Cal class creates interactive self-guided Albany Bulb tour ‘Monument to Extraction’ developed this spring in UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab course
East Bay Times
June 15, 2021
” ‘The goal is to imagine future history,” [Susan] Moffat said. ‘We want to tell the stories particularly of the East Bay and the Bay Area in general…’
Stops in the Albany exhibit examine topics from deadly dynamite manufacturing in the 19th century to oil refining that continues nearby today, along with immigration, food processing, highway construction and other areas.”
Read the full article about the multimedia tour created by students in this Future Histories Lab course.
Photo: Kimberly Pack
Datebook
June 2021
“The Albany Bulb, a lollipop-shaped peninsula that extends a mile from McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, affords spectacular panoramas of the San Francisco Bay, from the Oakland cranes to the Golden Gate Bridge to Richmond.
It’s also a dump.”
“UC Berkeley undergraduate and grad students made art responding to the myriad ways that mining, manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction industries have used and abused the shoreline, leaving indelible imprints.”
Read the full article to find out Susan Moffat’s insight of this “accidental museum.”
Cal students build artistic ‘monument to extraction’ at Albany Bulb
Berkeleyside
June 14, 2021
“Much of the Bay Area’s history exists out of sight. Or at least out of notice. A new environmental art installation, and self-guided audio tour, at the Albany Bulb aims to change this by sharing the former dump’s history and calling attention to fossil fuel extraction, mining and climate change…
“If you take the audio tour, you’ll listen through your phone as you wander through the 1.5-mile site. Soft music will play and the calm voice of a UC Berkeley student will speak over the melody: ‘Pay attention. The Albany Bulb is full of hidden stories.’”
Madeleine Fraix, a UC Berkeley student of public health who worked on the Monument to Extraction exhibit, said the hardest part of the project was finding a way to represent the rich, complicated history surrounding the landscape. While the infrastructure it supported provided accessibility, opportunity and convenience to the Bay Area, it also created waste and extraction, she said.
Read the full article including student reflections on the multimedia tour they created in this Future Histories Lab course.
Photo: Kelly Sullivan
Oakland’s Black Liberation Walking Tour will use oral history to root a community in place
The Oakland Side
May 18, 2021
“The Black Liberation Walking Tour organizers hope that by documenting the stories of people who have spent generations in the neighborhood, they can help the community resist a type of gentrification that’s been all too common in Oakland. “
“The walking tour is also getting support from Dr. Lynne Horiuchi who is teaching a UC Berkeley course this summer entitled “Race, Redevelopment, and Gentrification: Oakland’s Hoover/Durant Library.” Students will interact with community members to ‘research and create products such as plans and oral histories that advance their cause.'”
Read the full story about the tour and the collaboration of a Future Histories Lab course with the Friends of Hoover-Durant Library.
Stephanie Syjuco’s ‘Native Resolution’ Won’t Let Racism Remain Filed Away
KQED
April 5, 2021
In her latest exhibition, Oakland artist Stephanie Syjuco powerfully implicates photography as one of imperialism’s most effective tools. Made by mining archives for images of Indigenous Filipinos, her show at Catharine Clark Gallery, Native Resolution examines photography, anthropology and archiving as overlapping knowledge structures that shape both imagination and American history.
Read the full article about Global Urban Humanities faculty member Stephanie Syjuco’s work on the representation of Filipinos at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
“Looking for Hope and Clinging to Hope”: Short Films for Our Times
Hyperallergic
February 22, 2021
The Asian Art Museum shares with Hyperallergic some of the short films featured in its forthcoming exhibition “After Hope: Videos of Resistance.”“How does art engage with the community and the world?” said [Padma] Maitland, who has curated all the events. “Looking at an issue and seeing how art can be part of that highlights the gray zones and challenges.”
“It’s this lens of different artists’ experiences,” he said of the short videos. “And it gives us an immediate window into someone’s experience.”
Read the full article about this exhibition at the Asian Art Museum curated by Global Urban Humanities alumnus Padma Maitland, who is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The exhibit featured a work by Global Urban Humanities alumna Connie Zheng.