Grad Walk/Open Studios
Boyce Gallery
Baton Rouge
Nov. 20
Walking into Boyce Gallery on the day of open studios is an almost overwhelming experience. Every wall is covered by a different student’s work. There’s no organizing principle. One student’s project projects onto the wall while another’s is a set of three framed digital screens. Another looks to be part of a burgeoning picture book. But everything has a story.
Ara Allen, a first semester MFA graphic design student, is working on a project called Zine Flux, a workshop experience for 10-17 year old girls.
“This idea came to be when they started becoming preteens, and they became very disconnected to their own peers,” she said.
It caused her to brainstorm ways she could reconnect them to their peers and community. In her research, she found zines. In the '80s-'90s, adolescents printed mini newspapers/booklets, subscribed to each other’s and built an organic community.
“It ended when adults were like ‘Oh this is great! Let’s make it educational,'” she said.
Now in her research, Allen is working with small groups through Girl Scouts to do multiple zine workshops, some of which were featured at the gallery. She set up a table for people to make zines of their own and hung up a selection of different zines as examples.
They’re mostly not educational. Some are: One describes different vocabulary one might need to navigate the world of Kpop. Another is a guide to current slang including 6-7 and glazer. (To any older millennials out there, they’ve taken this word and made it kinda wholesome.) Others explore what happens when fish eat poprocks or different kinds of pie. A surprising number of them include references to pee.
It’s cool to see what young people are passionate enough about to make a zine about. Maybe with more workshops and more opportunities, they’ll even start finding other things they want to write about. So much of school is focused around the next step: You do well in elementary school to set you up for middle school so you can do well in high school so you can get into a good college (or trade school) and potentially more school after that to somehow end up in a good career so you can have money so you can support a family so your kids can do the whole thing over again.
The zine project asks: What do you like now? It doesn’t have to be deep, it doesn’t have to be informational, and it doesn’t even have to be aesthetically beautiful. It’s also replicable. Allen has created guides on how to create the zines and hopes to train faculty at schools or other girls to facilitate zine workshops of their own.
Researchers don’t generally care about what young girls think, she observed to me in a casual conversation before our interview. It’s probably because they have no money and aren’t generally out here posing dangers to society.
But Allen has displayed these girls’ work next to the grad student work. Across from a meticulously designed poster of animal shaped Hangul letters, across from photography, she’s making space for what they want too, even if that’s “67 pee man.”
