Digital Collections Willamette University
Not a member yet
16804 research outputs found
Sort by
Barney the Bearcat and Cheerleaders
No full textPhotograph of Barney the Bearcat with cheerleading team
Ebony Frison 2025
No full textEchoes of American Apartheid is a multidisciplinary thesis that weaves personal memory with historical archive to examine the enduring impact of racial segregation and systemic violence in the United States. Central to this project are my own lived experiences—as a Black woman, veteran, and artist—and the Forgotten Frontlines archive, a collection of over 1,000 rarely seen photographs taken by Newton Carroll, an African American army photographer during World War II. Through photogravure, painting, and prose, this work bears witness to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual residue of American apartheid.
By confronting the visual and emotional dissonance of Black life—between visibility and erasure, service and betrayal, memory and myth—the project offers both a reckoning and a reverence. It creates space for ancestral presence, collective grieving, and reimagined belonging. Influenced by thinkers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, Echoes of American Apartheid is at once altar and archive, resistance and remembrance—a gesture toward healing through radical seeing
Paper Son's Passage 2025
No full textPaper Son's Passage (A VR Interactive Experience)
In 1903, a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy stood in a Portland jail cell, carrying a secret that could determine his fate in America. His story, preserved in immigration archives, becomes the foundation for this immersive virtual reality experience that blurs the boundaries between historical documentation and surreal imagination.
Paper Son's Passage invites viewers to step inside a detention cell from the Chinese Exclusion Act era – but this is no ordinary historical recreation. The room itself becomes a manifestation of alienation, an environment where the familiar turns foreign and the mundane transforms into something monstrous.
As a first-generation Chinese immigrant artist, I uncover stories hidden in time through creative narration. This experimental VR experience serves as a portal – an invitation to step inside history's uncomfortable spaces and gather what fragments remain. It exists both as a puzzle to decode and a space to inhabit, where the past haunts the present in forms strange and terribly familiar. Through embodied exploration, viewers navigate the liminal territory between citizen and stranger, between belonging and exclusion, discovering how these boundaries dissolve under scrutiny.
Paper Son's Passage offers no easy answers – only an encounter with history's twisted geometries and the human stories concealed within them
Neo Newell 2025
No full textBlood-Soaked on Lunar Island is a gothic horror graphic novel. It follows a young man named Ira, who takes an awful corporate job with awful corporate people. He reluctantly agrees to go on a business trip to a mysterious island in hopes of getting a promotion. Little does he know, a werewolf named Cassius has set the whole thing up as one big bloody trap, and Ira’s world is soon turned upside down with the supernatural. This book is a literal eat-the-rich story about what it means to be a monster
Callie Sour 2025
Full text linkRaven’s Ridge, Chapter 1, is the opening installment of a full-length children’s novel that blends magical realism, regional folklore, and social history to reimagine the cultural narrative of Appalachia. Set along a river valley rich with memory and myth, the chapter follows young Frances Glum as she and her family journey to their new home aboard a whimsical bubble-powered sternwheeler. During the voyage, the enigmatic Captain Suds reveals the origins of the long-rumored haunting of the town’s Mingo Theater, an early hint at the deeper mysteries and community struggles Frances will soon encounter.
The broader project responds directly to the reductive stereotypes that have long framed Appalachian people, particularly those perpetuated since the sensationalized media coverage of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. Through storytelling rooted in authentic lived experience, the novel aims to uplift the creativity, resilience, and complexity of Appalachian artists and communities. It also weaves in underrepresented episodes of American labor history, including the coal wars and their ties to contemporary workers’ rights, offering young readers an accessible entry point into themes of justice, solidarity, and environmental stewardship.
Created from my point of view as an Appalachian multi-media artist raised in a theater rumored to be haunted and in a town still living with the effects of industrial pollution, this project is both personal and aspirational. It imagines a community that successfully defends itself against exploitation, and insists on the power of art and narrative to help envision a more equitable future. The chapter is just over 1,700 words and is accompanied by two miniature 3D sets crafted primarily from recycled and found materials, serving as tactile illustrations. Together, the written and sculptural components form a cohesive chapter
Barney the Bearcat with Cheerleaders
No full textPhotograph of Barney the Bearcat with cheerleaders, Fotinia Hanches and Hope Cameron in the gym
Rio Quezada 2025
No full textThe Church is a Dog Park is a mixed media installation project that explores grief, memory, and the processing of loss through tactile art making. The work honors Ellen, an influential figure in the artist's life who took her own life in October 2023 due to health issues. Ellen, affectionately known as "the crazy dog lady" in their community, fostered numerous dogs and served as a third parental figure to the artist. The project's title stems from the poignant discovery that Ellen spent her final moments at what others called a church but she experienced as a dog park—a green space where she frequently walked her dogs.
The installation comprises four primary components: ceramic figurines representing dogs significant to their shared history, embroidered and mended denim overalls symbolizing Ellen's practical nature, a weighted puppy-shaped soft sculpture referencing memories of carrying sleepy puppies during walks, and a variable edition of woodblock prints depicting The Dark Corner, a meaningful landscape from their walks together. Each medium serves as a different avenue for processing grief—the repetitive motions of embroidery, the grounding quality of clay work, and the layered transformations of printmaking mirror the complexities of mourning.
Influenced by artists like Zoe Leonard, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Alison Bechdel, the work examines how objects and natural environments become vessels for memory. The project is informed by research on trauma, emotional connection in mammals, tactile art as therapy, and the concept of "a good death." Through visible mending, variable editions, and interactive elements, the project explores how grief, like art making, is a transformative process—not obscuring damage but acknowledging it while creating something newly meaningful
Pearl Lockwood 2025
No full textintersistere explores the connection between our shared subconscious and the collective dream world, aiming to create a visual portal into these mysterious realms. The portal represents the internal subconscious looking within oneself and the dreams that exist. itersistere takes over space as it infiltrates the wall, breaking through and crossing the line of reality and delusion. The felted intestines house the dreamscape that I once entered, looking inside my dream-self, standing between reality and dream. My work is a living research project, and I will continue looking into these ideas and dreams for as long as I am creating. Starting from recurring childhood dreams, my work is about how hypnagogia, hypnopompia and lucid dreaming are an integral part of my understanding of sleep and the way that I process them into my art. My thesis is a look into my mind as a dreamer and artist, how I think, work, and connect to the worlds around me
Mary Paquette 2025
No full textInstruments of Power is a 2 minute video showcasing and utilizing 3D modeled assets through animation. I have modeled a series of four fantasy inspired 3D objects called ‘Instruments’ that are used as a visual representation of power. These four Instruments include a bident, staff, axe and scythe. In my animation, ‘power’ is used as a means to highlight the importance or authority of an object. Throughout this semester, I have been visually exploring what gives an object power through the use of visual elements and 3D props.
There is a fascination and attraction to power within video games. Power and control is an attraction which is obtainable within video games through fantasy objects. Through this project, I explore the attraction around this concept with a mix of marketing and game design through marketing game inspired objects in 3D. The overall style inspiration centers around fantasy genre video games targeting young adults.
Throughout this semester, I have experimented with what visual elements emphasize power or authority through showcasing 3D assets guided by animation. Through this project, I dive deeper into what elements attract and engage an audience including; editing and effects, lighting, color, space, camera angles, sound design, and more. In order to make sense of how these elements might make my 3D modeled Instruments marketable toward an audience or group of people.
Instruments of Power is the end result of a semester long journey of learning 3D through the program Blender. Before this semester I have never modeled, animated, rigged, created digital materials, and colored in 3D before. I define the success of my work through what I was able to accomplish
Ray Zill 2025
No full textSplendid Irony reflects on my relationship to text as a print-disabled artist and librarian. I exist in a liminal space between print and electronic text, always longing for the tangible. My work draws on the tension between tactile and visual modes of perception and the human touch we often lose by reading digitally. Through print, and physical media in general, I regain an intimacy lost in our digital age, one that can be found on the press or by directly animating on film. I experiment with light, magnification, and sound to challenge traditional methods of reading and the didactic meaning we place on text.
My research focuses on personal narratives from blind and visually impaired artists and writers reflecting on their experience with sight loss and reading. I then broaden my scope to include origins of ocularcentrism, the importance of touch, and technostalgia. My hope is to present both an intimate glimpse of my lived experience as well as a universal longing towards print, reading, and physical media. This paper asks: Why are we still craving physical media in a digital age that boasts convenience, accessibility, and connection? And how do we maintain touch on screen