*** POSTPONED*** Cassy Smith Dissertation Defense
February 24, 2023
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location
106 Henry Hall, and via Zoom
Calendar
Download iCal FilePhD Candidate Cassandra Smith will be defending her dissertation, entitled "Performativity and Metaphor: Kiva Murals at Pottery Mound,” on a date to be determined. The originally scheduled defense (February 24, 2023, from 2:30–4:30 PM in room 106 Henry Hall) had to be postponed due to illness. Once rescheduled, this event listing will be updated with a new date and time. The event will be hybrid, with a Zoom link to accommodate committee members and attendees who are unable to be there in person. For the Zoom link, please email the chair of Cassy's dissertation committee, Virginia Miller: vem@uic.edu
“Performativity and Metaphor: Kiva Murals at Pottery Mound”
Sensorial, material, and formal characteristics of the Pottery Mound kiva murals are active participants in a performative realm that transcends representational similitude and symbolic iconography. This dissertation proposes a consideration of the Pottery Mound murals that is more hermeneutical in nature, and I position myself as a scholar whose art-historical practice acknowledges the creative artistry of my chosen discipline as a fundamental component in the production of critically generative scholarship. The methodological framework for this project comprises site visits, community consultation, critical ethnographic analysis, archival and collections research, and a review and synthesis of existing scholarship. I consider the lively role of metaphor in a Pueblo life world across time and space, and I propose that such a consideration constitutes an essential framework for writing about Pueblo material cultural production and performativity. I discuss the paintings at Pottery Mound as sites of transformation, and I consider the figurative depictions in the murals as they correspond to the art-historical concept of portraiture. I suggest that many, if not all, of the painted figures are portrayals of specific individuals and that, moreover, they represent a diversity of genders. Drawing upon ethnographic evidence, I suggest that such depictions correspond to a wide and varied spectrum of lived genders and orientations in an Ancestral Puebloan life world and that the practice of kiva spaces at Pottery Mound, like the figurative representations upon their walls, may have been far more diversely gendered than is commonly assumed.
Date posted
Feb 20, 2023
Date updated
Feb 24, 2023