Deconstructing Icons
Deconstructing Icons was a semester-long project founded in examining and assessing various icons that America has come to recognize as representations of both social movements and contemporary culture. With a number of academic & artistic activities scaffolding our learning, we headed towards a student-produced art exhibition where we shared pieces built around these accustomed images, and chapbooks, which were self-published by our students to accompany the commentary portrayed through their art.
As a team, we worked to identify and understand the significance of many of the diverse iconic images our society has embraced, then considered how their current uses relate to the ideas and issues that they were initially exalted for. While this required much familiarizing with the stories surrounding these images, it also required a deep exploration of the social & historical context in which these icons existed. Unraveling and interpreting these stories positioned students to construct art pieces communicating both questions & commentary about the social significance of the images and the social, political & economic climates that they existed within.
Alongside the art on their canvases, our students took on a variety of writing modes - narrative, poetry, historical fiction - to include in self-published chapbooks. Working hard to push diverse writing to publishable levels proved to add layers of perspective and opportunities for thinking to the conversations we were holding around America’s icons.
Our work was celebrated at the conclusion of the Deconstructing Icons project during our team’s exhibition, held at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. A night of readings, food, conversation and art offered a fine moment for our community to join in our considerations about the society that we share.