Art & Art History ETDs

Publication Date

7-14-2025

Abstract

Route 66 was a U.S. Numbered Highway stretching from Chicago, IL to Santa Monica, CA, rising to fame through music and popular culture. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Route 66 has a troublesome twin life as Central Avenue, a highly politicized space where bodies are contested. In this thesis, the function of public arts and architecture of Albuquerque’s main street thoroughfare, Central Avenue, will be analyzed as visual devices of U.S. Highway 66, or known in popular culture as “Route 66.” I employ a critical Derridean framework through Mark Fisher’s theorization of hauntology and Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Ojibwe)’s theory of “survivance”, taking note of repetitions, persistences, and refusals of settler-colonialism within the visual vernaculars of the road. Following Kirsten Pai Buick and Kirk Savage, I explore how the highway is spatially articulated and manipulated into a monumental space that requires narrative maintenance—with the capacity to reshape civic imagination and consequential urban policies. In my study of pictorial archives, newspaper archives, public arts, and oral histories, I argue that Route 66’s monumentality is reinforced through the visual, wherein its power is maintained through successive, hauntological formation of “others” to uphold frontier fantasies of Westward Expansion.

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Art History

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

UNM Department of Art and Art History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Marcella Ernest

Second Committee Member

Kirsten Pai Buick

Third Committee Member

D. Aaron Fry

Keywords

route 66, civic imagination, hauntology, public art, native contemporary art, commercial vernacular architecture

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