The Intersection of Arts-Based Research and Art Criticism: The Art of Deshevski

This dissertation reinvents art criticism with the application of arts-based research to the field. The author disputes the current crisis in art criticism, reframes the evolution of art criticism into art appreciation, as well as constructs arts-based research as an organizing principle of criticism. The dissertation illuminates the recent visual-art products of the emerging artist Renee Davis Westerman (Deshevski). The dissertation acknowledges a single, contemporary, emerging visual artist: a sculptor and painter heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist School, the Boston School, and Surrealism. This dissertation adds to the current scholarship by looking at the production of an emerging artist through arts-based research, aiming to clarify the interpretation of the art products. Contemporary art-research practice, in particular, art criticism, oral life history, feminist theory, and critical theory are employed to explicate the meaning as well as a cultural and phenomenological context for the art, which justifies this study and further research into additional undervalued artists. Arts-based research applied to the field of art criticism asks and answers additional questions to further the study and the application of critical and feminist theory.