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

2023

Aniela Cohig
Contentious Consumption: LSD Blotter Art Inside and Outside of the Museum Space

Emily d'Achiardi
Digitizing The Self

Rimona Livie
Drag Faces Hypernatural and Supernatural Makeup

Safi Zenger
Control Liberate the Narrative: Black Liberation Through Re-Appropriations in Modern Art

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"

Sonia Andrea Vucetic
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"