Engaging Students as Producers of Culture
Lauren Addario, New Mexico Highlands University, USA
Mimi Roberts, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, USA
http://www.santafelucky7.com
This demonstration session will feature three web projects produced during the past year by students from the Media Arts Program at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. What these diverse projects have in common is that they engage students as producers rather than as consumers of culture. Many of these students are Hispanic and Indian New Mexico natives, who have been historically excluded from the cultural dialogue.
Lucky Number Seven, the 7th International Biennial Exhibition at SITE Santa Fe
Lucky Number Seven, curated by Lance Fung, focused on collaboration, experimentation, process, and community. He invited twenty-five visual artists from seventeen countries to produce works on site. In keeping with that spirit, the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs assembled a collaborative documentary team made up of media arts students from New Mexico Highlands University, the College of Santa Fe and Institute of American Indian Arts. The students decided that in lieu of a traditional documentary that is produced after-the-fact, they would produce an online documentary that would inform and engage the public in events as they were happening.
El Tesoros de Devoción/Treasures of Devotion
A second website, currently in production, is being created by a team of student designers, programmers, and videographers from NMHU for the Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum, and is scheduled to launch in January. The website will document and showcase the exhibit, El Tesoros de Devoción/Treasures of Devotion , a collection of bultos, retablos, and crucifijos, dating from the late 1700s to 1900. The website will go beyond what it is possible to do in the exhibition. Interactive components will allow visitors to rotate and zoom in on selected objects, and to create their own exhibits combining works from the exhibition with examples from the museum’s Iberian art collection. The website will also give context to the art of the santero in New Mexico though an interactive map, music, photos, and video clips of pilgrimages, home altars, and artist demonstrations.
Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities
May 23, 2008 - September 07, 2008
View Camera Interactive
Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, is a traveling exhibition organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe that brings together, for the first time, approximately 97 works by two of America’s most celebrated icons, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams. The exhibition clarifies the parallels between their distinctive visions of the natural world. An NMHU student intern created an interactive view camera that allows viewers to peer threw the lens of a view camera and to compose their own photographs. The O’Keeffe Museum presented a video version of the interactive in their orientation gallery during the presentation of the exhibition, and it is also on their website.
Demonstration: Demonstrations 1 [Close Up]
Keywords: diversity, cultural, dialogue, students, production, New Mexico
