“Finding Elsewhere: Selected Works by Maia Cruz Palileo and Jeanne F. Jalandoni” explores how these artists grapple with colonial legacies and intergenerational trauma through embodied practices in Palileo’s Kapatid (sisters) (2018) and Jalandoni’s Take Up the Brown (2018). Additionally, this study assesses how Jalandoni’s Transience (2022) transcends categorical limitations in media, place, and time as a channel of connection to the Philippines. Through the study of the work on paper Kapatid (sisters) by Filipinx American artist, Maia Cruz Palileo (they/them), I assess how Palileo embodies care within their practice. I study Kapatid (sisters) in relation to Dean Worcester’s colonial-era photography of the Philippines which Palileo references in their research. This integrated analysis determines how Palileo’s work manifests in opposition to Worcester’s imperial perspective. In my study of multimedia work Take Up the Brown (2018) by Filipina American artist Jeanne F. Jalandoni (she/her), I examine how Jalandoni embodies her own testimony of navigating historical erasure and historical recovery as a result of residual imperial subjugation. I deconstruct Jalandoni’s usage of Louis Dalrymple’s propaganda cartoon, School Begins (1899), and its close association with the Rudyard Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). By historically contextualizing her archival references, I examine how Jalandoni’s visual testimony of colonial history is made tangible for viewers. In the second section of my study, I examine Jalandoni’s oil and textile work, Transience (2022) to explore how Jalandoni labors towards a connection with her ancestral homeland while solidifying her own bi-cultural identity as a Filipina American. I delve into Jalandoni’s engagement with family oral history, family photographs, temporal methods, and embodied practices to understand how she forges connections with ancestors, and ultimately, with the Philippines. Furthermore, I examine Transience as an Elsewhere, a methodological model and aesthetic that foregrounds identity-making and reconnection in diaspora.

This thesis explores various modes of experiencing art through the realms of the traditional museum and alternative museums/art organizations. The history of the museum is deeply entrenched in segregated and colonialist pasts, particularly in private and public displays of looted objects from around the world. In addition, museums have historically spotlighted and catered to white, European-based, male artists and audiences. These legacies have created a divide within the art world, particularly in how these traditional structures have excluded and alienated communities that have been marginalized (women, people of color, queer, etc.). Through explorations within the traditional and alternative museums/organizations in the United States and abroad, interviews, bell hooks’ theorizations and personal narratives, this thesis explores how cultural workers are restoring these severed bridges between Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s (BIPOC) communities and the art world. Many museum workers are renovating the traditionalist museum from the inside, diversifying the artwork shown, creating more outreach and inclusion programs, and calling for the support/reorganization of the board and trustees. Alongside these efforts, alternative organizations to the museum are doing the work that oftentimes cannot be done within the traditionalist structures due to their more rigid internal structuring -- giving them greater opportunities to work in tandem with the diverse communities that they represent. Though their foundations vary, both traditional and alternative art organizations have created strong bridges between the artworld and BIPOC communities by prioritizing paid fellowships for artists/art workers, studio space, education on navigating the art world, and accessibility for the community to join and see the art on display. Ultimately, the necessity for variance within art spaces, how they’re structured, who they cater to, and what they have on display is necessary in order to accurately represent the vast, diverse field of art.

The complexity of the U.S.-Mexico border is rooted in a fixation on establishing a clear separation of land that is unsafe and safe, between them and us. Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa states, “A border is a dividing line, a narrow string along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). In her 1987 semi-autobiographical work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she examines the U.S.-Mexico borderland as an in-between space that allows for physical, emotional, and creative transformation through the lens of nepantla, a Nahuatl term for the “space between, in the middle of, or in the midst of.” Recognizing that collective landscapes, specifically that of the U.S.-Mexico border, are separated through policy and physical barriers, filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (b. 1963, Mexico City, Mexico) explores the permeability of the U.S.-Mexico border desert landscape through his mixed reality immersive installation, Carne y Arena (Virtualmente Presente, Fisicamente Invisible) (Flesh and Sand: Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) (2017). This thesis analyzes the use of virtual reality technologies as immersive storytelling tools in Carne y Arena through a social history of art and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa's reinterpretation of the concept of nepantla as a liminal space of transformation. González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena makes visible the perils Latin American migrants face when crossing the Southwest desert in an experiential presentation. Through a socially conscious lens, he depicts real-life individuals and their stories with humanity and empathy. Carne y Arena draws attention to the dehumanization of Latin American migrants and transforms the U.S.-Mexico border landscape into a political theater of imagination, empathy, and memory.

Cuban abstract artist Dolores “Loló” Soldevilla was one of many artists in the mid-twentieth century grappling with the global Cultural Cold War’s heightened polemic of abstraction versus figuration. For Soldevilla, the battle to prove abstraction’s modern social relevancy would reach its peak in the sociopolitical context of Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. With mounting critical and revolutionary rhetoric against an abstract visual language, Castro’s Cuba all but required figurative art with pro-revolutionary content. Soldevilla returns to this stifling environment after a formative experience within the dynamic artist community of 1950s Paris. It is there, amongst both European and Latin American peers, that Soldevilla cemented the socially transformative abstraction she would confidently bring back to the island and apply to Cuba’s new revolutionary demands. Through a combination of her undeniably singular abstract aesthetic, her ability to showcase abstraction’s multiplicity, and a strategic presentation of her abstract productions post-1959, Soldevilla managed to persevere in a post-revolutionary climate determined to exclude her and remained steadfast in her belief of abstraction’s social relevance. This research establishes Soldevilla’s legacy of resilience and rightfully positions her as a pivotal figure of modern abstraction across Europe, Latin America, and Cuba.

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.

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.

“Anchored Absences: Selected Works by Doris Salcedo and Enrique Ramírez” addresses how the works of these artists link the past to the present and make memories manifest by wielding evocative associations through particular materials and places. In my study of the works Sumando ausencias (Adding Absences, 2016), Fragmentos (Fragments, 2018), and Quebrantos (Shattered, 2019) by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, I delve into the political context of these works, discuss the different groups with which Salcedo collaborated in their production, and analyze the materials she employed and their associations. Drawing from discussions on the relationship between art and politics, as well as debates about the activity of creating public memorials, I examine how, through these public artworks, Salcedo contributes new images and representations of the cost of Colombia’s civil war (1960s-present) to collective visual culture. In the second part of this study, I analyze the strategies the Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez uses to produce the films Brisas (Breezes, 2008) and Los durmientes (The sleepers, 2014), which assemble layers of antithetical visual and auditory elements and deter a linear construction of history. I engage with writings that deal with the fragmentary and plural nature of memory, the use and repression of images, and the role of architecture and geography in holding and activating memory to discuss how Ramírez unsettles the narratives held by Chile’s dictatorship (1973–1990) in contested spaces. I conclude that by making innovative images of political events, the works by these artists create new frameworks to conceptualize violence. Therein lies the power of image production.

The Past in Front of Us: Imagining Black Diasporas in the 21st Century seeks aesthetic connections between Black artists working around the world today. This project prioritizes aesthetic perception and affect in relation to Black Diasporic studies and reimagines the canon of work by Black artists. This project does not relegate aesthetics to surface or formal analyses, but understands aesthetic motifs as intelligent entities which communicate the experience of existence. This project affirms Black Diaspora as a dynamic imaginary. I extend traditional analyses of Black Diaspora from the continental edges of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. I look horizontally and create juxtapositions between artists working in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. I use transdisciplinary terms from art history, psychoanalysis, semiotics, philosophy, rhetoric, trauma theory, and critical race studies. Analyses build on multiple discourses because Black Diaspora is a mutable concept that shifts and evolves. This project is one of the first investigations of twenty-first century artistic production by Black artists globally. Until now, these artists’ work has been covered primarily in magazines, exhibition catalogues, and art reviews in the popular press. Chapters, organized by themes rather than regions, focus on emerging artists Dannielle Bowman, Sandra Brewster, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Kambui Olijimi, and Frida Orupabo. In addition, this thesis contributes a new theoretical frame to existing scholarship on artists Sammy Baloji, Sanford Biggers, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, and Cauleen Smith. As a speculative work, this thesis articulates a vocabulary and uncovers a multitude of aesthetic connections between art practices globally. A significant component of this work is to foreground Black artists’ historically sidelined insights about being in the world.

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.