Scholarship & Research
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Item Alone in the West with a portrait of art history(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Krause, Nicholas O'Brien; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin BeamishHow do we find our place in the historical narrative of art on the vast continuum of human creativity? Art is a reflection and director of culture that embodies historic movements and fundamental principles that enable us to see a continuity and a relationship to humanity over the centuries. To understand our place in the historical canon we must reflect on the past to evaluate our current situation. We draw from the past to inform our understanding of art and culture to take responsibility for the direction of art in the future. To do this we must find a relationship to the aesthetics of historical, cultural movements and investigate the ideas and processes of different ages, to see how we can relate to them, and figure out how to represent the expanding collection of culture and art going forward.Item Chathamesque: Russell Chatham's Montana vernacular(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Bishop, Storrs Myron, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa RagainPainter and lithographer Russell Chatham introduced a Tonalist aesthetic to Montana's art scene in the 1970s, making way for a new aesthetic relationship between humans and nature. His work is recognizable by its gray-and-brown palette, horizontally structured compositions, and his signature envelope of atmospheric haze. When Chatham depicted a scene with fog, snowfall or rain obscuring parts of the landscape, he evoked a quiet mood conducive to introspection. People familiar with his work, especially those living in rural Park County, Montana, might look out their window and call the view, "Chathamesque." This term--along with other commonplace statements like, "It's a Russell Chatham kind of day"--became tightly bound to his artistic style and public identity. In contrast to the romanticized mythology of C.M. Russell's Old West, or the sublime grandeur of Thomas Moran's panoramic landscapes, Chatham offered a depiction of the intermountain West as a place for private, transcendental intimacy with nature. This thesis will analyze two series of Chatham's works he created in the 1980s: The Seasons, a series of twelve paintings commissioned by the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) in 1990, and The Missouri Headwaters Suite, twelve lithographs he made between 1985 and 1987. Through three stages of comparative analysis of his paintings and lithographs, this paper will trace Chatham's aesthetic development from conventional California Tonalism toward his transcendental Montana landscapes. The first stage connects Chatham's style to the nineteenth century's California Tonalist movement and its Transcendentalist relationship with nature. The second stage traces his struggle and resolution with interpreting Montana's mountainous landscape. The third stage ties his development as a lithographer to the establishment of his aesthetic vernacular. Each of these stages was another step toward a distinctive style which came to be uniquely identified with Russell Chatham. By the early 1990s, his local audiences had internalized his approach to landscape, and the term "Chathamesque" became a vernacular way of expressing their relationship with Montana's changeable appearance.Item Mary Cassatt (1844-1926): advising against convention(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2022) Hanger, Paige McCarthy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa RagainAmerican artist, Mary Cassatt became an advisor when she joined the Impressionists and by the 1890s, she as a celebrated advisor, who worked with elite Gilded Age collectors like the Havemeyer's of New York, the Palmers of Chicago, the Sears of Boston, and others. Anchored in market-based and epistolary research, this thesis will examine Cassatt's advising career and her graphic work. Cassatt taught her clients to value artworks that included both stylistic elements comfortable to American taste and unfamiliar modernist tropes. As an advisor, Cassatt educated her clients to acquire works which were hybrid in nature and borrowed stylistic qualities from accepted artwork and from modernist esthetics. The addition of these in-between works to American collections primed American taste to incrementally accept modernism, realism, and the avant-garde into Gilded Age collections. Cassatt's impact on her clients' collections shaped American collecting habits and the collections of American national museums.Item Reimagining John Dewey for the 21st century: the art of living - praxis for social utility and wellbeing(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Munson, Jesine Lynn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa RagainThe purpose of this dissertation is to explore the rich parallels and connections between John Dewey's pragmatic theories involving aesthetics, education, and experience and the aspects of the Compassion Project that center upon participant's physical and imaginative engagement in the experience of creating an artifact expressive of their thoughts and feelings. As human beings inhabit the world, we participate in shared universes of meaning and value that have been realized through human activity. This transformation of the powers of nature into expressive media, or an "artifact", gives shape and significance to human life. Art, in other words, is nothing more than the quest for concretely embodied meaning and value in human existence. Embodied aesthetic experience fluidly incorporates thinking, feeling, and making which produces experiences of the most meaningful sort. This research realizes the importance of this type of mindful, creative, compassionate engagement in developing resilient communities for the Twenty-First Century. By reimagining John Dewey's ideas, I examine the importance of aesthetic experience for our everyday lives as a means for communication and unity across diverse perspectives. The artifact is iconic of that nexus of dynamical change and emblematic of Dewey's theories as they find expression in the Compassion Project. It is a retrofitting of theory to practice. In the process, both Dewey's theories and the Compassion Project's practices may be better illuminated. As this research has progressed, the notion of artifact creation has advanced into the idea of habit formation within ourselves, our actual bodies and minds becoming the artifact of our making, applying pragmatic intelligence as the art of living.Item Strength in fragility(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Ahn, Myung; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jeremy HatchCeramic vessels often have humanlike aspects to them. People are drawn to these anthropomorphic qualities because they live in a human body. Clay contains both a strength and a fragility that correlates to the physical and psychological experiences people have as human beings. Physically, bodies came from the earth/clay, and if thoughts and emotions emerged out of matter, the clay form and the human form share both origin and experience. Psychologically, people redefine what is considered failure, and turn a perceived broken experience into a great gift. My ceramic work is mostly made out of paper clay that appears to be fragile, but is very resilient. The idea of success and failure as a visual art is explored in this paper. Collapses, warpages, accidents, and fusions that occur in the kiln are rearranged and reevaluated by the artist to challenge the audience's preconceived notion of beauty and success. These expected and unexpected changes in the process of making directly reflect what we face in life that is full of surprises. Accepting 'what is' in life and the outcome in the kiln helps me to be present and develop skills to see things from various angles and find beauty in it.Item Common ground: finding an American aesthetic in ceramics through the history of wilderness and ceramic art in America(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2021) Botelho Alvarez, Alejandro Manuel; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Josh DeWeeseMy quest to find a unifying principle that constitutes 'American ceramics' has led me to survey the histories of studio ceramics in America and Wilderness and Nature in America. I've discovered resounding similarities between the two: both were responses to a flagging sense of identity and a hope to (nostalgically) confirm and promote certain values and worldviews (over others). Both our relationships with nature and American studio ceramics are monolithic in their founding ideals and have persisted into the 21st century; both have been fundamental in my upbringing and have codified my own worldview. However, I've become sensitive to the fact these particular values are rooted in privilege, are fundamentally exclusionary, and are ripe for a reexamination. In this paper I propose that we revisit the bearing of the values that wilderness and the aesthetic judgements of ceramics in the early 20th century have on society today. It does not mean that these traditions should be totally abandoned. Instead, I am convinced that a more pluralistic and inclusive approach to both is a more holistic way forward. By appraising the histories of wilderness and ceramics in America I hope to uncover some of the unrecognized people and cultures that have been deliberately redacted from the history. In so doing, I expect to find similarities and trends within the existing canon that are commonly celebrated and introduce the forgotten traditions back into the fold, such that it might lead to a new vision for American ceramics. In conclusion, I hope that this rediscovered American aesthetic might be the framework in which I create my own body of work, with a particular appeal towards process rather than form, as a criterion of excellence. With an understanding that American studio pottery has many different traditions to pull from that are still being 'digested', but that these diverse inspirations is not a weakness, but a strength.Item Neither here nor there(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2020) Marian Albin, Cristina Simona; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sara MastTraditional rites of passage are losing value today or are forced to take new forms, sometimes at a rapid pace. Inevitable events instantly and actively change our personal, societal and global life. Neither Here Nor There examines mental and physical liminal spaces. My aim is to define the concept, etymology and history of liminality, while exploring its relevance in our modern world. Included as part of this paper, images from my current body of work chronicle different transitional environments, both aesthetically and emotionally. The original concept of liminality, as described by earlier theorists, no longer holds the same meaning. Transitory experiences become perpetual, some occurring at the same time, some repeating. A liminal space can sometimes metamorphose into a home. In this thesis I am addressing several questions of liminality: What are the attributes of liminality and how does it reshape our identity? How do we navigate unsettling unknowns when the ground under our feet seems to constantly shift? During the writing of this paper, the novel virus COVID-19 hit the world, resulting in fear, stress, anxiety, chaos, and changes. However, the crisis also brought with it flexibility, creativity, collaboration, and resilience. New forms of ritual are being born every second.Item In pursuit of value(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2020) Gathje, Samuel Gehring; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jim ZimpelWhat follows is an exploration of the bounds of Material Intelligence in contemporary forms of making. While the physical work is autobiographical, and this research is broken up by anecdotal vignettes of my lived experience, the questions presented here are urgent and present. What is craft and where can it be most useful today? What objects hold stories, and how can we become more connected to these objects? In a world filled with the mass produced, I aim in this writing to showcase a different way of approaching material and making. A regard for old ways of seeing, and for a mindfulness when it comes to objects, stories, and spaces. This writing is my journey in pursuit of value. Through my own life, through various mentors, teachers, and lessons, I have learned to look to an object's origin to understand its value. Folk art (art of the people), the handmade, and traditional craft all ground us to place, time, experience or culture. I am not arguing that things must be done one way because it is tradition. Instead, I look at what these traditions provide beyond the object, which is often a communal experience of growth, appreciation, and learning. Craft can connect people across distance and time. To borrow a phrase from Glenn Adamson, I hope through this research to uncover a world of 'Fewer, Better Things'.