Arts, Crafts, and Analytic Collage: Insights from Relating Community Members’ Artistic Creations Via Collage

• In Event: Centering Relationality & Expanding Knowledge through Artistic Practice: Transdisciplinary Education Research and Arts Methodologies for Change

Abstract

In this paper, I consider an arts-based approach for surfacing community members’ visions of the future, and a visual analytic process for relating their works together. Thus, the arts aspect of this work is two-fold, in how the participants engage creating representations that respond to creative prompts, but also in how I engage in analytic collaging (Gerstenblatt, 2013; Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999), as a way to understand the works in relation to each other. In the process of analytic collaging, I bring attention to dominant notions of memory and temporality (Mahadeo, 2024). Specifically, I am addressing the following research questions: How can the process of analytic collaging surface participants’ insights about temporality and memory?
The Wall Quilt (WQ) activity is a form of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2016) that aims to create space for critical and imaginative conversation through crafting. The WQ was set up at the Regional History Museum (pseudonym) in South Texas. The WQ space consisted of tables filled with craft materials such as paper, scissors, tape, markers, etc. Participants were given their choice of prompts which were co-designed with museum staff, or the option to make something else of their choosing. The data from this activity includes field notes, pictures, brief artifact interviews, scans/photos of artifacts, and notes from debriefs with co-facilitators. The artifacts include poems, drawings, and mixed-media creations. The scans/photos of the artifacts were used to create the collage (Fig. 5).
One place temporality can be seen in the artifacts is in the direction that the red trucks (Fig. 1, bottom left) are oriented, moving from left to right. In western contexts, an arrow going from left to right shows how time has progressed and will go forward in the future (Zerubavel, 2003).
In the process for the first draft (Fig. 5), I centered participants’ ideas about the future, while also playing with how memory (one of the themes identified by a co-facilitator) impacts visions of the future. The red trucks are one example of the combination of memory and the future, but they can also be understood within the larger conversation. The collage form resists linear thinking (Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999), yet because of the blocked style of the contributions, it still lends itself to sequencing, and is an opportunity to resist linearity. So, the artifacts explicitly about the future were placed in the center/top, while the artifacts that represent history/memory are placed as the surrounding positions. One of the participants also wrote a poem, which I cut apart (digitally) and spread out over the quilt, representing the present.
Ultimately the WQ is a manifestation of the conversation that community members started as part of their work and is something that can be widely shared for feedback on the ideas, composition, and overall impression. In future iterations, I can also work together with research partners and community members to create these types of analytic works.

Author

• Melissa Perez, University of Michigan