In the American postwar era, artistic engagement with technology has been characterized by deep ambivalence in favor of conceptual practice. This project examines how craftspeople challenge this history through their engagement with digital technology. Given their object-centered practice, craftspeople were primed to give material form to abstract “Systems Era” concepts. I approach this project through three case studies: biological feedback in Mary Ann Scherr’s jewelry, human-computer feedback designed by IBM programmer and weaver Janice Lourie, and ecological feedback in woodworker Wendell Castle’s immersive spaces. These craftspeople provide a vibrant precedent to contemporary personal fabrication, and offer insight into the role gender played in the domestication of technology.

The reunification of North and South Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was a tumultuous time. Many Vietnamese citizens, afraid of communist persecution, fled the country in search of political asylum and were relocated to new host countries throughout the world. The Unites States houses the largest such population of refugees in Orange County, California. This dissertation focuses on six varying perspectives from that community, in the form of visual voices of immigrant Vietnamese American artists, as they delve into representational issues that reflect the general diaspora, including themes of trauma and memory, sexual identity and gender role, displacement and alienation, and the concepts of allegiance and home.

From visual analysis of art work, personal interviews conducted with the artists, varying secondary resources, including art reviews and critical responses to exhibitions, the project explores the viability of art as a communication tool that creates dialogue between the Vietnamese American diaspora and the larger society.

This dissertation examines the introduction of governmental technologies that have shaped the formation of three ethnic museums in downtown Los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), and the Chinese American Museum (CAM), to provide a critical genealogy that reconstructs the histories, political rationalities, and traces the implementation of new models of financialization that converged to form these institutions. Earlier studies of ethnic museums have stressed the ways the city’s ethnic museums have either constructed or contested the representation of ethnic Otherness. Instead, this dissertation examines how the formation of downtown’s ethnic museums were formed by networks of governmentalities that were mobilized in the last decades of the twentieth-century that accelerated the redevelopment of the ethnic neighborhoods that surrounded these ethnic specific institutions.This project uncovers how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy, and urban redevelopment, were utilized in the creation of the museums examined in this study. As I explore in this project, the creation of this trio of museums provides a crucial key to understanding the means through which these institutions have arrived at their present configurations in the city’s cultural economy. My project’s focus on the formation and impact of downtown’s Los Angeles’ ethnic museums uncovers the various roles these institutions have played in the creative destruction of downtown Los Angeles’ historic ethnic enclaves in the latter half of the twentieth century. My approach assumes that understanding the ‘how’ of museum-making is a crucial prerequisite to future discussions of policy alternatives and approaches to the institutional formation these museums and others like them may wish to explore to ensure their sustained economic survival and continued relevance to their audiences.