This thesis explores Bay Area choreographer Anna Halprin's 1960 summer workshop and affiliations with workshop participants such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, La Monte Young, and Robert Morris. I selected these particular participants because of their roles in shaping overarching fields of dance, visual arts and music. Through articulating the significance of the workshop as influential on artistic process, I frame the 1960 workshop as in concert with the larger world of the avant-garde, including Allan Kaprow's Happenings, Fluxus performances, Judson Dance Theater, Minimalist sculpture and post-war experimental music.

In addition, I extend the concerns of event-based performance into the lexicon of landscape architecture by acknowledging Lawrence Halprin's role in the workshop as the architect of the deck and marital collaboration with Halprin. Eventually, he adopted scores into his architectural practice, designed scores for Halprin's dances and focused on pedestrian activities in his designs of public spaces.

Object and Image in the Work of Jack Goldstein.

Between 1989 and 2004, Noah Purifoy constructed over one hundred large-scale sculptures that intersect earth art, assemblage, and architecture spread out across a ten-acre parcel of land in Joshua Tree, California. His works are primarily made from locally discarded and repurposed industrial materials that create a site-specific dialogue with their environment. Across space and time, these constructions have culminated in his Outdoor Desert Art Museum. For several decades, he worked as an artist, educator, and administrator throughout Southern California until the rising cost of living prompted him to relocate to the high desert at 72 years old until his death. In effect, scholars have located Purifoy within the discourses of Black Art, socially engaged art, and the postwar Los Angeles art scene regarding his early bodies of work made in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion; however, few have written in-depth about his late works. Perhaps this is because his site is not easily categorizable- his constructions sprawl out across the vast desert floor, decentered into various pockets of experiences. Some works recall Purifoy’s past, while others suggest references to modernist art and design, the African diaspora, and African American identities; other works play with commercial graphics and language, defunct technology, labor, and consumerist surplus. Because of the plurality of meanings that emanate from his works, this project examines how Purifoy’s site operates as a re-spatialization of personal and collective narratives through the juxtaposition of material objects to realize potential futures. Furthermore, this project focuses on three particular works: Bessemer Steel, No Contest (bicycles), and Adrian’s Little Theater, as exemplary case studies to examine the real-life implications of space, place, and perspective through compositional forms. In the wake of the current weaponization of critical race theory and education, oppressive policymaking, racialized mass and police violence, this project argues that Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum confronts historical denials of space toward African Americans in the United States while asserting space through memory, movement, and materiality on site.

The work of E.J. Bellocq and George Dureau although superficially distinct, share a number of core attributes: each lived and worked in the historic French Quarter (albeit separated by several decades), took portrait photographs of denizens of their neighborhood, each sought out non-traditional subjects for portraiture, e.g., sex workers, prostitutes, and people who are disabled or homeless. In each case the artist is perceived as empathetic with the subjects they depict, that the artist seems to have known the subject. Explored herein is what may account for these shared qualities. Interestingly, these artists’ works manifest two key features of New Orleans history: 1) acceptance of a sex industry and sex workers, and 2) the prominence of homosocial relationships and the overt presence of a homosexual, LGBTQ community. Moreover, Wilhelm Worringer’s approach to empathy (einfühlung in German) in Abstraction and Empathy, whereby the artistic production of a place reflects that culture’s view of the world, is exemplified by the similar qualities in each of Bellocq’s and Dureau’s artistic production. Additionally, the three core aspects of the German concept stimmung (a subjective and collective social mood, an objective and pronounced atmosphere, along with a distinct affinity for the musical) are all uniquely possessed by New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter. To wit, the French Quarter provides a real-world archetype of Robert Sinnerbrink’s concept of enveloping mood, where the mood of the place is itself a key player in the unfolding narratives (comedic, sensual or dramatic), going on there. New Orleanian Lillian Hellman’s quote from which the name of this essay was taken, “seeing and then seeing again,” reflects her revisiting events of her life. Here, however, the ones doing the seeing are Bellocq and Dureau. First Bellocq saw, and then Dureau saw again. These men encountered the same physical and cultural milieu, and their output reflects that place.