting Maralinga: a composition titled after the most active British nuclear test site in Australia, and designed in the acrylic “dot” style that internationally identifies her as an Aboriginal Australian. Finally, the third chapter compares the local art histories of the previous chapters, initiating a global discussion concerning the ongoing effects and presence of the Atomic Age on Indigenous lands. This chapter also historicizes how Cannon and Hansen’s tactics of politicizing art made way for contemporary artists like Will Wilson and Yhonnie Scarce to do so in even more overt capacities. I conclude with a brief survey of other artists and institutions currently using art to rectify misrepresentations and address incomplete understandings of the Atomic Age past and present.
Open Access
Post-Digital Publishing Practices in Contemporary Arts Publishing
(2019-12) Rogers, Kelly; Bailey, Robert; Fields, Alison; Duncan-O'Neill, Erin
A consideration of the ways in which post-digital influence impacts visual culture, and specifically arts publishing. The post-digital moment creates a unique opportunity for analog/digital crossover, which manifests in publishing practices and publications. This thesis aims to dedicate a space for discourse concerning these contemporary practices. Focusing on self-reflexive sources about arts publishing, this study analyzes the hybridization of media, pointing to mediatization as a result of our contemporary moment and its integrated digital influences. I address design and object composition of publications and artistic publishing practices using visual analysis to evaluate the tangible (or non-tangible) aspects of the publication and assess the multidisciplinary reach of arts publishing. This type of analysis supports the ideas of arts publishing as artistic practice, and allows us to develop a literary and aesthetic commentary about contemporary arts publishing and the latest developments in this field. I look at these primary sources as artistic objects and critique them also as conceptual pieces. While art objects are usually the focus of most art historians, the recent boom in arts publications and reflections on publishing practices in the arts warrants special attention and a thorough academic examination to consider how arts publishing functions alongside other, more-recognized media of the art world. Academic and communications design specialist Brad Haylock speaks to the lack of attention for this subject in DISTRIBUTED, an anthology published in 2018: “I enjoy curating exhibitions; editing a multi-authored volume gives me the same kind of buzz. Clearly, there are a great many parallels between the two types of practice, but, while the discipline of curating has received much attention in recent years, the aesthetics of editing is too rarely discussed.” Arts publishing is an important intersection of the visual and conceptual that provides a way for us to historicize the dissemination of some of the most important contemporary theory, texts, and interdisciplinary design that is foundational to our discipline. This thesis provides an expansion of the traditional art history subjects by considering the digital humanities and visual culture as fundamental to post-digital analyses of the arts.
Open Access
Selected examples of the Crusader style icons in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
(2022-12-16) Grant, Spencer; Basic, Rozmeri; Palmer, Allison; Karathanasis, Constantinos
Before Constantinople fell in 1453, Byzantine-style iconography had been experiencing massive shifts in not only production, but also in manufacturing quantity and personal use. Two such pieces reminiscent of this shift are displayed in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art as part of the Ambassador George Crews and Cecilia DeGoyler McGhee Collection of Icons at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of art at The University of Oklahoma at Norman. These two works, Virgin and Child, Virgin of Consolation (Madonna della Consolazione) and The Virgin as the Life-Giving Spring are representative of the aforementioned variables, namely the effects of Crusaders and their art on the iconological canon, the emergence and prevalence of icons hailing from the Greek Ionian islands, and the influence of private patronage on thematic matter and function. By creating a historiographical timeline focusing on the influence of these variables of style, I identify the icons in the FJJMC as derivates of the works being manufactured around the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries
Restricted
WAYS OF KNOWING: JEWELRY OF THE NAVAJO, ZUNI, AND HOPI
(2020-05) Eustace Jones, Robert Mac; Fields, Alison; Bailey, Robert; Cobb-Greetham, Amanda
This research examines the introduction of Southwestern Native American jewelry as an art form in the Navajo, Zuni and Hopi cultures in conjunction with developing sociographic variables, supporting cultural survivance while resisting European colonization. It examines handmade pieces of jewelry made by members of Native American source communities, informed by their visual language and material culture, in the creation of flexible art objects that work to transmit knowledge, tradition and heritage. The primary focus of this research is to develop methods of artistic attribution utilizing social media sources as a direct link to the source communities. Im-portant works containing different levels of knowledge will no longer be operational if they lose their connection with their source of activation. By using a relationship matrix linked to a piece of jewelry’s movement through time and space, becoming the responsibility of different stew-ards, it became possible to access its link to its artistic origin. First, by examining an artwork representing facets of the relationship between a Native American artist and their Tribal community, it is possible to access specific cultural information embedded in the work aside from cryptic knowledge meant only for specific cultural members. This research does not seek to understand the protected knowledge within a Native American art-object; however, it does seek to show the presence of the information allowing for the object to operate on multiple levels. Secondly, by examining the relationship between the piece of jewel-ry and its collector, we can see the piece’s flexibility not only as it operates as an object of cultur-al transmission but also as an artwork, a piece of fashion, and an item of identity for the collector who came upon it. Finally, as an art-object enters the stewardship of an institution, such as the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, its knowledge may become available once again to its source community if the institution knows how to access its history.
Open Access
The Works of Will James: His Contribution to the Mythologizing of the American Cowboy
(2016-12) Harrison, Nicole; Price, Byron; Bailey, Robert; Fields, Alison
The life of Will James is one of mystery. His works, however, tell the story of a life he was meant to live. Born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault in 1892 in Saint-Nazaire-d’Acton, the boy grew up yearning to be a cowboy. Dufault headed to western Canada in 1907 to fulfill his dream. By 1910 he had crossed the Canadian-United States border into Montana and changed his name to Will James. During his travels James managed to steal cattle, survive jail and a hospital stay, and attend art school. These events, and the people he encounter along the way, played an important role in his decision to become a full-time artist and author. The individuals in the literary, artistic, and entertainment industries prior to James’s arrival laid the groundwork for the artist to extend and update the iconic cowboy imagery. Pining for the Old West, Will James illustrated the American cowboy before the effects of barbed wire and the automotive revolution took place. In his depictions the cowboy almost invariably accompanies the horse and cattle. To James the three were indispensable to his way of life. His drawings and paintings not only served as illustrations for the books and short stories he wrote but also helped shape and extend the historical, cultural, and mythological perceptions of the cowboy-hero in American culture. The life and works of this forgotten legend have endured through avid collectors, artists, and historians. Marginalized to the far corners of western American art, Will James’s work endures, inspiring a new generation and creating a love for the Old West.
Open Access
Zoomorphic Representations in Early Cycladic Art: A Catalogue Reference List
(2017) Ashbacher, Mariah; Basic, Rozmeri; Watson, Mary Jo; Palmer, Allison
The focus of my thesis is to examine the noteworthy role that three-dimensional zoomorphic figures played in Cycladic Art during the Early Bronze Age Aegean period. The importance of animals for this period, clearly documented by their artistic representations, has largely been surpassed by scholarship on the anthropomorphic figures found in and around burial sites. It is my intention with this study, and an accompanying reference list of sixty-nine works, to provide evidence that supports the importance of the animals, their relationship to the communities of the islands, and to discuss the reasons and iconography behind their artistic production. Previously, the zoomorphic objects discussed here have been studied considering the archaeological context of their discovery, as part of a chronological group or on an individual basis only for their aesthetic qualities. However, by compiling them as an isolated corpus of objects, and then arranging them chronologically, new interpretations become apparent. When these considerations are combined with existing information known about the settlements and cemeteries where they were excavated, established hypotheses about other artifacts, and comparative data concerning cultures of contact, it is possible to come to new perspectives concerning the role of animal objects in the Early Cycladic period. I propose that the three-dimensional zoomorphic figures represented in the catalog reference list are in the categories of votives and occasionally cult images used in domestic cult activity.