The Hong Kong-born Canadian photographer and performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi mostly worked in the United States until the year he died in 1990. Upon arriving in New York in 1979, he started his career with a new name. By dropping his anglicized name Joseph and replacing it with his Chinese given name Kwong Chi, Tseng made a clear statement: this is my staged persona who refuses to assimilate to Western culture. This thesis deconstructs Tseng’s key works, including his party-crashing Met series, the decade-long East Meets West series, and the extended Expeditionary series. With his persona disguised by wearing a Mao suit and a pair of sunglasses, I argue that Tseng was a pioneer in the genre of Asian American performance photography and that his work foreshadowed the cultural jamming movement in his innovative use of détournement while it also critically comments on orientalism, cultural fetish, and Asian identity politics. Additionally, Tseng’s work served as a bridge, connecting art history with issues of Asian American identity. As a gay artist who worked mostly in the United States, his work was an early example of what Jachinson Chan has suggested as an alternative model of masculinity for Asian American men: that Asian American men can be free, independent, expressive, and willing to embrace femininity with their masculinity. As David Eng has argued, Tseng also bridged the fields of Asian American queer studies and diaspora studies. Moreover, Tseng carried the legacy of the first-generation Chinese American artists in the medium of photography and inspired the next generation of diasporic artists to explore Asian identity, and to contest the image of Mao and the power dynamics between East and West.

The dissertation focuses on several Romanian avant-garde magazines, such as Contimporanul, Integral, and 75HP, that Romanian artists and writers created in Romania in the 1920s, after Romanian Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Iancu disbanded from Zurich Dada in the 1910s. The Romanian avant-garde magazines launched the Romanian avant-garde movement—the most intense period of artistic production in the country. The Romanian avant-gardists established Integralism in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other European avant-garde groups and to capture the intense and innovative creative spirit of their modern era by uniting and condensing avant-garde and modern styles on the pages of their magazines. However, I argue that instead of Integralism, what the Romanian avant-garde magazines put forth were Romanian avant-garde versions of Constructivism and Cubism conveyed in the magazines’ constructivist prints and reproductions of cubist paintings. The originality of the Romanian avant-garde magazines, thus, is concentrated in their appropriation and reinterpretation of Constructivism and Cubism rather than in their Integralism. Moreover, in their rebellion and resistance to Romania’s social, political, and artistic status quo, the Romanian avant-garde magazines functioned as an instrument with which the Romanian avant-gardists expressed their complex relationship with their Jewish identity. The magazines were not on the periphery of artistic production, as art history discourse on modern and avant-garde art has situated them, but were an important player in the global network of avant-garde magazines that traversed across eastern and western Europe, South America, the United States, and Japan.

Despite his critical role in the development of American Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Postwar Assemblage, gay Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio remains at the margins of the historiography of these movements. Born in Manila, Philippines, the artist immigrated to the United States in 1930 where he lived and worked until his death in 1990 at his home city of East Hampton, New York. He is among the few Philippine-descended artists living in 20th-century America producing museum-collected works. Since America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines in the 19th-century, immigration has been increasing as a result of migrant labor, military recruitment, and economic exchange. However, the Philippine diaspora’s artistic contributions and visual identity before 1980 are largely under-researched in the United States. Queer artists of color, especially Filipinx-Americans, rarely feature in the dominant narratives of American modernity. Ossorio deeply inflected the trajectory of the American avant-garde yet his marginal place in the history demonstrates how art communities excluded queer and Philippine-American identities in the 20th-century during the development of two major American modernist movements. The scholarship has increased since Ossorio’s death in 1990 as a result of museum and gallery exhibitions. Previous writers focus on biographical description or contextualize Ossorio’s work within a broad movement category without considering Ossorio’s Filipino-American and gay identities in advanced detail from queer and critical race frameworks. These studies lack specific theoretical analysis around race, sexuality, and colonialism on Ossorio’s identity and his artistic communities. Through the analysis of his paintings and archival documents, this thesis argues that Ossorio’s negotiation of these intersecting minority categories is central to understanding his artistic production and his relationship to the American avant-garde. This research applies the current literature on queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory on Filipinx-American identity to Ossorio’s life and artwork. I center the work of Philippine psychologist Virgilio G. Enriquez with additions from Filipinx-American scholars Martin F. Manalansan IV, Vicente Rafael, Denise Cruz and American scholars art historian Richard Meyer and queer theorist Judith Butler when examining the artworks Untitled 1944 (1944) and Astonished Mother (1950) in the context of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism respectively.

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 6 No. 1 (2012) - Table of Contents

“Notes for a Historiography of Surrealism in America, or the Reinterpretation of the Repressed” by Samantha Kavky, p. i-ix.

“What Makes a Collection Surrealist?: Twentieth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities in Paris and Houston” by Katharine Conley, p. 1-23.

“Dalí, Magritte, and Surrealism’s Legacy, New York c. 1965” by Sandra Zalman, p. 24-38.

“‘What Makes Indians Laugh’: Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in Steven Yazzie and Joseph Beuys” by Claudia Mesch, p. 39-60. 

“Cracking up an Alligator: Ethnography, Juan Downey’s Videos, and Irony” by Hjorleifur Jonsson, p. 61-86.

“Review of Effie Rentzou, ‘Littérature Malgré Elle: Le Surréalisme et la Transformation du Littéraire’” by Pierre Taminiaux, p. 87-90.

“In Wonderland: the Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States” by Susan L. Aberth, p. 91-94.

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 7 No. 1 (2013) - Table of Contents

“Introduction to the Issue and Special Section on Native American Surrealisms” by Claudia Mesch, p. i-iv. 

“George Morrison’s Surrealism” by W. Jackson Rushing III, p. 1-18. 

“César Moro’s Transnational Surrealism” by Michele Greet, p. 19-51. 

“A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma” by Mark A. White, p. 52-70.

“The Opposite of Snake: Surrealism and the Art of Jimmie Durham” by Mary Modeen, p. 71-95. 

“‘My World is Surreal,’ or ‘The Northwest Coast’ is Surreal” by Charlotte Townsend-Gault, p. 96-107. 

“Complexity and Contradiction in Native American Surrealism” by Robert Silberman, p. 108-130. 

“Review of ‘Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy’ & Kay Sage, ‘The Biographical Chronology and Four Surrealist One Act Plays’” by Larry List, p. 131-134.

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 10 No. 1 (2019) - Table of Contents

“Introduction to the Special Issue on Max Ernst” by Samantha Kavky, p. 1-6. 

“Napoleon in the Wilderness: The Transmogrification of a Picture by Max Ernst” by Martin Schieder, p. 7-23.

“Seeing Through an (American) Temperament: Max Ernst’s Microbes, 1946-1953” by Danielle M. Johnson, p. 24-45. 

“Max Ernst and the Aesthetic of Commercial Tourism: Max Among Some of His Favorite Dolls” by Carolyn Butler Palmer, p, 46-68.

“Arizona Dream: Maxime Rossi Meets Max Ernst” by Julia Drost, p. 69-83.

“Glowing Like Phosphorus: Dorothea Tanning and the Sedona Western” by Catriona McAra, p. 84-105.

“Conference Review: ‘SURREALISMS: the Inaugural Conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism’” by Kristen Strange, p. 106-110. 

“Exhibition Review of ‘A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago’” by Jennifer R. Cohen, p. 111-114.

“Exhibition Review: ‘Native American Art at Documenta 14 and the Issue of Democracy’” by Claudia Mesch, p. 115-120.   

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 2 No. 1 (2008) - Table of Contents

“Surrealism and Ethnography: Introduction” by Amy H. Winter, p. i-vi. 

“Totemic Landscapes and Vanishing Cultures Through the Eyes of Wolfgang Paalen and Kurt Seligmann” by Marie Mauzé, p. 1-24.

“Surrealist Visions of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Legacy of Colonialism: the Good, the (Revalued) Bad, and the Ugly” by Keith Jordan, p. 25-63.

“Surrealism and Inuit Art: The Fascination of the Far North” by Florence Duchemin-Pelletier, p. 64-94.

“Bound Objects and Blurry Boundaries: Surrealist Display and (Anti)Nationalism” by Susan Power, p. 95-113.

“Man Ray’s Lost and Found Photographs: Arts of the Americas in Context” by Wendy Grossman, p. 114-139.

“T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp” by Bradley Bailey, p. 140-144. 

“The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940 and Danser Gala: L’Art Bouffe de Salvador Dalí” by Mary Ann Caws, p. 145-146.

“Review of ‘The Art of Lee Miller’: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2007” by Peter Barberie, p. 147-151.

“Frida Kahlo in Philadelphia: Life and Death” by Samantha Kavky, p. 152-156.

“Thinking the ‘Post-Indian’: Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World” by Claudia Mesch, p. 157-161.

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007) - Table of Contents

"Introduction to the Journal" by Samantha Kavky, Claudia Mesch, and Amy H. Winter, p. i-iii.

"Anti-Surrealist Cross-Word Puzzles: Breton, Dalí and Print in Wartime America" by Julia Pine, p. 1-29.

"William Carlos Williams’ A Novelette: an American Counterproposal to French Surrealism" by Céline Mansanti, p. 30-43

"The Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s" by Sandra Zalman, p. 44-67

"Ben Cobb, Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" by David Church, p. 68-71

"Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted" by Marta Julia Clapp, p. 72-76

"Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and 'Poetic Politics'" by Terri J. Gordon, p. 77-80

"Dali and the Specter of Cinema" by Frédérique Camille Joseph-Lowery, p. 81-84

"Julia Kelly's Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects: Paris, c. 1925-1935" by Susan Power, p. 85-90

"The Janus-faced Legacy of Joseph Beuys" by Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz, p. 91-93

"A.J. Meek, Clarence John Laughlin: Prophet Without Honor" by Jeffrey Ian Ross, p. 94-98