By Gwen Frost
The annual Memoirs student art gallery kicked off their two-week showing this Monday, May 14. The Memoirs showcase is derived from the famous spoken word performance, ‘The Vagina Memoirs,’ which is derived from ‘The Vagina Monologues.’
Seventeen students have come together to produce a collection of art reflecting their individual experiences with their own gender, race, sexuality and experiences as womxn, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people.
The students have met weekly through Fall, Winter and half of Spring quarter to work on developing their projects and this event.
The Memoirs art gallery is outside the post office on the fifth floor in the Viking Union, accessible by elevator or the stairs next to the information desk on the sixth floor.
This year pulled in a large number of people, a total of 18 students including junior McKenzie Bolar, the organizer and director of Memoirs. Bolar is also the AS Womxn’s Identity Resource Center assistant coordinator for identity expression.
“Not all the students did put out projects,” said Bolar. “But the main purpose of memoirs is to help the students involved in memoirs build community.”
The Vagina Monologues were a spoken-word event, which has now evolved to a gallery event. Bolar said the name changed because “we at the Womxn’s Identity Resource Center realized that vagina isn’t inclusive to all the people who we would want represented in the event, so we got it shortened to ‘Memoirs.’”
Senior Josephene Dean contributed to Memoirs last year as well as this year.
“I think the artwork is just representative of that community building that happens during Memoirs,” they said.
Dean has gone to Memoirs since Freshman year, back when it was called ‘Vagina Memoirs,’ and said it was all women back then.
“It was a very raw, emotional event,” Dean said. “This one is much easier to take in, but the raw emotion is still there, it’s just a bit more accessible, because not everybody is able to just get up there and talk about their life story.”
Freshman Daniela Tierra found healing through Memoirs.
“Throughout the year, it’s been a really big journey for me to openly talk about my own life and the things I’m dealing with,” she said.
Tierra’s piece titled Emotional Baggage is a suitcase filled with things that are “representative of (her) life.”
The tangible function of the art led to internal healing that Tierra found through putting butterflies over identifying information on the pill bottles and her old high school transcript.
“I gradually realized that it was actually really healing to be able to put something that’s a sign of hope on the things that I found to be inherently so negative to me,” Tierra said.
Attendee Xana Gilman talked about Dayjha McMillan’s collage poetry piece.
“It’s really powerful how she chose to collage images and words to create this piece that expresses so much about her and her experience,” they said.
This was Gilman’s first experience with Memoirs, and said that “it’s really cool to be surrounded by so many queer people.”
“It’s nice to know that there are so many of us,” said Gilman. “I hope to feel more connected to the queer community on campus. To feel empowered and inspired to create my own poetry and art. Seeing other people actually do it, I want to become more inspired to do it myself.”
The gallery will be up until Friday, May 25.