Friends of Fondren Library Research Awards

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https://hdl.handle.net/1911/21949
Launched in 2008 and funded by the Friends of Fondren Library, the Fondren Library Research Awards program recognizes students who demonstrate extraordinary skill and creativity in the application of library and information resources to original research and scholarship. Students submitted their research project and an essay outlining how they used specific library tools and resources to do their research. For more information about the awards, see here

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Browsing Friends of Fondren Library Research Awards by Subject "Art History"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Duality and the Mask in Eighteenth-Century Actress Portraits
    (Rice University, 2015) Evans, Jane
    Theatrical masks in portraits of eighteenth-century actresses signify more than the figure’s profession. Multiple masks in a single composition and the figure’s active engagement with these plastic, yet eerily human objects suggest a more complex relationship between the theatrical mask and portraiture. Many scholars have examined eighteenth-century British actress portraits as tools by which the sitter elevated her reputation and distanced herself from associations with prostitution. Yet the presence of the theatrical mask in portraits by Joshua Reynolds, John Hoppner, and William Beechey, for example, has received no critical attention. Quantity, placement, and interaction between actress and object indicate metaphorical significance and demand examination. I argue the mask acts as a marker of duality and potential deception, becoming the locus for anxieties within the sister arts of theatre and painting. Artistic and dramatic theorists were in the process of codifying each medium based upon strict categories and dichotomies. Yet the actress’s proclivity for deception spilled onto the canvas, requiring artistic intervention. As such, the mask was a site of artistic and social anxiety, where gender norms, aesthetic principles, and power relations were visually negotiated.
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    Exchanges: Artistic Dialogues Between Tibet and China
    (Rice University, 2019) Ziebell, Zelda
    In a dynamic exhibition, Exchanges: Artistic Dialogues Between Tibet and China explores hybridized Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Chinese styles from the Tang to the Qing Dynasty. China and Tibet have engaged in an iconographic dialogue, facilitated through Buddhism, for a period of over a thousand years, and a survey of this convergence of styles will present museum visitors with a visual timeline of a complex, transcultural relationship. The exhibition is organized by three sections: Secular Portraiture and Encounters, Esoteric Buddhism and Chinese Emperors, and Vajrayāna Buddhist Figures.
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    Seeing opposite: The Battle of Algiers and “colonial analogy” in the “Panther 21”
    (Rice University, 2018) Rooney, Adrienne
    The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al (1970)—as of 1972, the longest and costliest Supreme Court case in New York State history—concerned the indictment of twenty-two members of the Black Panther Party. Charged with “an over-all plan to harass and destroy [the] elements of society which the defendants regarded as part of the ‘power structure,’” the case reads as an exposé on racism and classism in the U.S. at the time. During the trial, the defense and prosecution, the defendants, the jury, the judge, and members of the public sat together through a screening of The Battle of Algiers. The 1966 pseudo-documentary, by Gillo Pontecorvo, centers on a 1956-7 campaign of urban guerilla warfare against French colonial forces in Algeria’s capital city. Arguing the defendants used the film as a training manual for their alleged plan to bomb several public spaces and administrative buildings in the New York Metropolitan area, the prosecution presented it as evidence. While the defense, representing the BPP members, worried the screening would fuel a conviction of their clients, the opposite occurred. Indeed, at a time when the national “establishment” often marginalize those fighting against racist U.S. policy and European colonization, one of its branches—the DA’s office and the concomitant executive branch in the nations largest city—appropriated a highly affective film championing those very causes as evidence. As this paper argues, despite the DA’s intentions, the maneuver publically linked anti-colonial sentiment with inner city “radicalism,” a gesture that exposed profound equivalences between them.
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