This essay delves into the portrayl of fruit in Italian Baroque still life painting and its relationship to period botanical studies. By formally analyzing two seperates artists of the Baroque I hope to understand the importance of still life in scientific history. I focus my research on Caravaggio due to his cultural importance as a famous Baroque artist. In particular, the works of Caravaggio can be used as tool to understand the culture of fruit in Baroque Italy. I take a point of departure the high naturalism of Caravaggio, whose attentive depictions of fruit reflect seventeenth-century Italian domestic agriculture and import market. Botanical artist Giovanna Garzoni painted for Medici members of Florence specifically Grand Duke Ferdinando II and Grand Duchess Victoria. Garzoni provides an example of the fruit being grown in Medici botanical gardens. Medici botanical gardens are a prime example of horticultural practice within the seventeenth - century. By contrasting the depiction of the same species of fruit in Garzoni's painting Still Life of Birds and Fruit and Caravaggio's work Still Life With Fruit On a Stone Ledge, we can explore how the artists represented truth differently. Caravaggio paints from a specific subject by paying close attention to the detail of his subject in imperfections, which represent truth in specific form. This contrasts with Garzoni who a generalized truth of the species as a whole and not each individual subject. In this essay the contrast between these two artists will be explored to understand their different avenues of depicting truth in their artworks. Theatrical metaphor, sexuality, religion, and genre painting will all be employed to approach Caravaggios work. Comparitively Garzonis work will be viewed in the context of gender, class, and botanical collection.  Caravaggio and Garzonis seventeenth century still lifes explore how artists enter the discourse of scientific truth. 

In what social context can the Mona Lisa, a thoroughly neutral work, be ascribed vampiric qualities? Ultimately, in a culture that places the feminine form on the precipice between life and death. Since the forging of witchcraft iconography in the sixteenth century, the aesthetics of the woman have operated in the limbo of “otherness,” painting her as both the giver of life and, conversely, the bringer of death. Her form is used as a template in which to project male anxieties, existential and social alike. This transforms the woman into a contemplative canvas, where her human qualities are undermined by her poetic associations. This artistic liminality has informed depictions of women throughout history, revealing itself most notably in the overlap between woman and death. In this essay, I analyze how these concepts manifest in Death and The Maiden motifs, erotic corpse paintings, vampire and siren imagery, and death portraiture. While Death and the Maiden imagery establishes a firm connection between death and the female form, the erotic corpse paintings of the Romantic era expand upon it, fully converging death and female sexuality by the nineteenth century. Simultaneously, the vampire/siren paintings of the Symbolist movement depict the threats of women in a comparatively didactic manner, reinvigorating the retired witch iconography of the sixteenth century. Women and death become fully consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where presumably neutral female figures are endowed with vampiric qualities (or, an inherently sinister sensuality). To understand the gendered visual language that haunts contemporary culture, one must sift through the art of the past. In doing so, there is a clear theme of female demonization and dehumanization, exaggerated through the lens of male death anxiety.

My focus is on artists who have been affected by motherhood. I am looking at how being a mother, or not being a mother influences their work. While I am concentrating on female artists, this pertains to all women in the work force. I am looking at different works created by three seperate artists who have used their art to show the impact of the expectatoin to be a mother. The artists are Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, and Anna Rose Bain. The pressure of motherhood is a recurring theme throughout history. I first look at Cassatt, who was an artist throughout the late 1800's. She was an artist who had to choose between doing what she loved and being a mother. She chose her passion for painting, but is best known for her depictions of mothers and their children. For her I will look at the painting Mother and Child, which shows the feeling of deep love that the mother has for the child in her arms. The next person is Kahlo, who was an artist during the first half of the 1900's. I specifically look at the painting Henry Ford Hospital to show how infertility can affect women. The last artist is Bain, who's painting from the last decade, Proverbs 31:17 (Self Portrait at 29), shows the balance between being a mother and being an artist. This is something that every woman has either experienced, or at least given some thought to. Using these painting and a few secondary sources, I uncover details of the lives of the artists to show how being a mother and an artist creates obstacles that do not arise for their male counterparts. 

Throughout the 20th century, Alphonse Mucha’s Job Cigarette Poster (1896) remained a touchstone for artists across disciplines. His highly influential poster, with its trademark sinuous lines, densely patterned surface and suggestive gestures, unsurprisingly became an inspiration for mid-century graphic artists — specifically the psychedelic and comic art of the 1960s. Within the LSD and hippie drug culture, numerous artists revisited Mucha’s depiction and expanded on his sensuous representation. For this project, I look at the psychedelic comic and poster art of notables such as Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Martin Sharp, and Robert Crumb. I identify the degree to which Mucha’s work remains palpably present. For example, Mouse’s hauntingly visceral lines, Moscoso’s highly patterned surfaces, and Crumb's flippant poses reinterpret Mucha’s Job Cigarette Poster. Over the subsequent decades, Art Nouveau inspired psychedelic art has only intensified. Recently resurfaced in psychedelic realism, Alex Grey, Cameron Gray, and Tokio Aoyama use influences of psychedelic art to create works of spiritual actualization. In this paper, I look at a century in which a distinct style of representation shifts. From the marketing of cigarettes (no less), to the characterization of counterculture and drug paraphernalia, to the representation of sensuous and spiritual interpretation.

In this essay I seek to trace how W.E.B Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness and Alain Locke’s theory of the New Negro are reflected within the fashion of hip-hop, the portrait paintings of Kehinde Wiley, and the television show Empire. These three examples subvert and appropriate from the predominantly white, male-dominated narrative of the West to create new forms of art within the African diaspora. I also posit that the creation of hip-hop develops into a second Harlem Renaissance, one whose cultural production serves to promote a more modern black identity, creating a new black aristocracy within the African-American community. The examples I use within this essay demonstrate how clothing brands such as Gucci, FUBU and Karl Kani popularized by African-American hip-hop artists such as Tupac Shakur and LL Cool J emblematize a visual representation of Du Bois and Locke’s terms double-consciousness and New Negro. In a continuation of Du Bois and Locke’s hopes for a new more positive black identity, one that is predicated upon self-assurance and self-empowerment, contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley, in recognizing hip-hop artists as cultural producers and creators of a new black identity, paints the portraits of LL Cool J and the late Biggie Smalls. The television show Empire can be seen as the final culmination of hip-hop as a second Harlem Renaissance and marks a recognizable shift into a third dynamic phase of black identity within America’s African-American community. Examples of the African diasporic art that can be seen within the show include works from Kehinde Wiley, Kara Walker and Jean-Michael Basquiat. Commonalities between all of these artists can be seen in the subversion of the Western narrative, the promotion for an empowered black identity and an ongoing discourse with double-consciousness.