Description
This written thesis paper overviews a community-based, pedagogically grounded, and socially engaged art project that I developed and organized, in partnership with the PRIDE Center at San Diego State University and the CHEL learning community for LGBTQ+ students at Southwestern College in southwestern San Diego. This graduate thesis project consisted of a series of hands-on workshops that explored the intersection of art and queer identity, through exposure to the queer history of adornment and creative jewelry/adornment making projects. Specifically, these workshops created spaces for queer college students to explore how jewelry and adornment could be utilized as tools for healing, self-expression, coded messages, and imagining queer futures. Additionally, this project included a guest speaker event that highlighted the intersection of jewelry/adornment within a queer, trans, and Indigenous context, as well as an on-campus exhibition of the work. As a person who works through an interdisciplinary lens of education, the arts, and identity, this project is grounded in history and theory that spans multiple subjects and disciplines. My research centered queer aesthetics and theory, education as a praxis of co-creation and liberation, as well as the potential of community-based socially engaged arts to create individual, community, and ideological change. The findings and inspiration from this research created the foundation for exploring the community-based and socially engaged art project, both in practice and as it relates to drawing conclusions regarding the project's contributions. I believe that this thesis project and paper, which lie at the intersection of community-based socially engaged art, education and queer identity, contributes to this larger field in three significant ways: by providing a case-study on the impact of formally integrating community-based arts practices within spaces of higher education, within the context of a pandemic; by providing additional insights into the intersection of jewelry, adornment, and queer identity; and by highlighting the power of community-based and pedagogically integrated arts to disrupt dominant narratives and construct new ideologies.
