About The Project:
This project was based around the idea of "The American Dream." We were first inspired by a video about wealth inequality, as well as statistics about wealth gaps and American Dream Statistics Joanne showed us. We then went out into the world and found someone who came of age (financial independence, or defining moment) in 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's,1990's, or 2000's and interviewed them about their life experiences. We then compiled our note in order to create a biography that was two pages about our interviewee's story, and two pages of analysis of the time they grew up and relations between their stories and events during that time period. We also took the time to write a personal narrative about what we students personally thought about the American Dream. Eventually after several drafts of each, we got into different teams (like at a company that makes a magazine) and started work on compiling all out writing into a book along with images that provided a parallel image to the overall idea of the book, or the individual stories themselves.
Exhibition:
We were very fortunate that The New Americans Museum, located in Liberty Station, were willing to let us display our exhibition. They thought it was very cool that we were doing a project that correlated with their overall ideals and goals as a museum. At the same time we were exhibiting, an artist named Shin Pei was doing an installation at the same museum. He asked us to contribute to his piece by submitting 113 word poems about a moment of arrival. He then incorporated this into an installation made out of string by taking the first letter of the first and last words of our poem and taking a strand and connecting them to points representing letters in the alphabet and then weaving them in with string. Overall, this exhibition went a lot better than I expected. We put the entire thing together in about the span of 3 or so days. Unfortunately on the last day we had to walk back and forth between school and the museum which wasn't super enjoyable because of the wind. The actual night of the exhibition went well. We had bands playing and everything looked very nice. As HTH exhibitions go, I think we killed it.
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