Visual Storytelling and the Museum

In a time where history seems to be repeating itself, and forces across the nation are making a concerted effort to obscure history and dismantle programs trying to teach a full historical narrative, it is all the more important for students to have the opportunity to look at primary historical sources and make their own sense of them. Drawing inspiration from Fred Wilson’s impactful exhibit “Mining the Museum,” Professors Djouini and Petty will draw on their experience working with museums and archives to guide their students through their own mining of the museum, using UCSB’s archives and other national and international digital museum collections to bring attention to often overlooked and sometimes deliberately hidden artifacts of history. They will find a piece that speaks to them and, throughout the summer session, write about its connection to them, history, and the present day. Those responses, which could be prose or poetry, will be carefully designed with consideration of typeface, color, layered imagery, and symbolic motifs within a single folio that will be bound into an archival book by the end of the course session. This collated book will be submitted into the UCSB Special Collections permanent collection of contemporary artist books and archived for future review or exhibitions. Importantly, this book will be printed using a risograph digital duplicator, a printing method which will be aesthetically vibrant, archival for preservation purposes, and reproducible in high quantity and quality. Each student will receive a copy of the collection the class co-creates.