Sean Loach successfully defended and filed their MA thesis, “Painting in the Year 1960: Yoko Ono, Queer Theory, and Modernist Abstraction”
Congratulations Sean!
Sean Loach (BA UIC Art History, 2021) successfully defended and filed their thesis, "Painting in the Year 1960: Yoko Ono, Queer Theory, and Modernist Abstraction,” chaired by Elise Archias, completing the MA degree.
Summary: The thesis thinks through two parallel developments in the New York art world at the beginning of the 1960s: the development of the artist group Fluxus and the increasing visibility of gender and sexual minorities in Euro-American culture. Loach attends to the earliest years of aesthetic production that would come to characterize Fluxus—namely, the abandonment of traditional media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, in favor of performance-based artistic practices and focuses on early works by Yoko Ono in which the artist negotiated her relationship to the canon of Western art with her own identity as a Japanese woman. While Ono is both cisgender and heterosexual, Loach argues that her growing engagement with gender identity and sexual desire as a material for artistic production emerged alongside the “discovery” of the mutability of sex and gender during the 1960s.
Congratulations, Sean!!