Sourdough and Selfies: How Art Saved Us During the Lockdown
Vivian Halloran
English
In this course, we will think back to the pandemic lockdown of 2020-21, a time when you were high school freshmen, and analyze how people turned to art, broadly defined, to help them cope with the isolation of lockdown. We will mine social media posts from this time as well as journalistic analysis of the viral trends as they happened in real time to better understand why cooking, reenacting historical artworks, book clubs, and bad singing in Zoom, became the viral ways through which we built community at this time. We will simultaneously use some of these trends to start building community during the virtual portion of IFS instruction. The primary skill we will develop and hone during IFS will be creative non-fiction reflective writing. Once on campus, our class will visit locations that house similar resources—from the Eskenazi Museum of Art, to the IU University Archives, the teaching kitchen, to the Arthur Metz Bicentennial Grand Carillion, to name just a few and engage with the collections in real time as well as choose items to recreate virtually. Finally, we will serve our local community by spending one shift volunteering at the Monroe Community Kitchen. By comparing how physical interaction with archives, kitchens, and museum collections provides a different set of access and connections to those virtually available, our class will reflect upon how art feeds the soul individually even as it also helps us build virtual communities based on shared aesthetic values. Together, we will assemble an annotated “lockdown syllabus” for future generations of people studying this era to refer back to as they try to reconstruct and understand this historical era. A key factor here will be to add generationally appropriate activities to supplement the middle-aged ones that went viral or captured the news.
This course is eligible for honors credit through Hutton Honors College.
Catalog Information: COLL-S 103 FRESHMAN SEMINAR IN A&H