Reflection: Public Art Display

Yik Yaks Exposed: Public Art Project 


Jewel and I both decided to create a public art display in the hallway leading up to the Great Room. This project was very time intensive seeing that we had to cut out everything that was hung up on the wall: the speech bubbles, the yin yak symbols, the quote, and the interactive aspect. Jewel contacted multiple people to send her screenshots of these yik yaks and we both typed them out. I went back and made some of the words bold and italicized to draw the reader in to the speech bubble.

This was not by any means an easy project for me to complete because reading these racist yik yaks and then typing them out was not an easy thing to do. It made me more and more upset as I went along but Jewel and I kept pushing through the emotion. This project was taken down by Kelly Shroeder the morning after Jewel and I put it up. This was very upsetting because we wanted people to see it, to be shocked and surprised, sometimes even see what words came directly from their mouths to paper. I do not think that this project would have the same impact if there was just an interactive element (being part of the solution) so I thank Jewel for collaborated with me.

I have taken several pictures of this project and I can email those to you Professor Friebele. This project has made me want to produce more public art projects. Maybe not always politically charged, but at least putting art in an environment gives it more context.

Project 4: Public Art Proposal

On Sunday, December 14th, Jewel and I plan to collaborate on a public art piece featuring posts from  the Yik Yak app directly from smcm students. We plan to blow these yik yak posts up in photoshop all around the campus where there is high foot traffic. Jewel and I want to make a huge political, social and cultural statement through this project and shed light on racist bigotry. I also plan to create an interactive aspect to this project by placing a large, wooden box in the Campus Center and asking people to right down their experiences with injustices (specifically in the context of racism and racial profiling.) We want to emphasize that racism is a human problem, not just a problem that only minorities should deal with. White privilege needs to be recognized and ignorance needs to be eliminated.