An Impossible Utopia: People’s Art and the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period of the People’s Republic of China (1966-1976) was crucial in the creation of modern-day China. The material culture of that period mirrors the turbulent political activity of students and the directives of the Communist Party’s central leadership during the height of the Mao Zedong personality cult. The commercial manufacture of posters, often the sole decoration available for the public and private spheres, offers strong examples of the design style of this time. The posters are not only indicative of the propagandistic fervor of production, but the aesthetic changes initiated in the visual and performing arts during the period as the state consciously manipulated style in an effort to create a “people’s” art and envision a Marxist utopia. This paper suggests that a comprehension of folk arts and popular culture is essential for understanding the visual language of this specific geographic and political space. A new perspective on the reconciliation of reality and ideology during the Cultural Revolution is gained through an analysis of popular form and content, and reveals not only the basis of a modern mass culture, but the unprecedented unification of high and low art forms

Geisha with Hamburger: Food, Sex, and Mirrors in the Narrative Art of Teraoka Masami

Honors (Bachelor's)History of ArtUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112146/1/qiniu.pd

The Figure in Art: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection

The Figure in Art: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection is the second annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods class. This exhibition is an exciting academic endeavor and provides an incredible opportunity for engaged learning, research, and curatorial experience. The eleven student curators are Diane Brennan, Rebecca Duffy, Kristy Garcia, Megan Haugh, Dakota Homsey, Molly Lindberg, Kathya Lopez, Kelly Maguire, Kylie McBride, Carolyn McBrady and Erica Schaumberg. Their research presents a multifaceted view of the representation of figures in various art forms from different periods and cultures.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1017/thumbnail.jp

Modern American Cover Art: The Great Gatsby Through Time

Book jackets and cover art are, more than anything, an advertising tool used to attract consumers, promote book sales, and establish company identity. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a staple in the canon of American literature whose cover art has drastically transformed in the ninety years since its original publication. This thesis traces these changes over time, focusing specifically on publishing history, art history, American culture, and thematic interpretations. In doing so, I found that the most substantial influences on these covers were publishing house identity, design trends, and available artistic techniques. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby’s cover art is able to shift readers’ expectations and comprehension, enabling it to have its own type of influence in contrast with the novel itself

The effect of aqueous materials and papers on subject matter

None provided

Auras

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband\u27s memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion. The story seems to take place within the confines of the widow’s mind. The plot mimics the obsessive, hypnotic quality of nostalgia and memory. Much of my illustrative content and artistic process reflects a personal obsessive nostalgia I have for my grandmother and her life. It is her image, young and old, coupled with the complex and repetitive processes of printmaking, both traditional and current, that inform my illustration and personal interpretation of Aura. My thesis research conculs a series of artistic processes and theories behind image-making that relish the synthesis of new and old. I look at early horror illustration by Harry Clarke and Francesco Goya, and analyze images and practices in early digital graphic design and April Greiman, reappropriated inkjet and woodblock prints (Anselm Kiefer), and my own lasercut woodblock prints

Manual / Issue 10 / Polychrome

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Polychrome. In art, especially, polychrome invites us to the dialogue that colors are always having amongst themselves. A history of polychrome could be a series of poems exchanged among colors. The exchange might exhibit something like perpetual newness, again and again revealing differently bent hues and movingly novel blends. It would be a short-line poetry, excruciatingly sensitive to tone. Its speakers would have no names, so it would confuse the psychology of human orientation. In this connection, a warning against rendering polychrome as a pure positive seems in order: the parties to this dialogue talk at cross-purposes, always on the brink of divorcing. Polychrome can offend and destroy. It conscripts discrete colors in order to sacrifice them. Does polychrome offend by mocking our own failure to connect? In any case, polychrome has an advanced idiom for dealing with conflict. It’s at home with uncertainty. —Darby English, from the introduction to Issue 10: Polychrome. Softcover, 80 pages. Published 2018 by the RISD Museum. Manual 10 (Polychrome) contributors include David Batchelor, Gina Borromeo, Nicole Buchanan, Catherine Cooper, Darby English, Mara L. Hermano, Elon Cook Lee, Josephine Lee, Evelyn Lincoln, Dominic Molon, Maureen C. O\u27Brien, RISD Museum 2017 Summer Teen Intensive Students, and Elizabeth A. Williams.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_journals/1036/thumbnail.jp