Lorraine O’Grady Both/And is Everything

So I got a huge opportunity my senior year of undergrad. The campus art museum was looking for an intern to help them curate methods to get more students to visit and wanted to create simple ways to understand the retrospective. Considering Lorraine O'Grady is an intellectual, her work is conceptual, deep, and extremely nuanced! She explores intersectionality in so many ways and is definitely a part of history in MY book if not the literal textbooks. And also she is a black woman of Jamaican decent, so, it kind of felt destined.

I created two projects in hopes to really get the exhibit to stand out amongst students. The Weatherspoon wanted to do some out reach with other organizations across campus, so I figured we should utilize the dance program as well as the housing and residence life community.

The first project was the Both/And Bulletin Boards Project. I wanted to get a bulletin board with O'Grady's work in every dorm hall possible! I had taken a social art class with Professor Lee Walton a semester prior, so I drafted up some participation slips to see how students might engage with the ideas O'Grady is actively exploring. They looked something like this:

Eventually, with some counseling from Walton and the museum staff, we settled on this design:

I had drafted up how we would set these up on some bulletin boards, presented the idea to the dorm hall's leadership, and gathered some volunteers to put them up. UNCG's CoWAM made every piece of this project possible, because there was absolutely no way I would have been able to cut out all those letters myself lol.

Heres a mock up of the bulletin boards compared to how some actually turned out:

I also got to do an event where people got to fill them out with me instead of anonymously, below are some images of that:

And lastly I will include some images of the bulletin boards before we took them down:

I'm intrigued with how students chose to engage when it was anonymous compared to in person. I had a few people fill theirs out and keep it, without showing me what they wrote. I wonder if anybody took the slips for themselves and had a discussion about it after seeing the exhibit. I'll never know how far the impact of this project went for others, but it had a HUGE impact on me.

And don't forget, this was just project ONE! I did a second project for this exhibition involving the dance department! I will add that update later and I hope you all enjoyed this bit of insight and reflection! Stay lovely!!!