Surrealism, inner life, and artistic authorship

Senior thesis · Willamette University · 2024

Journey from Woman Surrealist to Heroic Magician-Scientist

My thesis examines paintings Varo made between 1955 and 1963. It argues that her mature work reworks inherited archetypes of femininity through figures who investigate, experiment, and transform their worlds. Reading these paintings as a process of personal mythmaking, I ask how Varo’s treatment of knowledge and nature complicates accounts that place women primarily at the margins of a male Surrealist movement.

The thesis received the Erwin Panofsky Research Award in Art History.

Presidential Scholarship · Hallie Ford Museum of Art · 2023–2024

I researched five Dalí print portfolios, photographed their contents, transcribed accompanying texts, prepared translations using software and help from another person, and designed digital catalogues. The exhibition brought Dalí’s prints into conversation with the Spanish literary and visual works he revisited, including prints by Francisco Goya.

I am developing a neurodiversity-informed approach to Surrealism and self-taught art. How do artists’ working methods challenge assumptions about reason, productivity, and authorship? What becomes visible when we approach inner experience as a source of knowledge?

I use psychocentrism as a working term for the centering of psyche and lived experience in art. It is a framework I am testing through close attention to artworks and their historical contexts, rather than a diagnosis of the artists who made them.

Dalí and Varo offer different ways into these questions. My museum work and experience at Living Studios also inform how I think about the categories “self-taught,” “outsider,” and “neurodivergent” art.

My earlier research on the Colored Knights of Pythias Temple in Deep Ellum examined Black history, urban planning, and public memory in Dallas. I am also interested in the history of Oregon’s Fairview Training Center and the ways institutions preserve or obscure disabled people’s experiences.