This art project explores the exclusion of ongoing “urban” narratives in history and our roles in reflecting our community experiences in 2021. In this work, we will learn how to make a viewfinder—a lens through which a perspective comes into focus—that brings visibility to neighborhoods that are restorative rather than depleting.
Watch A Scavenger Hunt of Bay Area Perspectives
The de Young Open Connection
Hannah Waiters is a Bay Area–based conceptual artist, visual researcher, and educator. Her photograph Protest Sign—None Have Triumphed Without a Poet (2020), which was included in The de Young Open, was an improvisational viewfinder that documented a protest sign made from historical materials. The viewfinder reflected what it means to belong and to visualize Black social freedom and possibility despite conditions of erasure in the Bay Area.
Materials
- An image with a mirror or frame from a magazine, found photograph, or Polaroid photograph
- Pencil
- Construction paper or cardstock
- Pen or thin marker (optional)
- Colored pencils and markers
- Scissors
- Glue or tape
- Popsicle stick
Questions to Consider
- What are the tools that you use to see the world?
- What would you like the world to know about your community?
Steps
1. Find or capture an image of a mirror or frame from a magazine or a photograph that you would like to draw for the activity. (For example, my viewfinder will be in the form of a Polaroid photograph I took of my younger sister posing with our great-grandmother's mirror in hand.)