Department of Art History and Art Conservation Graduate Theses
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Item Being “Other”: Ana Mendieta’s Artistic Practice and Feminist Politics within Arts Institutions(2024-07-29) Alejandria, Cassidy Joy; Art History; Kennedy, JenThis thesis examines the art and politics of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta through her engagement with three arts institutions: 1) the University of Iowa; 2) Heresies: A Journal of Feminist Art and Politics; and 3) Artist in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.). I explore these three institutions specifically to illuminate how their unique structures provided Mendieta with essential opportunities and confronted her with challenging constraints that would shape her artistic practice and Third World feminist politics. Her practice and politics were both rooted in her experiences of difference after being exiled from Cuba in 1961 and her journey to reconnect to her homeland. During the 1970s and 1980s, women of colour describing themselves as “Third World women” began seeking an alternative means of feminist organizing that embraced their multiplicity, based on coalition-building and tactical alliances. Throughout her life, Mendieta was committed to uplifting Cuban and other Latin American artists, and, through her institutional work, she showcased her commitment to uplifting Third World women through a politics of being “Other.” By approaching Mendieta’s practice through her work with arts institutions, this thesis connects her artistic practice to the important feminist activism that Third World women were doing at the time.Item The Agnes Etherington Art Centre: The Formation and Growth of a University Collection Through Specific Donations and Endowments - The Early Years(2024-05-02) MacLachlan, Christina A; Art History; Dickey, Dr. StephanieThe Agnes Etherington Art Centre is a public museum affiliated with Queen's University. Familiarly known as the Agnes, the museum holds collections comprising more than 17,000 works of art and material culture. This thesis aims to document the formation of the collection and the effect of key donations on the direction of its development during the first fifty years of the museum's history. Additionally, it provides background information on the donors themselves and the circumstances surrounding their donations. Research questions included how and why the Agnes and its collections were established, the implementation of its original mission statement, how and why early donations were made, how they affected the museum's direction over time and how Queen’s University participated in the collection’s development. The data for this project was collected through documentation, correspondence, and donor files, both at Queen’s University Archives and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre Archives, as well as scholarly articles and books on the topics of museum development, collecting and donating. The history of museums is discussed, starting with the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and highlighting how the Agnes collection followed established patterns. The characteristics of collectors, the type of collections they worked within and the personal reasons they chose to donate were considered. The research findings led to the conclusion that, like all donations and bequests, those made to the Agnes added to the collection while moving it in different directions. Donors were found to be associated through friendships that were connected by the common goal of establishing a thriving arts community in Kingston. As friends, Agnes Etherington and André Biéler shared a common goal that was applied to the growth of the collection and the establishment of a permanent home that drew later prestigious donations. This research comes at an opportune time: the Agnes is currently undergoing the redesign and rebuilding that is “Agnes Reimagined”. By documenting the early history of the collection and the effects of donations, this thesis will allow future scholars an opportunity to continue the story by researching more recent events, renovations, and donors, such as the Baders, the Langs and Guardian Capital.Item In and Out of Feminism: The Experimental Writings of Lee Lozano and Lucy LippardCloutier-Trepanier, Beatrice; Art History; Kennedy, JenMy dissertation, “In and Out of Feminism: The Experimental Writings of Lee Lozano and Lucy Lippard,” examines the experimental writings of artist Lee Lozano (American, 1930-1999) and writer, art critic, curator and activist Lucy R. Lippard (American, 1937-). Guided by the layered connectedness of their writing of the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that these women’s words created and occupied a malleable interstice within their practices and conventional art discourses – an alternative space in which their work was at once autobiography, theory, fiction, criticism, conceptual art, and life/work. The dialogue I establish between Lozano’s Private Books (1968-1972) and many conceptual Pieces, and Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean (1979) and numerous other unpublished works of fiction, supports an analysis of the feminist labour that constitutes, drives, and sometimes complicates these marginal forms and early examples of autotheory, a self-aware feminist writing strategy for thinking and feeling from liminal spaces; a subjective way of working that is personal, conceptual, theoretical, critical. (Lauren Fournier, 2021) Articulated around close reading and recent archival finds, this research refocuses and revalues anecdotes, gossip, citations, and footnotes, both as legitimate historical evidence and theoretical framework. Haunting conventional and acceptable forms of feminisms, it mobilizes contemporary queer feminist methodologies and theories, namely shadow feminism (Judith Halberstam, 2011) and the figures of the wilful subject and feminist killjoy (Sara Ahmed, 2010, 2014, 2017, 2023) to push against normative relationalities established between Lozano and Lippard and to question the histories, knowledge and ways of knowing that have cast Lippard as feminism, and Lozano as the (constitutive) ‘outside’ of/to feminism. Destabilizing and introducing friction against accepted narratives of second-wave feminism in the arts, this research simultaneously expands understandings of Lippard and Lozano's respective experiments in writing and contributes to the history of feminist praxis and genealogies of feminist writing, critical, and performative methodologies as they emerged within and against conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s.Item Once Upon a Queer Time: A Study of Reparative and Speculative Histories in the Work of 2SLGBTQ+ Contemporary ArtistsFlavelle, Genevieve L.; Art History; Kennedy , JenIn this portfolio dissertation I attend to the ways in which artists have navigated the various challenges of doing 2SLGBTQ+ history through creative practice. I focus on the archive (both tangible and conceptual) as an important intervention site for queer and trans artists seeking to expand how 2SLGBTQ+ histories are depicted. Through a series of case studies on contemporary artworks, I ask: What are the specific strategies that queer and trans artists have used to interrogate gaps in archives? And, relatedly, what strategies have these artists used to address some of the broader methodological challenges of researching and (re)presenting 2SLGBTQ+ histories? I argue that artists’ adoption of historiographic strategies may effectively bypass methodological challenges and present alternative models for gaining insight into queer and trans histories. Within the context of the broad archival turn in cultural theory and the archival turn in contemporary art, the four essays in this dissertation loosely chart the period from the mid-1990s to the present, during which queer and trans artists in North America have continuously been working with the concept, spaces, and materials of archives. Three of four essays focus on American artists, while one focuses on Canadian artists. The artworks engage with a range of historical periods and contexts, from the turn of the twentieth century to as recently as 2008. I attend to a series of interrelated but distinct methodological questions across the case studies, including: What kinds of materials can constitute a queer archive? What might constitute queer forms of historical evidence? And, what happens if we take speculative narratives seriously as a historical mode? Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading (2003) I describe the artists examined in this dissertation as reparative in their approach. What this looks like is varied; some of the artists moonlight as archivists or historians, others engage magical realism and/or speculative fiction as historical methodologies, and still others seek to reactivate the past in the present. Across the case studies, I focus on speculative fiction as a particularly generative reparative response to the historical absences and erasure experienced by minoritized communities.Item A Study of Metal Ion Migration in Oil Paint Films with Iron Oxide, Cobalt, and Organic PigmentsHalili, Jonah A.; Art Conservation; Murray, Alison; Smithen, Patricia; Fuster López, LauraMetal soap formation and metal ion migration are two drying phenomena observed in historical and modern oil paintings. Conservation professionals have observed that the formation of metal soaps in oil paintings can be problematic for their care, and these metalorganic compounds have been linked to cracking and delamination on the surfaces of paintings. Metal ion migration can facilitate this process by the transfer of metal ions into adjacent paint layers which may induce metal soap formation in paints that would otherwise not undergo this process. The focus of this thesis was to determine whether metal ion migration and metal soap formation can be observed during the intial stages of the curing process of oil paint films. Laboratory samples consisting of paint films of a selection of colours and pigment content were studied using analytical methods including attenuated total reflectance-Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR-ATR), portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and environmental scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (ESEM-EDS), along with two other methods, the scribe test and the percent weight change tests. In particular, the results from the scribe test strongly suggests that interactions between adjacent paint films occur and can affect the drying times of individual paint types. Analyses conducted on the laboratory samples served to study the drying behaviour of paint films early in the paint-curing process in the immediate period following their initial casting. While metal ion migration and metal soap formation were not confirmed to have taken place through instrumental methods, interactions between different paint types were found to have occurred through the scribe and weight tests. A case study was also undertaken as part of this study to understand the long-term drying behaviour of oil paints better. Two paintings by the French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre were analyzed using FTIR-ATR, scanning XRF, and ESEM-EDS. Two crack patterns observed on the surfaces of the paintings could be attributed to the presence of cobalt and calcium in the paint layers.