An Emergent Vision: Revising the World with Images

This page takes its inspiration from a conversation led by Juana Rodriguez at Bryn Mawr College in November 2003. Our discussion of "Mural Making at Bryn Mawr" explored the politics of representation: how visual and kinesthetic artistry can both teach residents and visitors about the history of a location, and invite them to imagine a different future for it. How can art function, in short, as a political act, when it is used to alter a sense of place? This was not a discussion about re-decorating, but about using the physical fact of art to claim a space for institutional revision. What does it mean to be represented? How can we go about making images which highlight the experiences of a variety of people, which themselves invite future re-visioning? We were talking about art that negotiates the encounter of aesthetic choices with institutional imperatives: both acknowledging who we have been (including some of the contradictions in our tangled histories) and what we want to be. We were talking about changing a physical space, in order to encourage change in the kind of work and play performed there. This page highlights a variety of venues in which such revision has taken place: experiments where the politics of diversity have been made visual. We offer them with the hope that, because their viewers will change, their meaning will change with time. We invite submission of other projects as they emerge: Re-making the Landscape: The Art and Science of Ava Blitz Geographic (and Human?) Diversity: Exploring Iceland in Text and Image Making a Feminist Mural: Women's Center at Bryn Mawr College Drive-By Shoot: Revising the Consciousness of English House