December 13, 2015 - 15:03
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I felt very satisfied with the presentation of our work from Wednesday to Friday, beginning with what I considered to be a productive and enlightening opening reception. As a member of the curating team, I arrived early and helped set up easels and foam board, handing out the placards that I formatted and typed up for each piece. We had gone in hoping to have some sort of cohesive “flow” to the exhibit, but found that we had many restrictions in this sense because of the crowded nature of the campus center; we had to put easels wherever they could fit, and 3D pieces on whichever table was empty at the time. Still, we chose to place Kieres’s piece closest to UnCommon Grounds, as we imagined that the gaze of passersby as they walked in to the Campus Center would most likely fall on that wall, and we felt that her piece offered a coherent overview of the history of the prison system, as well as two examples of the day in the life an incarcerated person. The rest of the projects fell into place as we hurriedly attached them to pieces of foam board and displayed them on the standing easels around the room.
There was not a massive turn-out, but I was happy to see that many of our friends came by to support us and ask insightful questions (and I noticed the one student who walked around and asked several of my classmates whether or not they were abolitionists). This critical engagement with the subject of the work itself (beyond surface-level praise or critique) was so exciting to see, and I was glad in that moment that we had chosen the Campus Center, as opposed to TGH, which would not have resulted in so many people happening upon the exhibit and engaging almost by accident. As someone in class mentioned the other day, in this sense the exhibit really did feel like a piece of resistance in itself, a disruption of the everyday we experience as Bryn Mawr students to call attention to the everyday experienced by incarcerated people.
I was not so impressed by the Socratic dialogue we hosted on Friday morning. In retrospect, this timing was not the best, as classes were finished and everyone was excited to sleep in on Friday morning. It might have been a better idea to hold the conversation on Wednesday evening in place of the reception, as it seemed that many of the visitors at that time were already eager to engage in such discussions. However, I do want to recognize that while the conversation may not have felt groundbreaking to me, I have been engaging in similar conversations throughout the entire semester, while the 5 or 6 outside participants may have felt enlightening by what we considered to be essentially “just another class.” In opening the floor up to such large and unanswerable questions as “What is freedom?” we acknowledge our own lack of expertise—we were by no means prepared to answer that question, even after a semester of study on the subject. I hope that these questions came off, in this sense, more welcoming than daunting, and I very much appreciated the presence and participation of those non-360 members who did come by.