Very few individuals have been able to influence a wide variety of disciplines as Leonardo Da Vinci. This paper assesses the artist’s development of anatomy by delving into his influences, notebook conclusions and artistic applications. It argues that Leonardo Da Vinci evolved his understanding of the human body through three phases of analysis. The scientist transitioned from descriptive anatomy, to mechanically based notions and finally to an interpretation of origin.

In the first section, I research Da Vinci’s interest in the mind’s ability to support the five primary senses. The artist focused on the sub sections in the eye and the cranium during his first study in 1489. The paper indicates how he applied a qualitative analysis grounded on the study of proportion and harmony to support his analysis. Da Vinci began his second period of investigation relating to the body in motion around 1500. During this analysis he described several theories for the function of muscles, joints and the overall transfer of force in the body. Da Vinci pays more attention to the human body as a subject of movement governed by mechanical laws stemming from geometry in motion. Through his study of the spine, I describe a transition from a rigid structure dominated by proportion to a form of synthesizing large amount of information. In his third and last series, Da Vinci examined the internal organs, respiration and blood flow for the purpose of comprehending the nature of humanity. The artist incorporates mechanics to the belief that everything in nature holds a purpose. He also delves into the idea of the microcosm of the world in relation to the microcosm of the body. Through these ideas, the paper shines a light on Leonardo’s development of anatomy and demonstrates a transition from previous interpretations of anatomy.

This paper explores the photos of Russell Lee taken throughout the state of Arizona in 1940. Lee was one of eleven photographers who worked under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration from 1936-1943. As a photographer with the FSA, Lee’s mission was to “introduce America to Americans” by documenting the effects of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression on people across the country. Beyond that, photographers at the FSA had the additional goal to showcase the positive effects the FSA and federal government’s assistance had on their lives. While his photos were primarily taken and used to promote the work of the FSA, the federal government, and the state of Arizona, Lee’s photos—both what is included in them and excluded from them—reveal much more. His focus on images of government farms and their landscapes documents the government’s new land use policies that emerged in the wake of the Dust Bowl as well as beliefs in strict environmental control and overcoming nature. Likewise, Lee’s photographs of Arizona residents reveal the changing racial demographics in the state as well as the government’s policies on immigration and migration. His images relating to Native Americans further reveal the government’s stance on both racial and environmental issues as well as contemporary cultural understandings of native people.

While Lee was the longest serving and most prolific of the FSA photographers his work—perhaps because of the sheer breadth of it—has gone largely unexplored often in favor of contemporaries like Dorothea Lange or Gordon Parks. His images taken in Arizona in 1940 are especially under-researched in favor of his much more famous series taken in Pie Town, New Mexico in the same year. This paper works to shine a light in this unexplored area as well as to examine it through the also often-ignored lenses of race and the environment.

Eve and Mary represented two different types of women within medieval society. Their images were used by church men to perpetuate a framework that applauded obedient women while aiming to deter women who stood in opposition of their male counterparts. Such desires of the church materialized in images like The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve which blatantly puts the two women in stark opposition with one another. Eve, illustrated in a seductive manner, represented the disobedient woman. In this instance disobedience is synonymous with controlling or having a position of power over their male counterparts. She contrasts with Mary who took on a pious role within the church and is often displayed fully covered from head to toe. Her prominence comes from her close relationship with Jesus and not through her own power, thus she plays a subservient role as the carrier and supporter of Jesus. On the other hand, Eve plays a direct role in the fall of mankind. Her images portray her as a temptress easily swindled by the enemy, thereby becoming a symbol of the enemy herself. Her disobedience to God, who is often depicted as a man, parallels women’s disobedience to the male figures in their lives. Given this logic, women who go against or challenge male authority are essentially like Eve, and they fit into the bad woman motif.

To validate the authority of the church and understand the role women played in society, this paper will analyze historical information such as the Albigensian Crusades and courtly love literature. The events that unfolded due to the direct involvement of the church, like the Albigensian Crusades and the decline of courtly literature thereafter, reaffirms the assertion that the church had the power to utilize art to insidiously control the behavior of women in their communities.

The Expressionist period of art featured bright, exaggerated colors and lines, representative of the artists’ own feelings and ideas rather than an objective view of reality. Two artists of this period, James Ensor (1860-1949) and Emil Nolde (1867-1956), produced aesthetically similar pieces of art, predominantly featuring imagery of the grotesque and the exotic. However, while stylistically similar, Ensor and Nolde’s artworks do not necessarily have the same meanings and interpretations. This paper will discuss the possible interpretations of Ensor’s and Nolde’s artworks, and how these two artists exemplify the risks of oversimplification caused by grouping artists by movement, such as Expressionism. It will argue that Expressionist art does not have a standardized formula for understanding certain imagery, such as the grotesque and the exotic. Despite visual and stylistic similarities, James Ensor and Emil Nolde might have had vastly different intentions behind producing images of masked figures, grotesque faces, and non-European imagery. In order to determine and better understand the interpretations behind Ensor’s and Nolde’s artworks, and thus explain why art movements can be limiting, this paper will address both of the artists’ biographical information, primarily focusing on their political affiliations and opinions regarding the social hierarchies of their time, and how these factors may have contributed to their artistic choices. It will also examine the historical contexts in which the artists were working, discussing how this might have influenced their works. Additionally, this paper will examine multiple artworks of each artist, in order to compare and contrast their potential motives in creating certain aesthetically similar works. Through this comparison, this paper seeks to better comprehend Expressionist art as a whole: can it be assumed that an Expressionist image of the grotesque/exotic has one essential interpretation, or does the interpretation vary on the artists’ own experiences and beliefs? This paper concludes that, through examining the artwork of Ensor and Nolde, the latter holds true. Although Expressionist artworks may be similar from a visual stance, the interpretations are entirely subjective and relate heavily to the beliefs, histories, and affiliations of the individual artists.

This paper looks to material culture to explore the discrepancies between the vision of the Lieber Code, a landmark legal document promoting tolerance and the protection of cultural heritage, and the realities Plains Indians faced following the Civil War. The Lieber Code, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, was the first of its kind in history to codify the protection of personal and cultural property rights and to mandate respect towards enemy religious and social customs. It is credited with influencing the Hague and Geneva conventions of the 20th century. Yet the subsequent treatment of Native American personal belongings, sacred objects, and items of cultural significance demonstrates that the code was far from successful.

In considering the disparity of law and the conditions of material culture, this research focuses on three objects and two military events. The Ledger art of the Double Trophy Book removed from the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn illustrates the continued violence faced by Native Americans following the Lieber Code and treaties intended to protect Indian land. The existence of Ledger art itself represents Euro-American encroachment on Native American interests. The style evolved from hide painting--where Plains groups painted cultural subjects on the skins of Indigenous animals. Ledger art, in turn, reflected a shift in U.S.-Native relations over resources, as its materials were increasingly sourced from ledger books and other paper introduced by troops, missionaries, and reservation officials. Similarly, military scenes and other encounters with white people began to dominate its content. Two important Native American garments and their history also evidence the gap between the Lieber Code and the treatment experienced by Native Americans. Sitting Bull’s leggings and Bigfoot’s buckskin shirt both reflect the Ghost Dance movement and its brutal end at the Massacre of Wounded Knee. The movement—simultaneously messianic, apocalyptic, and pacifist--emerged from a culture in crisis as Plains Indians continued to bear the consequences of an ignored Lieber Code. The removal of both items from the bodies of Native American leaders demonstrates the persistent interpretation of art as trophy in war and the failure of the Lieber Code to carry out its protection of people and heritage.

Sandcastle (1963) and Remembered Sea (1974), as two unconventionally shaped, mostly horizontal floor works within Anne Truitt's wider production of mostly vertical forms demonstrate Truitt's development in the same line of thinking over a 10 year period. Both works thematize an internal division between the artwork's literal status as an object and the artwork's conventionally secured status as pictorial, a picture of something, or more than its material facts. I argue both works dramatize this distinction as an internal contradictio and propose the active inhabitance of suggested standpoints to resolve the image. I also assert this drama of literal and pictorial corresponds to a drama of separateness and continuity, both within the self and between the self and others that is fundamental to the act of expression.

I make my argument first by introducing precedent for Truitt's interest in standpoints in her contemporary works of the 1970s. Then by establishing Truitt's relationship to medium conventions, I hope to draw a contrast between modernist and minimalist relationships to medium conventions, situating Truitt on the modernist side. Finally, I plan to compare the unfolding tension between Sandcastle and Remembered Sea's pictorial and literal qualities to the competing sense of continuity and separateness that underscores human action and artistic production. This gives the floor pieces a self-reflexive quality. They are about their own making, and they resolve a contradiction between separateness and continuity inherent to their making by suggesting a viewpoint which shows how both aspects form the whole of the artwork.

Almost a decade has passed since citizens took to the streets of New York City’s Financial District, organized by Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, to protest the increasing role corporations were taking in democratic practices combined with their lack of legal boundaries. What began as a peaceful occupation quickly turned into a larger conversation about American economic immobility as the magnitude of media coverage increased and Occupy Wall Street became a pulsing physical and temporal arena for airing individual grievances and sharing alternative economic thoughts. Art played no small role in articulating revolutionary ideas and kick-starting conversations on leftist economic philosophy, its nuances, and its narrative effects on people’s lives.

The most legitimate form of the artistic exhibition lies in No Comment, a five-day-long, nonstop display of visual and performance art, with a global audience. Held in a building that formerly housed J.P. Morgan’s headquarters, the exhibition was organized in a matter of days by relatively unknown curators, calling for work from any and all artists. Unlike formal exhibitions of well-known museums, No Comment attempted to start a literal conversation amongst its viewers with no boundaries between them and the works, an aggressive and loud atmosphere, and encouraged interaction between viewers, artists, and the art itself. Both Occupy Wall Street as a whole and the No Comment exhibition exist as turning points in the history of leftist protest art as it operates within the system it protests. This project explores how different pieces in the exhibition comport with and disrupt capitalist thought, and ultimately asks whether protest art can achieve its goals while working within the system it struggles against.

As a genre, animal painting is often associated with a tradition of specialized artists in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The foundations of this tradition, however, are in Northern Europe, among the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. The Early Modern period was marked by a shift in the way animals were conceptualized, treated, and understood by natural historians, philosophers, laypeople and artists alike. In the first half of the seventeenth century, an emblematic system of symbolic and allegorical associations characterized the human understanding and perception of animals. As the study of natural history moved from a firmly humanist tradition in the Renaissance to a practice based increasingly on empirical observations, the position of the animal in the macrocosm was questioned, and the drive to classify and categorize nature occupied natural historians.

Abraham Hondius’s The Amsterdam Dog Market (c. 1677) illustrates a key transitional moment in the mid-seventeenth century during which surviving understandings of animals and the natural world from the Renaissance mingled with new theories of the animal (and human) body and mind, generating an ambiguous category of artwork which is both anthropomorphic and scientific. Through the organization and imagery used in sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history encyclopedias as well as the works of preceding and contemporary animal painters, I will demonstrate the ambiguity and continuing development in the fields of natural science and philosophy which prompted artists like Hondius to engage with themes outside of the traditional hunting pictures and game pieces, in some cases inventing the premise of their images in order to compromise between competing ideas. In the case of The Amsterdam Dog Market, the liminal position of the dog between the human and animal spheres further complicates their classification and portrayal as characters or objects. As immigrant artists to England, Hondius and his Dutch peers likely influenced the subsequent development and popularity of animal painting there, and his artistic choices reveal the complicated network of associations present in the mind of the contemporary viewer, which structured their understanding of both animal and image.

Engaging in historical remembrance on derelict industrial sites means confronting not only histories of economic and social injustice, but also the myth of an ‘irretrievable past’ and the ways that we construct history. Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark and the adjacent 35th Avenue Superfund Site in Birmingham Alabama are uniquely positioned for critical engagement with all of these themes. By addressing the Superfund Site, conducting meaningful community engagement, co-creating museum exhibits with audiences, and splitting from the historical ‘museum as teacher’ programming, Sloss could be a powerful agent of change. They could not only have a measurable impact on the long-awaited cleanup of the superfund site, but more broadly, change how industrial museums practice historical remembrance. As a whole, industrial museums need to confront the legacy of pollution and environmental racism that their industries have left behind in order to create real change today. Ultimately, as we reach into our ideas about history and heritage, we should do so with the notion that it has the potential to powerfully affect our future.

Few experiences are as overlooked and meaningful as the daily interaction with the built environment of the home. Specifically, across the gender equality movements of the twentieth century, the kitchen was ground zero—the the kitchen rearranged with the feminist movement, and advanced from space of sexist division to that of cooperative responsibility and equality. Through the emergence of material feminists, the rise of co-housing and central kitchens, and the integration of professional and domestic space, the nuclear kitchen played a key role in defining and transforming the gender roles of the twentieth century.

The kitchen was a vessel for three key phases in domestic equality: assuaging women’s efforts in their traditional roles, enabling the division of labor across sexes, and finally promoting cooperation across gender roles. In analyzing the material feminists of the 1930’s, Swedish collective housing projects from the 1940s and 1950s, and co-housing trends from the 1970’s, I argue that the Frauen-Werk-Stadt, or the “woman-work-city” in English, incorporates traditionally overlooked woman-friendly design into conventional housing development plans, and synthesizes the various feminist movements of the twentieth century using a universal approach to gender equality known as “gender mainstreaming.” Distinct for an average of four stories per apartment building, grassy courtyards and accessible staircases, and diverse floor plans, the Frauen-Werk-Stadt incorporates woman- friendly design into conventional housing with a twist—from proposal, to construction, to its lasting legacy, the Frauen-Werk-Stadt attempts to elevate modest cooperation and experience into the industry of design itself.

After the immigration of Anglo-Saxons from Southern Scandinavia and Northern Germany to England beginning in the early fifth century, they had many interactions with Scandinavians over the following centuries, facilitated by Viking raids and religious missions. In this period (the ninth to twelfth centuries), Christianity was at a high point and many of the Norse rulers would align themselves with the most powerful ruling religion in order to bolster their standings within the European arena. This increased interaction between cultures paved the way for the exchange of style and ideas which lead to this topic of this paper: stave churches as physical methods of the religious conversion of Scandinavia. Stave churches, wooden churches of medieval Nordic origin, are places built for the intention of Christian worship. They present imagery that is often a very clear marker of hybridization, the blending of thoughts and images, as a means of connecting ideas and making sense of the late ninth-century development of Christianization. This paper will argue that through looking at interactions between native and foreign populations around Scandinavia (the area including modern Norway, Denmark, and Sweden), examining Scandinavian-influenced styles found in Britain made by the Anglo-Saxons, and analyzing imagery found on architecture within three different stave churches (Urnes, Borgund, and Heddal), the examples of hybridization in imagery and architecture found in stave churches functioned as a form of translating newer Christian thought to native Norse people in order to make it more understandable. Additionally, the paper asserts that it was not just the native Norsemen that actively used this imagery, but also the Anglo-Saxons. In looking at the interactions between these two groups of people and seeing how the institutionalized process of conversion was reflected within the iconography of these stave churches, this paper helps to understand how these images and buildings were used to the benefit of the ruling powers to align themselves and their subsequent kingdoms with the ultimate powers at the time.

Medieval artists reserved nudity for depictions of the sinful. Images of temptresses, sinners, heathens, and infidels can be seen undressed by their shame and sin. This is particularly prevalent for females as their nakedness often symbolizes sexual temptation. Yet, it is not always the sinners who are presented bare. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a holy and devout woman, is illustrated unadorned in Duke Jean de Berry’s illuminated manuscript Les Belles Heures. The private devotional book was created between 1405 and 1409 and illustrated by the gifted Limbourg brothers. Nudity and sexual imagery frequent the pages of this devotional book, yet, Saint Catherine’s images are the most striking. Catherine is illustrated semi-nude, with blond hair, white skin, rounded breasts, and a fecund stomach. The Saint has been envisioned as the ideal medieval woman. As the manuscript was created by male artists for the supposedly salacious patron Duke de Berry, scholars argue that this nudity represents Catherine as a sexual object for the gratification of its male viewers. However, the Limbourg brothers’ depiction of Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Jean de Berry’s Les Belles Heures is more complex than this. While Saint Catherine’s nude body indicates an idealized vision of the female form, visually consumed by a male audience, her nudity could also be considered as a source of female power. As the Saint is described in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, a book of hagiographies popular throughout Medieval Europe, Catherine’s strength lies not just in her sexual purity but in her intelligence, persuasion, and wisdom. The Limbourg brother’s illustrations of Catherine simply reiterate the words of Voragine. When considered alongside a religious understanding of nudity and clothing, and in relation to female viewership, Catherine’s naked figure expresses the holy strength, provision, and power of the Christian woman.