Department of Visual Arts and Art History

Not long ago, Venezuela was considered the wealthiest in Latin America. Today, Human Rights Watch estimates that 2.3 million Venezuelan refugees are scattered through the Americas. Imagine having to leave your home with just a few possessions. The world is currently witnessing a wave of mass migration, with nearly 65 million people being displaced because of war or persecution, and an even higher number migrating from poverty. This thesis uses design to visually articulate the personal narratives surrounding the struggles of flight and the significance of emotion to the debate on migrant identity, acculturation, and the perception of being the other, focusing on the current displacement crisis in Venezuela. The visual message making process of graphic design is used as a catalyst for social good with the intent to create a conversation and generate an experience and that promotes advocacy.

For years, black women have endured the mainstream stereotypes of the Mammy,
the Jezebel, and the Sapphire.
Backtalk is a conversation about black women using their own language
translated into a graphic visual language. It examines ways in which black women are
active agents in the social scripting of their own identities. Their complexity is visualized
using a formal semiotic system based on their individual descriptions. This new visual
language allows black women to deconstruct the limiting categorizations mainstream
culture allows them, freeing participants from category-based expectations.

My thesis body of work offers a bridge into the physical, emotional, and spiritual
scarring caused by global intolerance towards the LGBTQIA+ community and
oppression embedded by patriarchal power. This body of work is a collection of
resurfaced history and experiences transformed physically by intentionally subverting
hyper-masculine materials into knots. My objective is to deconstruct individual knotted
cords that make up the fabric of my identity and reconstruct them into an installation.
Renascence offers a visceral experience for the audience that aesthetically explores the
body’s transformation as it heals. This thesis asserts a place within a reflective, fluid,
transitional identity expressing the intersection of the temporality and body that I occupy
as a Queer, Latinx artist of color. Working across media, Renascence incorporates
performance, photography, paper, paint, projection, mirrors and built environments.

Ardent Dwellings is a work about longing, self-exploration, and construction of identity through the arrangement of meticulously drawn and cut paper elements. Mainly consisting of drawn dried flower forms and expressive female hands, these elements come together in deliberate arrangements of spaces and relations. The moments of sensuality resulting from these exploratory touches signify moments created through traversing bodies and identities. To achieve this exploration visually, I created a collection of eight drawing collages and a large paper installation with mixed media components. The elements in this work are carefully placed in relation to one another with the intent of constructing an abstract narrative exploring the who, how, and the why of the self—specifically the queer self and the search for belonging that accompanies the discovery of this identity.

Power of Wrapping explores and communicates the somaesthetically inspired artistic act of wrapping as a generative force for healing. This thesis exhibition is an installation of artwork comprised of the combined forms and outcomes from two types of investigation. One, a studio practice in which my own somatic engagement, collaborates with my personal aesthetics of form, to produce two kinds of exhibited work. The first is a large traditionally wrapped Japanese temari and the second, involves twenty low-relief two dimensional wrappings on eight-inch stretcher frames and configured in a circular pattern with a larger wrapped stretcher frame in the center. Two, a social practice which embodies relationally and somaesthetically inspired art making within community groups, as generators of a large hanging form of wrapped hula hoops. In its totality, the installation is an expression of the idea that the body is essential to both making art and experiencing art.

The culmination of my graduate research and investigations is my thesis
exhibition Solace; Intimately Remembered Places. This body of paintings is a visual
representation of land, water and flora that focuses on my abstraction of nature to extract
essential elements that expresses my deep connection to a specific time and place, layered
with associated memories. By revisiting a landscape over a sustained period of time, I
developed a personal visual vocabulary to communicate the essential abstract forms of
nature and record the subtle nuances of color, light, shape, texture, positive and negative
space to evoke a particular time and place. I expanded my painting techniques through
the addition of a laser cutter. Rooted in a background of graphic design, my thesis also
incorporated and included a book form using similar strategies.

Contemporary educational trends have created a false dichotomy between the arts
and science. The will to make STEM subjects the focus of K-12 education, ignores both a
shared history and the potential for greater learning in a shared future.The intention of
Points of Intersection is to demonstrate that design, science and math intersect in their
concepts, practices and history. In the past, these disciplines were explored and studied
together and benefited from each other. By exploring what design and science have in
common and the points where they intersect, we can see the relevance and importance of
art and design in k-12 education and change STEM to STEAM. The exhibition will
explore point, line, plane and the “Golden Ratio” demonstrating how these concepts can
be understood from the perspectives of physics, math, art and design on a basic level.
These basic principles can be used to introduce these fields of study and bring a better understanding of them to students in K-12. Future designers and scientists with this
educational underpinning will have a better mutual understanding of one another’s field
and the potential for shared research, process and results.

I believe art can offer an antidote to our numbness and rekindle a sense of childlike
wonder. Reclaiming Wonder is an installation in which I aim to explore the
possibility of evoking the curiosity of childhood in the viewer’s mind and transporting
him or her into a dreamlike atmosphere to wander about in wonder through the use of the
senses of sight, touch, and hearing.

Lifeline: Expressions of Intimacy Through Paint is a body of paintings that seeks
to bridge physical distance by sensually applying layers of oil paint to recreate the
physicality of my husband. I allow the viewer to enter into a private exchange by the use
of intimately charged spaces, like the bed, which demonstrates how paint can be a
conduit for touch in absentia. By intensely remembering my partner in these works, I
reconstitute my knowing him through paint and seek to move beyond mere representation
to know and express him better. Therefore, these paintings not only bridge the physical
distance between my body and his, but search for meaningful expressions of my internal
conversations as I make visual discoveries that expand my understanding of him.

Belongings hybridizes photography, sculpture, and printmaking through new laser
technology. The exhibited work communicates a lingering sense of homesickness and
maps a path through the objects discovered in my father’s wallet shortly after his passing.