Art, Education, and Richard Cross's Photo Archive
Graphic Novel, Exhibitions, Video Podcasts, Public Presentations
Last quarter at UCLA, Professor Marta Valier utilized the Bradley Center’s photographic archive, which contains thousands of images of San Basilio de Palenque by Richard Cross, to teach a special topics Arts Education course. Here, she shares the course objectives and the amazing work her students did creating graphic novel storyboards using archival photographs and illustrations. The art collective Madre Monte is bringing to life their video podcast documentary series, reinterpretating Richard Cross’s photographic archive. We plan to showcase this series during their exhibition, Mbosu ri Apú (Voices of Water), to open in late March at the Museum of Social Justice. And last but not least, on January 13, we will conduct a digital public presentation: Visualizing the People’s History: Richard Cross’s photographs of Guatemala and Chiapas in the early 1980s, sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s Social Data and the Archive: Rethinking the Politics of Knowledge Production Research Cluster at the Orfalea Center and the Central American Studies Lab at the Center for Latin America and Iberian Research. You can register here to attend.
“Beyond Photographs: CROSS Connections,” UCLA Students Engage the Richard Cross Archive Through Comics
By Marta Valier
In the fall, UCLA students researched and engaged with the Richard Cross collection, using photographs of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, and Guatemala to create a four-page comic. The course, “From Viewing to Engagement: Comics and Illustrations in the Photographic Archive,” was part of the UCLA Visual and Performing Arts Education Program (VAPAE) and was taught by Marta Valier, an adjunct faculty member in the Journalism Department at CSUN and an affiliated faculty to the Bradley Center.
The students were introduced to learning how to navigate and use the Richard Cross digital collection, and they examined examples of its use in different contexts. CSUN's professor and director of the Bradley Center, José Luis Benavides, was a guest speaker and presented Cross’s photographic work, and Mar Ajé, co-founder of the Madre Monte women's collective from the community of San Basilio de Palenque, talked to the students about what it means to bring the archive back to the community, allowing the people represented in the photographs to tell their own stories.
Students from various departments took the class, with only a few of them already having some experience in creating graphic novels. But all of them accepted the challenge of working with a collection they knew nothing about. Another class guest, illustrator Sara Scalia, gave them an introduction to creating comics, and the rest happened very fast, as UCLA operates on a quarter system.
One of the objectives of the VAPAE program at UCLA is to build bridges with the surrounding Los Angeles communities. Introducing the students to the Bradley Center archive, whose mission is to share the visual history of Southern California, with a focus on ethnic minority communities, and to contribute to regional education through its extensive photographic collections, proved to be a perfect fit.
The course culminated in December with a pop-up exhibition curated by the students, titled “Beyond Photographs: CROSS Connections.” Set up in the Untitled Lounge at the Broad Art Center at UCLA, it showcased all of the students’ work.
A big thank you goes to Ashley Hannah, teaching assistant and photographer, and to Dr. Kevin Kane, director of the VAPAE program at UCLA, for believing in this project.
Madre Monte Exhibition To Open in March
By José Luis Benavides
Madre Monte and the Bradley Center are preparing the upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Social Justice, titled Mbosu ri Apú (Voices of Water), which we expect to open by the end of March. The art collective Madre Monte explores, through a series of cyanotypes, the intimate and poetic ancestral heritage of Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia, reflecting on how memory, mystery, and the dreamlike coexist in the Palenque universe of waters.
In the exhibition, the female symbolism converges in the clay pot, an everyday object that also represents the womb, the uterus, dark and cool repose, a container of memories and secrets. Water transforms into faces, landscapes, and glimpses of the past; it clouds the documentary clarity of Richard Cross’s photographic archive; and it reinterprets the collection by bringing it back to life in the Palenque territory, where it originated, amidst medicinal plants and the hands of women.
Madre Monte is currently working on a series of video podcasts based on the workshops they conducted with female youths and their interviews with community elders using Richard Cross’s photographic archive at the Bradley Center. Check their Instagram post in Spanish here.
Richard Cross in Guatemala and Chiapas
By Marta Valier and José Luis Benavides
The early death of Richard Cross at age 33 prevented him from completing his visual anthropological work on the Mayan refugees escaping genocide in the early 1980s. As we are preparing for a January 13 presentation: Visualizing the People’s History: Richard Cross’s photographs of Guatemala and Chiapas in the early 1980s, organized by UC Santa Barbara’s Social Data and the Archive: Rethinking the Politics of Knowledge Production Research Cluster at the Orfalea Center and the Central American Studies Lab at the Center for Latin America and Iberian Research, we cemented our early notion that Richard skilfully combined the rigor of a social scientist and the artistic and humanistic sensibility of a mature journalist and documentary photographer. He visited eight Maya refugee camps in Chiapas, and he knew what he wanted to document: their environmental context, their work, their families, the signs of violence, their problems and illnesses, and their celebrations.
An amazing collaboration of comic art with the Richard Cross Palenque images.