[On January 9th,
1978 Harvey Milk
was inaugurated to a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, making him
one of America’s first openly gay
elected officials. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Milk and other
historical moments and events in the early history of the Gay Rights Movement,
leading up to this special post on an impressive visual exhibit on the movement
at Fitchburg State University.]
On two of the
many reasons to love a striking visual exhibition.
Throughout this
academic year, Fitchburg State University is hosting a
series of programs and events under the heading of Journey
to Equality: The LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement. While many of them are talks
or panels (by both FSU faculty members and invited speakers), each of which has
added importantly to the conversation and community, to my mind the most
singular and striking is an ongoing visual exhibition. Occupying the floor-to-ceiling
windows of FSU’s Amelia V.
Gallucci-Cirio Library, this series of posters, produced in conjunction
with the ONE
Archives Foundation, documents a number of key events, figures, and issues
in the history of the LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement (including many of those on
which my week’s series here has focused). The large and visually arresting
posters (you can see examples of many at this hyperlink)
do a wonderful job of both utilizing graphics to engage audiences and providing
text to inform them, achieving a difficult but important balance of art and education,
graphic design and history. The series has also evolved over the year, with new
panels added every month to expand, complicate, and deepen the histories and
stories being highlighted. The exhibition is a first at FSU, and makes use of a
shared and central campus space in truly groundbreaking and provocative ways.
That
groundbreaking use of space is one of two inspiring things I especially wanted
to emphasize in this post. As anyone who has spent time on a college campus over
the last couple of decades knows, one of the most consistent campus activities has
become construction: Hammond
Hall, the building that houses FSU’s library, is a case in point, having
undergone at least three major construction projects in my thirteen years at
FSU. While I understand the goals of modernizing campuses and attracting
students and the like, there’s no doubt that this emphasis
on the physical appearance can be frustrating, at least when contrasted
with the educational elements on which colleges (like society) seem far
more reluctant to spend money or resources. Yet like many dualities, this one
doesn’t have to be a dichotomy, as of course new and evolving spaces can also
become integral parts of a college’s communal and educational identity.
Utilizing the library’s windows (the result of one such recent FSU construction
project) and its shared spaces (many of which are the result of another, the overall
renovation of the library) for compelling and informative exhibitions like Journey to Equality is a perfect
illustration of how the physical and the educational can and should go hand in
hand. I hope that this can become a model for wedding literal construction to
all the other forms of building and growth that take place on college campuses.
While those campus
and college areas for growth are communal, they also and perhaps most importantly
involve individual students, the group who come to this space in order to
pursue and strengthen their own continued evolution. I offered extra credit in my
fall courses for students who engaged with the Journey to Equality exhibition and then shared a quick paragraph of
response with me, and here want to highlight two examples of inspiring such
responses. The most consistent were like that shared by one of my Honors
students, a thoughtful and knowledgable young man who nonetheless had never
learned or even heard of most of the subjects covered in the exhibition’s
panels; his response linked LGBTQ histories and rights to those of the suffrage
movement and anti-lynching activism (two of our class’s topics) in nuanced and important
ways. Another of my students engaged with the exhibition in a much more
personal and just as crucial manner: herself a member of the LGBTQ community,
she wrote about how the exhibition’s histories and stories helped her to
consider the communal legacies of which she’s a part, as well as striking
individual figures whose stories felt both distinct from and yet parallel to
her own identity and contexts. These forms of intellectual and psychological,
analytical and emotional responses are key components to any successful
educational experience, and it’s been deeply gratifying to see how this wonderful
FSU exhibition can help our students take vital steps along their own lifelong
journeys.
MLK Day series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
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