Art Project/Response to Magic Ladders

Hi everyone, 

I wasn't able to talk about my art project & artistic response to the Shonibare exhibit in class yesterday, so I'm posting my thoughts here. Like Sarah, I had a harder time thinking of an artistic response to the Shonibare exhibit. I really enjoyed it but was stuck on thinking of an isolated artistic response to it, so I decided to use my reflections & thoughts to build on the project I began thinking of after the trip to Tinicum. I walked away from the class after Tinicum not only as an Eco-Warrior but feeling very good about my project as well as the feedback and suggestions I received. Just a reminder, last week I talked about making a mosaic/collage using the photos I had taken at the wildlife refuge. 

Something that I was really struck by at the Magic Ladders exhibit was the way books were incorporated. I kept thinking about how books informed colonizing leaders, how books and what Shonibare read may have informed the way he designed this exhibit, and how what I've read throughout the different 360 classes is informing how I perceive and experience the different places we've visited. So, that gets me to my next point of continuing to work on my mosaic, adding photographs from the different places I go, but also quotes from different texts that have particularly resonated with me and have shaped my experiences in Camden, at the Wildlife Refuge, and at the Barnes Magic Ladders exhibit. 

So, here are some of the quotes I plan on weaving into my final mosaic project: 

"That's it? That's the fear. It isn't that we're motile or destructive. It's just that we are. We are other. There has never been any other." --Ursula La Guin, Vaster than Empires and More Slow

"It is about how everyone is a part of the background that shapes the meaning and value of each person's life. It is about propriety, mutuality, and the dynamics of socioenvironmental change." --Paula Gunn Allen, Kochinnenako in Academe

"A key to making the transition to ecological intelligence is recognizing that there are no isolated events, facts, actions--everything [...] is part of a larger system of information exchanges." --Chet Bowers, Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence

"Environmental Education is inherently interdisciplinary and inherently political." --Greenwood, et al. 

"Learning about the environment requires both a global awareness & knowledge of the home range--the neighborhood, the community, and the local ecosystems and bioregions in which people live their everyday lives." --Greenwood et al. 

"As I become familiar with my world, however, as I perceived and understood it better by reading it, my terrors diminished." --Paolo Freire, The Importance of the Act of Reading 

I am not entirely sure how exactly the quotes will fit in to my overall picture, but I want to present a documentation of my learning that has taken place throughout this 360--through the classes as well as the field trips. I'm leaning toward a map or web of the readings to tie them together, but am open to other ideas as I want the mosaic to be aesthetically pleasing.