Your Own Channel
“The inspiration for the design of the mural, Your Own Channel, emerged from a series of conversations with the youth groups, VQ/Vision Quest and AIC/Achieving Independence Center. During our meetings, these young minds expressed their understanding of the function of television and related media outlets. I incorporated their refreshing comments into work from my ongoing series which I began in 2013, LIVE and IN COLOR. In that series I collage images derived from television programs with black casts, intertwined with TV color bars set within a vintage TV frame. The resulting images represent variations of the exaggerated characterizations of the black subject portrayed in entertainment as a both a mirror and juxtaposition to our complex and rich existence.
“It was important to this generation that our conversation expanded to include social media as a form of entertainment, explaining how this new media is used to gain a personal audience in the form of ‘followers.’ It enables us to present our own hyper-expressions of characterization. We now control – to an extent – our own presentations. We are using emojis to communicate meaning and emotion, and these symbols are considered substituted versions of human emotion and are accepted as stand-ins in this new found entertainment.
“With this new information, the mural sets aside a commercially broadcast scene to make way for a new wall of contemporary emotion within the colorbars and vintage TV, serving as a present-day expression while acknowledging the past and looking towards the future.”
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About Mind Over Media:
Who tells our stories? And what details get left behind on the cutting room floor? In Mind Over Media, students explored content creation by learning to interview others, by editing stories, and by confessing their truth, adding their voices to the national discussion of race, youth, and media.
Artists Shinique Smith, the Cause Collective, and Derrick Adams added depth to the curriculum, helping students create a documentary, design twelve memes, and create two colorful works of public art. Forty-five students from Vision Quest, Lee Prep Academy, and AIC Mural Arts Education Sites took part in this project’s curriculum, addressing current events through the arts by focusing on the following questions:
What is media and what power does it have?
Racial inequality persists in America and continues to fuel a national discussion. One way that this inequality is perpetuated is through the types of representation and misrepresentation of people of color across various platforms of contemporary media. As many of today’s youth are tech savvy media makers themselves, this project helped youth research, understand, and contextualize the many messages that they receive.
Who creates media?
Through dynamic classroom interventions with contemporary artists, youth learned how artists create and use media in positive ways to reflect their identities. Artists Shinique Smith, the Cause Collective, and Derrick Adams worked with youth in the Mural Arts Restorative Justice Youth program exploring new and traditional media. Additionally, these artists created murals and temporary public art projects with students and Mural Arts teaching artists.
How can we make media that best represents ourselves and our communities?
Media is a constant in our lives. American teens spend approximately 1,500 hours a year watching television. Roughly 17 million children and teens have Internet access in their homes, using it daily for everything from researching school projects to playing online games, from grouping images and ideas with hashtags to chatting with their classmates.
After discussion and participation in thoughtful art activities, students learned how to interview each other, how to make a newspaper, and the process of creating large-scale public art. The Media Mobilizing Project documented the entire project through film, further demonstrating to the youth how media is planned and edited. The Media Mobilizing project also made memes, highlighting student perspectives on media representation.