Spring 2018 | Oral History and the Arts
Oral history is an art. The practice of oral history is creative -- in interviews we make narratives together with our interviewees, imagining worlds, telling stories, creating characters. Oral history can also be used to document the arts, to tell the stories of painters and dancers and actors and writers and the worlds they live in. And the arts are a powerful means to amplify and interpret oral histories, transforming them into literary narratives, building theater or music or dance performances from them, using them to create documentaries. This year, we will explore all of these many intersections of oral history and the arts, asking what unique contributions an oral history approach can make to artistic practice, and how oral history can help us to think about art and its role in the world.
Thursday Evening Event Series
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Thursday Evening Event Series 〰️
Find more about speakers, individual events, and student reflections through the Learn More buttons.
Spring 2018
January 25, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Jennifer Egan: The Novelist as Oral Historian
IN-PERSON with Jennifer Egan
Join us as Egan discusses her experiences as an interviewer, how she thinks oral history differs from journalism, and the process by which facts and stories are transformed by her imagination into entirely new stories. And learn more about Manhattan Beach, the latest memorable and surprising installment in a smart and versatile literary career.
February 1, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Writing and Listening for the Intersubjective Encounter
IN-PERSON with Nyssa Chow
Using her multimedia book project Still.Life. - Intersecting Histories as a starting point, Nyssa Chow will discuss the process of translating the oral history encounter into prose, audio and portraiture. This lecture will engage the question — What do we need to know to understand the experience of another? — We will consider ways to listen for the answer in the oral history interview.
February 15, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
The Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project: An Oral and Art History Mash-up
IN-PERSON with Sara Sinclair and Mary Marshall Clark
This talk will provide an overview of the process behind, and coordination of, the oral history project conducted by INCITE/CCOHR in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. This investigation sought to establish an oral biography of the artist by recording first-hand accounts of his life, work, and legacy and also to capture the spirit of the larger art world that he inhabited throughout his life.
March 8, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
How to Listen
IN-PERSON with Daniel Alarcón
In this workshop, Alarcón discusses the relationship between journalism, literature and oral history, and showing how interviews and lived experience can serve as the building blocks for different types of storytelling. Drawing on his work as a novelist, radio producer, and a print journalist, Alarcón will show how each medium informs and complements the other, and how the core skill of each—listening—always points the way.
March 29, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Performing Listening in the Context of Memorial Audio Walks
IN-PERSON with Luis Sotelo
Does a performance of memory need to include words? When is it necessary and appropriate to re-present someone else’s oral history testimony? What roles do listening, remembering and going public play in the performance of oral history? In this talk, Luis Sotelo will explore these questions by looking at a series of examples of work by him, by social actors (memory activists), and by other artists.
April 5, 2018, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Push Play
IN-PERSON with Nicki Pombier Berger and Liza Zapol
This participatory workshop will be based on the ongoing research of Push Play. We explore the embodied experience of interviewing as a way of examining how we remember, how we ask narrators to engage in memory, and what is, or is not, included in the archive. We draw on creativity and sense of play as a way of pushing through limits in the practice of oral history.
Find more Events with OHMA
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Find more Events with OHMA 〰️