Browse Exhibits (12 total)

Welcome to Black Female Filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion: an interactive exhibit that explores Black female cinematic auteurship during the revolutionary L.A. Rebellion at UCLA. 

The L.A. Rebellion is a film movement that spanned across the 1960s to the 1980s in which Black film students at UCLA began formulating a Black filmic aesthetic that opposed the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. The movement is marked by its highly radical nature, drawing from Third Cinema in its overt politicization whilst also experimenting with forms of expressing Black life. This exhibit focuses on the key Black female filmmakers involved in the L.A. Rebellion including Julie Dash, Jacqueline Frazier, Melvonna Bellenger, Alile Sharon Larkin, and Barbara McCullough—particularly interpreting and analyzing one short film from their respective bodies of work and situating them as entries into a versatile, radical tradition of Black filmic archival practice. 

This exhibit explores how archives shape the way women's labor becomes visible, celebrated, overlooked, or erased. Rather than treating archives as neutral containers, it exposes how descriptive choices such as captions, tables, slogans, and metadata guide what counts as meaningful labor and what does not. Drawing on scholarly conversations about memory, archival power, and the limits of representation, this exhibit shows how institutions cultivate certain narratives while obfuscating others. By placing various forms of labor in conversation through their modes of description, the exhibit invites viewers to think about how women's work enters the historical record and why those choices continue to influence what today's labor will mean in the future.

For my exhibit, I wanted to take you on a journey through the history of Little Nourse Theater, the student-led theater of Carleton College. The Little Nourse Theater was built as an extension to Nourse Dormitory in 1932 and has a reputation for structural issues as well as a deep sentimentality to students throughout the decades. This exhibit will not only span the entirety of the theater's lifespan but also specifically highlight moments of student resilience and perseverance in the face of hardships while working in theater. In viewing this exhibit, I would go in chronological order, starting with the Carletonian Article from 1932 and ending with the Antigone comparison.

Student-led theater is an area I am quite passionate about. I only recently became an active member of Carleton's Experimental Theater, or ETB, but the time I have spent there has been awe-inspiring and eye-opening, as I have witnessed the sheer determination and perseverance it takes to run a student-led theater board. There are limitations in budget, set, and actors, and still, revolutionary works are created in as small and restricted a space as Little Nourse Theater.

Although student-led theater is deemed as less professional, the drive and passion is unlike anything I have seen in professional Carleton shows. When something is entirely student-run, there is a pride and ownership from the students that is not always apparent in shows produced by the College. Theater is a beautiful paradox of an entirely fanciful world rooted in sincerity. It allows outlets for communities that have traditionally been ostracized to find a place of refuge and solace. Under the guise of art, protests and acts of transgression are made possible.

After spending countless hours in Little Nourse this term, I share a similar sentiment to the theater as my predecessors. This history and love for the theater are rich and cover every wall, literally and figuratively. Through this exhibit, I hope you also develop a fondness for this little theater and appreciate the perseverance of theater students past and present. 

An exhibit focused on the depiction and representation of Indigenous Americans in Hollywood; the central event it will discuss is Apache activist Sacheen Littlefeather's refusal of the Academy Award for Best Actor on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973. 

In the 1970s and 80s, students at Carleton College participated in a global activist push against Apartheid, the racist system of governance in South Africa that systematically oppressed the country’s majority Black population. At Carleton, as with many other colleges and universities, this activism manifested in calls for institutional divestment from companies with economic ties to the Apartheid government. Student demands were met with resistance from school officials and administrative bodies. Still, calls for divestment continued as new student activists cycled through their four years at Carlerton, sometimes yielding incremental concessions.

This exhibit showcases the various tactics employed by these student protesters during the years-long push for divestment at Carleton. Each page exemplifies different modes of student activism from throughout the history of anti-Apartheid activism at Carleton. 

Click the images throughout to enlarge items, view multi-page items, or find Dublin Core information.

This exhibit examines the push for coeducation and coed dormitories on college campuses in mid-century America. The sources displayed engage with popular depictions of coed living, student, alumni, and administrative opinion on the matter, as well as the lasting legacies of the coed movement. This exhibit aims to convey an understanding of the general concerns that accompanied switches to coed classes and dorms, from the value of homosociality to women’s education and students’ sexual promiscuity. It also prompts viewers, through engaging with the historical sources, to consider how modern attitudes have changed from those expressed during the height of the coed movement, or whether many of the same concerns still exist today.

This exhibit explores the experience and treatment of women's mental illness in the 19th century. Medical papers and official manuscripts offer insight into the broader culture at the time, while writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin seek to illustrate the counterculture of strong female voices. This exhibit seeks to show two experiences: women whose real illness was ignored, such as Gilman and other victims of the rest cure, and women whose illness was invented as a form of abuse, documented by women such as Lydia B. Denny. Furthermore, I hope to illustrate the ways in which these practices were ingrained into the culture, only to be challenged by women such as Gilman and Chopin who had the ability to fight back.