“Women in White: The Ivories of Nimrud” (2020)
Final Course Paper for Mellon Seminar “Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum,” The Graduate Center, CUNY
Instructors: Professor Rachel Kousser, Curator Sarah Graff, Curator Yelena Rakic
Exhibition proposal centering the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of ivory carvings excavated at the site of the ancient capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Calhu (modern-day Nimrud, Iraq). Includes a historiographic analysis of the ivories and analyzes the exhibition using feminist and critical race theories.
“Photography and the Structure of Kinship in Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album” (2020)
Final Course Paper for “Vernacular Photography of the African Diaspora,” The Graduate Center, CUNY
Instructor: Professor Emilie Boone
An overview of Lorraine O’Grady’s adaptation of her 1980 performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline into the 1994 photography series Miscegenated Family Album. Argues that photography was ultimately a more effective medium for O’Grady’s manifestation of race, identity, image-making, and the structure of kinship across the African diaspora.
“Back to the Future: Postmodernism, Post-Humanity, and the Sublime in the Work of Nix and Gerber” (2020)
Thesis submitted for partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Advisor: Professor Robert Slifkin
Second Reader: Professor Jean-Louis Cohen
A detailed analysis of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber’s photography series The City (2005-13) and Empire (2014-2018) and the artist duo’s exploitation of nineteenth-century painting traditions to bolster the work’s connections to imperialist history and traditions of the sublime and the beautiful. Positions Nix and Gerber’s work as the creation of a new model for photography that extends and liberalizes the medium’s connections to the future.
“Making Room: The Fabric and Space of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Abstraction” (2019)
Final Course Paper for “Sophie Taeuber Arp,” The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Instructor: Anne Umland, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculptures, Museum of Modern Art, New York
An analysis of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s paintings and drawings from before and after 1928 demonstrates the evolution of her design sensibility from one based on textiles to one based on imagined three-dimensional spaces.
“Erasure and Masking in the Late Paintings of Arshile Gorky” (2019)
Final Course Paper for “Materials & Meaning in Abstract Expressionism,” The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Instructor: Visiting Professor Jim Coddington, Former Head Paintings Conservator, Museum of Modern Art, New York
A close material examination of five paintings by Arshile Gorky in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum substantiates how Gorky blended and adapted his expressionist process in the last decade of his life.
“Validating Photography: The Effects of Photography-Based Painting in the 20th Century” (2018)
Final Course Paper for “Interdisciplinary Histories of Photography,” NYU Center for Experimental Humanities
Instructor: Associate Professor Lori Cole
The adoption of photography as a subject matter, rather than a memory aid, for painters in the 1960s and 1970s shows how the photograph and the painting interacted in a mutually beneficial relationship at this unique moment in history.
“Out of Eden: Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in Contemporary Art” (2018)
Final Course Paper for “Is Contemporary Art History?” The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Instructor: Professor Robert Slifkin
The memory of 19th-century landscape paintings by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and John Constable remains vivid in contemporary practices. Painters Stephen Hannock, Ed Ruscha, and Merlin James, among others, recontextualize twenty-first-century environmental and economic concerns within the Romantic and Sublime orientations of landscape painting.