Museum of the Wayward

Museum of the Wayward is a collection-based project of visual materials brought together through the process of reading Saidiya Hartman’s book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. In order to foster participatory engagement, not only with the text but with the networks of various characters, events, and places mentioned and described, students collected relevant images and research throughout the semester. In addition, students produced a contextual document (presented in the glass case) that engages some of the histories, locations, persons, events, and artifacts found in Hartman’s book. The viewer is encouraged to look back and forth across the networks of images and the contextual document to construct patterns of information and glean a gesture towards the radical way that Hartman has re-imagined the constructing of history.

Museum of the Wayward was created for and by the class, Decolonizing Time Travel, co-taught by Josh Rios (VCS) and Nicole Marroquin (ArtEd) with Fola Akinde, Long Cao, Alexandria Eregbu, Sarita Garcia, Hugo Juarez, Dj Malinowski, Amanda Nascimento Miranda, Emily Nagel, Misha Neal, Chloe Oslin, Emily Prescott, Eden Sanders, and Kirsten Schuck. Special acknowledgment to Hugo Juarez for helping in the installation process.