Defense Date
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Nicole Killian
Second Advisor
Jamie Mahoney
Third Advisor
Bradley Sinanan
Fourth Advisor
IBé Crawley
Fifth Advisor
Sarah Scarr
Abstract
Re-Sense examines artist’s books as perceptual tools capable of reshaping how readers encounter history, memory, and archival absence. Beginning with the idea that books teach us how to know and how to see, the text argues that conventional book structures often reinforce Western knowledge systems through overemphasis of linearity, coherence, and containment. In contrast, artist’s books' experimental structures support novel modes of knowing and relation to ourselves and the world of humans and non-humans. The author describes this process of exhuming perception from Western constraints as re-sensing.
Through re-sensing, the historical past becomes less like a fixed record and more like an unstable, but generative, field of relation. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Édouard Glissant’s opacity, and Yifat Gutman’s memory activism, the writing considers how artist's books can be used to know fragmented and erased histories without forcing them into total visibility or false coherence.
The writing traces this inquiry through three bodies of work: A Condensed History of Africa, which re-senses Nigerian colonial history by interrupting Western colonial texts with Nigerian perspectives; River Monuments, which reimagines the James River as a witness for Richmond’s overlooked histories; and Stemmers, which engages the fragmented history of Louise “Mama” Harris and tobacco stemmers through speculative plywood silhouettes.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-8-2026