Sophia Gimenez

Sophia Gimenez
Graduate Student

Specialization

Areas of Concentration: Feminist Theory, Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, European 20th-century Art, and Visual Culture
Faculty Advisor: E. Bruce Robertson
M.A. Thesis: "Hot Off the Press: Image-Making, Eroticism, Counterculture, and Obscenity in Yayoi Kusama's Underground Newspaper," completed 2018

Bio

Ms. Sophia Gimenez is from Denver, Colorado and received her B.A. in Art History from Knox College in June 2015. She was a McNair Scholar in 2013. Her work, Performance Art Meets the Art Institution, raised aesthetic and theoretical issues of performance art in relation to institutional contexts, the work of Marina Abramovi? serving as a main paradigm. The study promoted critical thought about the boundaries of art in the artworld as well as the future of non-material art and object-oriented institutional conventions. She presented her research at The McNair Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley in August 2013. Ms. Gimenez completed her undergraduate senior thesis in 2015 under the advisory of Professor Gregory Gilbert. Her thesis, Pleasure and Transgression: Pauline Boty’s Pop Art and Persona, unpacked male Pop singularity along a gendered axis and stressed a feminist revisionist study of British Pop artist Pauline Boty. Her thesis examined Boty’s distinct female Pop art that implemented subversive iconography and a strategic, parodic Pop persona to express an assertive, autonomous female sexuality. Boty’s subjective idiosyncrasies worked to destabilize artistic and gendered binaries in male-dominated British Pop. The thesis promoted a re-envisioning of feminism and Pop and an awareness of marginalized women artists. Ms. Gimenez is pursuing interests in Feminist Theory, Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, European 20th-century Art, and Visual Culture.