Print Study Room: Reimagining Representation

What makes up our positionality, and how do we come to understand how it affects our communities? In this two-part project, students utilize expanded drawing practices to map their positionality through the thinking of perceptual drawing and mark-making. The first project component focuses on expanded methodologies in drawing as a form of knowledge production, followed by synthesizing an actualized project in response to the initial mapping. Through multi- and interdisciplinary media, students create work that reflects on who they are, which communities they are part of, and how their target and agent identities impact their studio art practice. Beginning the semester by reflecting on how positionality relates to artistic production, we ask questions about the ethics of representation and the role of subjectivity in authorship. This initial project serves as a foundation for how students may begin to unpack their identities as artists while deepening understanding of the inclusivity and the exclusivity present in the art ecosystem.

Drawing on inspiration from Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, curated by Daniel Tucker, and the history of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and the BPP Newspaper, students work collaboratively to produce publications and print ephemera in support of social justice causes. Considering cross-racial social movements, the history of art and design within the act of protest, organizing, and intersectional movement building, students collectively create projects to be presented in collaboration with the Tang Teaching Museum. By assembling their shared communities and differences, students reflect on strategies for modes of address that challenge the reader to reconsider their positionality and default culture. Projects raise questions and awareness and advocate for a more inclusive society by providing educational resources, ways to get involved, and self-reflective tools for organizing. The central focus for class publications is to provide visibility for underrepresented narratives while sharing tactical skills that can be implemented within communities—from the personal to the structural.

How do histories inform our present? And who holds power to form society’s dominant narratives? Examining the power and production of history, students interrogate the politics of authorship and its influence on collective memory, monuments, and archives. Students create interdisciplinary studio projects utilizing site-specific or simulated speculative environments to explore approaches in producing counter narratives within a public art installation. By learning to prototype for their proposed and realized sites, students gain creative research skills in the context of site-specific interventions. Projects span various sites of memory, iconography, location, augmented realities, and histories through analog and digital media, reframing how we might understand our past, present, and future.

Reflecting on the dialogues, artists, scholars, activists, and urgent issues included in Culture as Catalyst, students create a final project by making a reimagined future through individual or collaborative research. Final explorations utilize a range of contemporary art practices across various studio media, oral histories, writing, and sound. In the last section of the course, we ask questions about the importance of hope and imagination in art-making. How can we radically transform the spaces we traverse through aesthetic and conceptual language? What role do artists play in contributing to social change, dialogue, and community engagement? And how can we reimagine art as a site of resiliency and healing? Reimagined Futures asks us to continue questioning societal systems and belonging through art as an ongoing process of growth, loss, and transformation.