Socially Engaged Art at the Reimagined 21st Century Museum

Abstract

Conceptual Framework On a warm sunny day in October, 2016, I sat in an uncomfortable office chair in the middle of a Midwestern campus quad, tethered to the woman sitting across from me by the connected microphones pinned to our shirts. We were brought together by our mutual participation in Migration Stories an art project led by visiting artist Mark Menjivar (2016). The piece was a component of Northern Triangle, a Borderland Collective exhibition about the United States' relationship to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala ("Borderland Collective: Northern Triangle," 2016). As a volunteer for Menjivar's project, I was tasked with drawing out the migratory histories of passing strangers on the college quad. Participants were invited to self-determine what they considered migration, be it their personal journey that led to their arrival on the campus, to their ancestor's relocations from various homelands. Later, these migration stories became part of an oral history archive that Menjivar disseminated through exhibitions, print publications, and a project website (Menjivar, 2016).