Ancestral Realm, or rather, a flier for the project, pinned up just outside my office door. From December 2008--one of the last times we did this one in my Environmental Design 11A class, at that time the introductory studio for the college as a whole. (And a course I first taught in 1974!)
"Each of the students chooses someone crucial from their family's past, and conveys the person's story though a set of large, chiaroscuro pencil drawings and a hand-made book. The kids work very hard on this--it's a month-long effort--and the stories they tell are invariably fascinating: they come from every quarter of the globe, just like the students themselves. We've had Shanghai ship captains,, Philipino revolutionaries, goldminers from Sinoloa, a ham-radio fanatic from Des Moines--and once even an associate of Le Corbusier, from the environs of Paris! Or a Navy man from Coronado...Touching, poignant, odd, funny, engaging--the work is rewarding in every respect. The students carry these projects with them for the rest of their lives; perhaps we do as well..."
Given the range of starting points, geographically speaking, the Navy officer was not an obvious choice. But you can tell from the care--and skill--applied here that the connection was strongly felt--especially in the framed doorway figure, head slightly down, hat in hand, the fit of the uniform makes him look almost boyish--so that the viewer wonders at the transposition--a Navy officer from 1958, or a Berkeley student half a century later. Not that Cara became her grandfather, but that in remembering him--that is to say, drawing him, she allowed for the possibility...
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The bottom corners of the flier crumpled slightly--push-pins borrowed and repurposed, no doubt... And what I liked, in particular, were the off-yellow verticals--lines of masking tape applied to the drawing, in progress--and here not yet removed...
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