Conflicted Coexistence:
Revealing and Representing Competing Identities

An arts education program for youth, investigating issues of conflict and coexistence through identity.

More and more people are beginning to recognize the multifarious nature of identity and its many subsets: race, language, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, to name a few. Some of these carry more weight than others, sometimes externally, such as we are seeing right now with the case of race, and other times internally, such as one's belief in God, perhaps. 

In an ever increasingly binaried world, it's imperative to address the complexity of identity and to be open to and engaged in conversations about what certain conflicted identities mean for individuals and communities. The ability to critically identify and analyze conflicting “identities,” to be able to listen to and respect multiple narratives is critical to a better future and that sort of social, emotional, and analytical training must start at a young age. 

Imagine if school children grew comfortable asking the questions: whose history are we learning? Whose narrative are we reading? What are the other sides to this story? 

The following is a curriculum designed to reimagine and revive the relationship between cultural institutions and community youth.

Critical Exhibitions: Coexisting Conflict in Museum Collections

Timeline: Each week-long session would focus on a single exhibition and would include approximately 8 Middle School children (7th - 8th grade).

Agenda: Each student would be given a chance to explore a collection, prompted with the following questions:

• Whose history is represented in this piece

• What types of pieces do you see 

Each student would be asked to pick a piece from the collection and answer as many of the following questions as they can:

• What is the name of the piece?

• Where was it created?

• What time period is it from?

• Who is the artist?

• What pieces is it placed next to? Why do you think its displayed this way? 

• What do you think the piece is trying to tell you?

• If you had to create a new exhibit, with this piece in it, what would it be?

And most importantly, how are different identities represented in this piece? Do they conflict or complement each other?

The students would come back together and share their findings with the rest of the group and discuss, prompted to think about which questions they could answer, which questions they couldn’t, and why. 

Then, the student would be given the opportunity to create their own piece of art (photography, film, writing, drawing, collage, etc.) which highlights the piece they’ve chosen and what conflicting identities are at play.

At the end of the program, all of the creations would be put on display, adjacent to the piece within the exhibition and open for the public to see. 

Presented at the 2nd Edition of Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education (Oct 2020) and 19th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities (July 2021)