Abstract: 

Observation is at the core of creation, so if one lets it be so, every moment is an opportunity to discover a new beauty. This three-part visual series explores the minute details of hands passing through time and space. On a larger-than-life scale, the artist’s inner world is exposed by the changes of her own body. Prim and painted, picked and bleeding, smudged and worn. One’s body tells a story about the beauty of change, and I am here to tell it.

Abstract: 

My work is heavily influenced by tall tales and folklore. I am especially inspired by the unrealistic, fantastical, sometimes grotesque nature of fairytales and how these are open to interpretation. I often begin my work by researching well-known variations of these stories to be sure that I understand the piece I’ll work with, and then I’ll try to find more unique or lesser-known interpretations of them. Recently, with current projects, I have started to create my own stories. When I was younger, I always made these funny stories into comics, so I started to go back to that, but in a more professional sense. The inspiration is there, but now it has a twist to it that is personalized to that specific work. I try to not repeat since my process starts with making multiple sketches focusing on facial expressions and lighting to illustrate the narrative and evoke dramatic emotions from the viewer. I often exaggerate the body, contort the bodies, and abstract the figures to highlight important narrative features of the character. The goal of this work is to evoke a strong emotional response from the viewer, such as shock, surprise, awe, and even disgust. The success of my artwork is connected to this emotional response from the viewer. In a way that gratifies my story and me, making it into physical work was successful as a whole. That is the purpose, so I want that to reflect in my research and my art.

Absract:

What happens to folklore – myths, legends, and oral histories – in the digital age? Does living in such a period of informational saturation render these fantastical, sometimes-counterfactual ways of knowing obsolete? Or do these mentalities continue to inform the ways that we narrativize our lives and the events around us? In my paintings, I explore the place of mythmaking in the modern age, appropriating and reshaping the tropes of the past to describe personal histories as well as to explore broader themes of coming-of-age and personal agency. I begin by researching imagery and literature rooted in Medieval European folklore, before recontextualizing that material to speak about my personal experience along greater cultural themes. I use the translucence and malleability of oil paint on canvas to interrogate the ways in which the past, both factual and mythic, bleeds into our experience of the present. References to mundane moments in my life are given the same treatment in paint as iconography from the art historical canon. This strategy combines the two into a pseudo-digital collage space and offers the possibility of combining them into a new library of symbols. In this way, I construct a personal mythology of the quotidian informed by the layering of history upon itself.

Abstract:

I’m working on a large, mixed-media sculpture for my BFA Capstone project.  Through cultural research, material experimentation, and sorting through memories of my paternal grandmother, I’m developing a visual language to discuss my mixed-race identity.

Abstract:

In 1983, the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a marble kouros (Fig. 1) that they believed to have been from Archaic Greece (Bianchi 1994, 22). The purchase garnered attention as this piece had not been published on until this point, and this attention brought scrutiny. There was no documented provenience, and the documents attesting its provenance were determined to have been falsified (Bianchi 1994, 22). The authenticity of the kouros was seriously questioned (Lapatin 2000, 43). Then, in 1992, the Getty Museum co-sponsored a colloquium with the Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece where 19 speakers were given the opportunity to defend or argue against the authenticity of the sculpture (Bianchi 1994, 23). The colloquium on the Getty Kouros could not make a conclusive decision on the authenticity. However, the stylistic and material anomalies as well as the falsified documents attesting to its provenance roused many doubts about its authenticity.

This paper examines the kouros’ anachronistic combination of stylistic features, the likelihood of using Thasian dolomitic marble for sculpture during the sixth century BCE, and the problematic modern history of this sculpture. This paper argues that the Getty Museum made an unethical decision in purchasing this kouros without doing proper due diligence.

Abstract:

Among art historians and critics, a common bifurcated belief persists: that Beauford Delaney’s interest in cosmology and abstraction began only after his trans-Atlantic move to Paris. While Delaney’s 3,600-mile relocation altered his sense of belonging, it was not the catalyst for his discovery of abstraction or cosmology. Delaney’s work reflects a sustained interest in the cosmos, not only as a scientific concept, but also as the framework for two core universal feelings: a sense of collective connectedness, between oneself and another, and a sense of universal connectedness, between oneself and a higher power. These themes translate as a venture in creating one’s own utopia. It is through Delaney’s construction of a new world, a utopia, perhaps, that he might’ve felt the ability to reclaim his agency and selfhood. As a child of ten from a small town in Tennessee, to a student in Boston, to a multi-disciplinary painter in New York, and finally to a fully realized version of himself in Paris, Beauford Delaney always took the opportunity to explore his inner world through abstraction. Though it was complex, Delaney, with a great passion, began his “creative gesture towards universality” in the face of unjust and unpredictable times (UTK Special Collections, box 7, folder 16, item 1).