This thesis expands the scope of literature surrounding the work of Juno Calypso, Christina Quarles, and Lisa Yuskavage by increasing the scope of their theoretical interpretations. Juno Calypso’s case requires establishing a critical foundation for her interrogations of domestic space, her subversions of feminine performance—particularly through accusatory address of the gaze—and her demonstrations of the new-hysterical process that I argue for via her alter-ego, “Joyce.” Similarly, I emphasize Christina Quarles’ subversions of art historical traditions, such as the gaze, meta-framing, and figural language, instead of her explorations into race and linguistic titular play. Finally, Lisa Yuskavage’s inclusion will bring discussions of her contemporary artworks fully into the present, leaving behind the scandalous-or-not questions plaguing her oeuvre in favor of contemporary figural reinterpretation. Through comparisons of each one’s approach to contemporary, artistic feminist theories and dilemmas, the artists convey informative insights into today’s visual culture. The thesis brings these ruminations to light through study of Calypso’s, Quarles’, and Yuskavage’s shared themes and characteristics, including subconsciously-influenced practices, multiplicity, and uncanny space. I account for one of Calypso’s most crucial yet divergent strategies of spatial uncanniness—gendered space. Calypso, Quarles, and Yuskavage are also linked by their ostensibly domestic spaces and featuring feminized figures. Yuskavage uses hyperfeminine performance as means of questioning the conventional and the pleasure one expected to receive from it; Quarles instead uses ambiguity to challenge the traditional white femininity assigned to subjecthood in order to reinforce her dissolution of race and gender. Unanswered performance and gaze questions of femininity, feminine performance and feminine rituals drive Calypso’s photographs, in which an onlooker’s voyeurism is highlighted by their mid-procedure state. Yuskavage uses the home as extension of cheesy self, a site of performance, but Quarles uses domestic spaces as sites or causes of internal struggle. Calypso is closer aligned to Yuskavage’s intersectional-feminist anxieties than Quarles’ post-pandemic ones. The temporal span of the artworks’ creation (2015-2022) is reflective of the dramatic social paradigm shifts experienced by Western societies post-BLM and other social movements, and post-COVID pandemic; the arguments made by this essay will contribute to the understanding of ongoing change experienced by women.

This thesis analyzes contemporary photographer Jeff Wall and his representations of cultural memory and domesticity. Wall both references and mimics historically and culturally significant symbols of canonical painting to comment on the role of art incontemporary society. In the coming chapters, this thesis places two of Wall’s photographs in conversation with paintings by Édouard Manet, Tintoretto, and Willem deKooning to examine how Wall deploys representation of domestic spaces to comment on the entwinement of female bodies, sexuality, and economic exchange. Wall’s photographs addressed in this thesis construct complex visual narratives that reflect upon the challenges to representational norms and conventions that were carried out by Manet, and deKooning in their own historical moments. Rather than offering a chronological account of Jeff Wall’s artistic trajectory, the thesis examines Wall’s critique of ingrained societal perceptions of women and the experience of womanhood itself through case studies of A View From an Apartment and The Destroyed Room and relevant paintings by Manet, Tintoretto, and deKooning. This thesis analyzes these photographs and paintings in their respective historical and cultural contexts to emphasize the parallels that Wall draws between violence and ideas of women as capital.

Gai Qi 改琦 was a Chinese painter and poet active during the three Qing dynastyreigns of Qianlong (1736-1796), Jiaqing (1796-1821), and Daoguang (1821-1851). His name can be often seen in publications that are associated with the history of Qing painting, the genre of shi-nü-hua 仕女畫 or illustrations related to Chinese classic novels. However, past works on painting history only offer a brief introduction to Gai Qi and barely mention his other works. Besides being well-known for Illustration of Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢圖詠, very little is studied about this artist. There are various publications that mention Gai Qi and his works, however, questions have been asked but never carefully addressed, such as the function of specific paintings, his painting techniques, and the connection between his religious background and artworks. This thesis explores these issues by examining three of Gai Qi’s extant paintings in American collections, Portrait of Lüzhu (綠珠小像圖), Famous Women (列 女圖冊) and Four Luminaries of Mount Shang (商山四皓圖). The study fills in gaps in the understanding of Gai Qi as a Muslim painter in the Qing dynasty and on his works in shi-nü-hua and other genres. In addition, this work begins to reveal the contribution of Gai Qi’s paintings to the history of Chinese painting during the 18th to 19th century, the period of transition between 18th-century styles, and the rise of Shanghai painting styles in the mid to late 19th century

During the 2nd millennium BCE Aegean Bronze Age, the people of Crete venerated an “erotic” goddess who was associated with marriage, sexuality, and the carnal pleasures of intercourse. As a syncretized version of the Mesopotamian Inanna and Ištar and their later eastern derivatives, her arrival on the island is attributed to an increased exposure to Levantine cultures, which was facilitated by the extensive networks of international exchange (trade, diplomacy, and population shifts) that linked the Mediterranean with the Near East. The presence of the “erotic” goddess in Crete fulfilled a distinct function: she guided elite female initiates through premarital and wedding-related rites of passage that were modeled from sacred marriage, a mythology that described the marital union of two deities or a king and the “erotic” goddess. To compensate for the lacunae in texts on this matter, this study draws from literary and cultural comparative material from the Near East and eastern Mediterranean to reconstruct the structure and metaphorical significance of female premarital initiation ceremonies in Crete and Thera, a Cycladic site with a strong Cretan cultural influence. The symbolism in Mesopotamian and Canaanite love songs and erotic poetry provides analogues to the iconography within Aegean frescoes produced in elite contexts between the Middle Minoan (MM) IIIB and Late Minoan (LM) IA periods. These paintings, which suggest a heightened sociocultural and political importance placed on matrimony, coincide with a time of increased factional competition among Crete’s elite. Wedding-related rites of passage facilitated such rivalries by cementing alliances between kin groups and advertising the perpetuation of dynastic lineages, both of which were processes in which females played key social and biological roles. Images of fine clothing, copious amounts of adornment, and floral symbolism communicated to the initiates the social and sexual expectations of women as brides and wives, while reinforcing strategies of gender-specific expressions of elite identity. The Cretan “erotic” goddess encouraged women to enact their sexuality, which enabled their active participation in Crete’s cultural and political systems, while her connections to sacred marriage underscored the ways in which marital unions could be effectively used to legitimize power.

In the fifty-five years since its founding in 1966, Goodman Gallery of South Africa has established itself as a renowned and commercially successful art gallery of contemporary African art. Established during the height of apartheid, Goodman Gallery was the only venue to show Black African artists amongst their white counterparts. As the art world and market has expanded globally, so has the role of commercial galleries in maintaining, creating, and establishing new international artists’ work to be exhibited and sold. With the market becoming ethnically and culturally inclusive, the gallery has been a pioneer in embedding those goals in its mission since the beginning. Because it is unusual for commercial galleries to have a long commitment to confronting power structures, I will examine Goodman within a global context as both an anti-racist business and a space whose owner seeks equal representation in the art world by exhibiting new and established artists, including David Goldblatt, David Koloane, Sam Nhlengethwa, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Shirin Neshat, and Alfredo Jaar. With an emphasis on its stated mission, I construct a narrative of the gallery as a critical space for social and political change within the growing interest of the Western market.

Social stereotypes in industrial countries have long regarded women as lacking the capacity for understanding the intricacies of machines, from appliances to cars. A major barrier excluding women from technology was the specialized language spoken by those in the industry. It is through my unique perspective as a female Automotive Master Technician that I explore the photographs, paintings, and prints during the interwar period between World War I and World War II created by female artists from a technical point of view. The First World War had artists such as Olive Edis who recorded female ambulance drivers while Dorothy Stevens, Henrietta Mabel May and Anna Airy showcased the skillset of the women machinists. During the interwar period Elsie Driggs rendered monumental structures while capturing the essence of the airplane all in the Precisionist style as Sonia Delaunay used her theory of Simultanism on the inner workings of the Spitfire airplane. For WWII, photographers M. Thérèse Bonney and Ann Roesner both snapped pictures of women operators of the lathe and drill press. Ethel Gabain’s prints displayed women machining parts and Edna Reindel depicted women in shipyards. During the New Deal and WWII, Barbara Wright shot over 2,600 images of women. Finally, Laura Knight painted portraits of award winning women and to uplift the spirits of the public. These artists proved that women were more than capable of understanding this complex language of machines.

Museums are influential platforms due to the high degree of trust the public places in their information. This platform becomes especially useful for curators and activists seeking to increase awareness around social justice issues. A way curators can connect with audiences and further the potential impact of their art exhibitions is by cultivating empathy within their audiences, especially social empathy. There are two forms of empathy, interpersonal and social, both of which help an individual gain knowledge and understanding about the world around them. Museums are institutions that teach empathy by providing opportunities for visitors to interact with different people and learn new perspectives. Curators can encourage empathy by using three methods of audience engagement: reflection, discourse, and building relationships with outside community organizations and individuals. Through the analysis of three social justice contemporary art exhibitions, Beyond Borders: Stories im/Migration (2018) at Santa Clara University, Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency (2021) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Undoing Time: Art and the History of Incarceration (2021 - 2022) at the Arizona State University Art Museum, I identify examples of how these methods can be utilized to grow empathy and suggest changes museums, curators and audiences can implement to build empathy and increase the plausibility for positive change within communities.

Cuerpos de Fuerza y Resistencia: Dismantling the U.S. – Mexico Border in the Work of Ana Teresa Fernández and Margarita Cabrera addresses how their artwork maps a geography of resistance that counters the carceral landscape of the U.S. – Mexico border. I apply Michel Foucault’s (1926 – 1984) methodologies of the panopticon to the border as a lens to analyze how Fernández and Cabrera dismantle this structure of power through centering their work on the invisible labor of immigrant women. Foucault’s assertions of disciplinary spaces compare to the unethical conditions in migrant detention centers and maquiladoras. Giorgio Agamben’s (b.1942) study of the concentration camp and theory of bare life also provides a point of comparison between these spaces and harmful treatment of immigrants that Fernández and Cabrera criticize. Through a focused selection of Fernández’s performances and subsequent documentary paintings from her Pressing Matters, Borrando La Frontera, Entre and Of Bodies and Borders series, I analyze how her repetitive and metaphoric acts of labor communicate liberation and autonomy. In a similar vein, I focus on Cabrera’s collaborative embroidery workshops and resultant Space in Between sculptures of Indigenous plants of the Southwest, her vinyl sculptures of domestic appliances, and collaged works on paper from El Flujo de Extracciones. Like Fernández, Cabrera’s aesthetics of labor reveal the disciplinary and abusive institutions of the border, such as the maquiladora, and thus deconstruct these isolating power structures. In considering Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s (1942-2004) borderlands theory, Fernández and Cabrera’s work exemplifies a cultural duality that is integral to disrupting immigrant oppression. I further engage with writer and activist Grace Chang’s gendered analysis on immigration as a framework to address the feminist social justice issues that Fernández and Cabrera explore in their work. Fernández and Cabrera exemplify how centering immigrant women will not only aid in the destruction of xenophobic systems, but also empower stories about women, and invoke a continuous resistance against patriarchal traditions.

Many contemporary artists have turned to the past in order to negotiate and make sense of their relationship with the present. Similarly, museums have begun to look back in order to push forward and through a revisionist lens they scrutinize their collections and reveal ignored object histories. A prominent method some museums implement is allowing contemporary artists to comb through the vaults and present new relationships between their objects to their visitors. Through a psychological analysis of memory, and theorists’ dissection of nostalgia, object agency, and contemporaneity, I argue that artists Spencer Finch, Do Ho Suh, Newsha Tavakolian, Solmaz Daryani, Malekeh Nayiny, Mitra Tabrizian, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Gala Porras-Kim function as revivalists – or artists whose works use memory and nostalgia to bring the past back to life. By attempting to retrieve memories, create nostalgic experiences, and question histories, they make their works tools for remembrance, reconciliation, and renegotiation with the past and present. The concerns these artists bring to the surface through their works build an understanding of how memory and nostalgia function as devices for personal meaning-making, trauma processing, and human-object relationship building.