This dissertation examines how ethno-religious communities are affected by and respond to white supremacist hate violence on their bodies and buildings in the contemporary moment. I illustrate how the violent construction of white nationhood in and outside the U.S. through the latter’s statecraft of Islamophobia translates to precarity for Muslims and “Muslim-looking” bodies and buildings, particularly Sikhs and ​gurdwaras​.

I critique education and awareness programs that Sikh advocacy organizations in the U.S. have created as their means to combat the hate violence that results from white supremacy. My analysis of these programs reveals that their insistence on the Sikh community as a “model minority” is not only anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, but that such a narrative also evades the harsh realities of significant portions of Sikhs in the U.S. who are working class, undocumented, and far from the elitist narrative of “Sikhs in America” that these programs articulate. Since many of these education and awareness programs proliferated in the growing global Islamophobia after 9/11, I argue that their focus on who Sikhs are has the pernicious implication of who Sikhs are not: Muslims. Through these critiques, my dissertation brings to light the inherent Islamophobia that structures Sikh advocacy in the U.S.

Through a mixed methodology of interviews, data and media analysis, photographs, and site visits, I also look at various memorial activities and institutions created by Sikh communities across the globe. I focus specifically on ones that contextualize Sikhs’ struggles with state and hate violence with those faced by other racialized communities. I argue that, in order for true alignment with Sikh ethos, and for reasons of long-term efficacy, the current structure of Sikh advocacy in the U.S. must be revised such that it is staunchly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. My dissertation serves as a rubric through which to imagine this revision.

Artists John Baldessari’s, Andrea Fraser’s and Fred Wilson’s works are typically understood as insisting on the avant-garde values associated with artistic autonomy, but they are also workers, with hybrid practices and professional identities that exceed such critical assessments. Baldessari has been a teacher as long as he has been an artist, mainly at Cal Arts, consciously knitting these roles together. Fraser collapses her work as a critic and theorist into scripted performances about the art world. Wilson works as a curator and educator to realize his institutionally-situated art projects that critique the social construction of race in museums. The practices these artists developed, and the organizations in which they have worked, are deeply implicated in the particular configuration of the postwar economy in the United States and are subject to historically specific social constructions of work.

I argue that in addition to the crises of authorship and artistic labor that artists confronted as a result of changing economic conditions in the postwar era, there was also a crisis of status and identity. Like the majority of middle-class workers who anxiously positioned themselves against manual and technical laborers vis-à-vis organizational or institutional hierarchies and new codes of professionalisms, Baldessari, Fraser, and Wilson developed practices and identifications that solved aesthetic problems as well as the problem of the worker’s prestige.

By examining scholarship about sociologies of work and art history with visual objects, I argue that these artists’ innovations required the same kinds of labor as the newest intellectual jobs in the broader American economy from the 1960s through the 1990s, and similarly positioned them as white-collar professionals. The stakes of this project include debates about the legacy of the avant-garde, the autonomy of art, and the identifications of artists who perform multiple and changing professionalisms. The positions Baldessari, Fraser and Wilson have occupied in the art world as workers index their identifications within the larger structure of the American economy in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Through these hybrid practices, they have produced themselves as professional artists by aligning with both avant-garde values and the economic values of American business.

The role of an artist in twentieth century Mexico was to artistically define the nation. The period of the 1940s when murals expressed Mexico’s Indigenous past and the history of colonialism is referred to as the Mexican Renaissance. Mexican culture was constructed through the lens of muralists who depicted a masculine nation. These murals shaped the landscape of Mexico. Inspired by the Mexican Renaissance was the Chicano Arts Movement. Chicano artists used art as a form of expressing cultural identity within the United States. However, women artists were not recognized for their contributions. Mexican artists María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, and Chicana artists Yolanda M. López and Ester Hernández’s artwork uses religious iconography, such as Catholic and Indigenous imagery to emphasize women’s roles in cultural creation and defining identity.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Beyond the Framed Image: Contemporary Iranian Art from Production to Exhibition

By Deanna June Kashani

Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Studies

University of California, Irvine, 2018

Professor Bridget R. Cooks, Chair

In this dissertation, I analyze a diverse set of Iranian art exhibitions through art historical

and ethnographic methodologies and investigate the strategies that Iranian art professionals have used to reclaim the public audience they lost during the years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Artists approached the problem of inadequate public exhibition opportunities and art discourse in this postrevolutionary period in various ways—by working with government institutions, private galleries, underground spaces, private museums, and creating public art outside of institutional limitations. Through analysis of the exhibitions as case studies, I present an overview of artistic survival in contemporary Iran in which art professionals are taking control of their narratives and the future of the art scene. Overall, Iranian art professionals seek to be experimental, autonomous, and connected with the interests of the local community in their practices. While the art sphere is itself divided about the best ways to exhibit art within the current political and cultural climate, I argue that this multi-vocal characteristic signifies a healthy democratic process as artists navigate the challenges of the domestic and global art worlds.

Contemporary art in all its forms can be a means for the exploration and expression of Blackness and the memorialization of Black humanity. This dissertation project addresses art related to the ocean and connected to expanded notions of Blackness and Black humanity. If the ocean can be said to have memory, then surely it is a forceful one, as vast as its spread over the majority of earth’s surface. During the period when the transatlantic trade in human beings from Africa was extant, millions of Africans did not survive the journey through the Middle Passage and thus remain in the ocean in “residence time” as the term is known in the scientific realm, and as illuminated by the scholar Christina Sharpe in her seminal work, “In The Wake: On Blackness and Being.” The ocean’s memory may contain some evidence of the life force of captive Africans, invisible to us in our contemporary scientific methods of discovery, but present nonetheless. Upon their entry into the sea depths they became part of its universe of sea creatures, microbes and its myriad life-generating processes that populate the ocean, some known to us but many as yet undiscovered. For people of African descent they are also our ancestors, and although they cannot ever be recovered in their complete physicality, there is great value in remembering them and accounting for their existence beyond the bare numerical statistics of the trade. They remain part of Blackness and Black identity, and of our unique history as human beings who facilitated the growth of western democracies with the sweat and suffering of their unpaid labor. We can memorialize them as a strategy against the contested spaces and fraught circumstances in which Black people exist, such that a reaffirmation of Black humanity remains ever necessary.

This dissertation reimagines the paradoxical experiences of race in the early 1980s through the vantage point of an influential constellation of artists who experimented with science fiction themes, cutting-edge electronic instruments and digital imagery. My work identifies nuanced, often unexpected connections between expressions of interstellar fantasy and the lived conditions of race. At this historical juncture, Black communities across America were faced with an array of contradictory forces as systematic retreats by civic governments, economic disinvestment, and violent repression unfolded in sync with a growing celebration of Black cultural productions by mainstream America. I argue artists such as hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, jazz great Herbie Hancock, and pop star Michael Jackson mobilized otherworldly, futuristic premises to create temporary spaces of safety, escape and pleasure within that confluence of racial oppression. Further, images and sounds of the galactic, the machinic and the cyborg provided galvanizing metaphorical vehicles to articulate concerns about the tensions and dire stakes that defined the contemporary conditions of possibility for Black life. By listening and viewing for key theories of “ensemble” and “synthesis,” I show how these artists broadcast substantive arguments toward new possibilities for Black identities, racial liberation, and a just, multicultural way of life. These statements were intertwined with broader cultural anxieties about racial Blackness, simultaneously registering the spiraling potential of those visionary projects as the twentieth century drew to a close. My investigation applies an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on media studies, social history and Black radical theory to analyze interviews, archival documents, vinyl records, artist notebooks, music videos, original artworks, costumes, and sociological theory and journalism of the time.