TAMPERING WITH TRUTH:
Relating Family History
The Collage Project
This course will explore the theme of artists and history. We will study how creative artists in diverse art forms–fiction, memoir, theater, opera, film, photography, and visual art—interpret and transform history. How does an artist mold materials to expose an audience to new and challenging ideas? How do different texts and different genre illuminate the human condition—the twisting and turning, the metamorphosis, which we all experience as to we struggle to understand who we are and why we exist?
This fall, we began the semester, by seeing a performance of The History Boys, set in the mid-1980s in Cutler’s Grammar School in the North of England. Determined to get into England’s pre-eminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, a rare phenomenon for grammar school students, the boys received intensive coaching to enable them to sit for the Oxbridge entrance exams. To alter the course of history, their headmaster decided that the traditional teaching methods (Hector’s) needed updating and Irwin was brought in to transform the classroom: to add shock value, rather than content, to the boys’ answers. The results—we discovered—transformed history, often tampering with truth.
Several weeks later, we read Samuel G. Freedman’s memoir about his mother, Who She Was. When Freedman visited our class, he described how he researched and subsequently recreated his mother’s life, which included several years as a student at City College downtown (Baruch). Freedman spoke about his desire to make his reader understand and appreciate the world Eleanor Hatkin, his mother lived in—the larger truths about life in immigrant families in The Bronx and beyond.
We also read Susan Choi’s novel, American Woman, based on the Patty Hearst story, and screened the PBS documentary Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst. In her talk, Tampering with Truth: What Fiction Can Do with Historical Facts, Choi described the ways she reframed the Hearst story, choosing to center her novel on Japanese-American Jenny Shimada (based on Wendy Yoshimura) instead of Patty Hearst.
After our readings and discussions, it was time for students in the class to become artists. Students were asked to create a collage that would relate their version of their family history. The collage was to be approximately 8 ½ by 11 inches in size, incorporating a wide variety of materials. Each creative work was to be signed.
We were following in the tradition of album or autograph quilts which were popular during the 19th century in such cities as Baltimore, Maryland. These album quilts—with individual squares that were created and signed for a variety of occasions—were passed on from generation to generation, creating an artistic and personal historical archive. This collage project continues the legacy of the quilters, using Web log technology, instead of needles and thread, to sew together our own class family history quilt.
Prof. Roslyn Bernstein (email)
Baruch College
Fall 2006
William Hampton-Sosa (email)
Technology Fellow