Inside Out + Outside In: 2022 Interactive Oral History Exhibit
Our students created this year’s exhibit in a moment of cautious venturing out. In New York City, spring is coming, and withdrawing, and coming back. We are now allowed to take our masks off in class, but many are keeping them on. We noticed that, in this moment, our work engages with the dynamics of inside and outside.
How much of our internal realities can we, or should we, share externally through oral history processes? How can oral history help us to understand and to cross boundaries - political, social, material, linguistic?
In this year’s exhibit you can hear about
- People with experience tattooing in prison, who carry that experience out with them on their bodies
- Penpal networks that connect people on the outside with incarcerated people
- What went on inside one NYC apartment building during Covid
- Queer activists in Florida, where crossing county lines can mean gaining and losing legal rights
- Getting to know rural Cuba through the lives of one extended family
- A teenager surviving air raids in Japan during WWII
- How a Chinese girl that dropped out of middle school later became a doctor
And think about
- What would go into an archive of your life?
- How can we create a shared understanding of what hearing means, to allow for dialogue?
- Can artificial intelligence guess what is in your head?
- How can the visual arts help us understand others’ memories?
- Can we document the paths we did not take in life?
- How do people stay connected to places they have left behind?
- What does it mean for someone to be their own oral historian?