Mapping Arts OC

An ongoing public digital humanities project produced in collaboration with digital history students at California State University Fullerton (CSUF), local artists and community partners throughout Orange County, California. This project digitally maps the public arts landscape of Southern California cities including Santa Ana and Long Beach.

Project Highlights

• Mapped the location, artist info and spatial stories for 28 public art works across two Southern California cities and counting
• Published a 21-page coloring and activity book that shares the history of local public art with a K-5 audience
• Created a bilingual mobile walking tour of Santa Ana California’s downtown murals
• Hosted two public programs including a student symposium and keynote talk at California State University Fullerton, and a community launch party held at Makara Center for the Arts
• Continues to engage historically marginalized groups and first generation college students in the public digital humanities

Evidence of Quality of the Digital Platform

This project constitutes the fifth installment on the geographically multi-sited, Mapping Arts platform. Mapping Arts was created by Dr. Lara Kirby Pardo, founder of Blackbird Arts and Research, a nonprofit dedicated to innovative arts and research projects that connect the arts, history, and the public. The Mapping Arts platform is designed to map cities through places where artists have lived and worked historically. The Mapping Arts OC portion of this platform contains images, and original research by graduate and undergraduate students from CSUF, working under the supervision of Dr. Moore Pewu .

Project Background

Mapping Arts OC is that rare kind of project that feels seamless, but its complex inner workings are actually the product of years of work by various partners that come together at just the right time. In 2009 Dr. Lara Pardo Kirby extended her doctoral dissertation research into a digital mapping platform that helped users visualize the places and spaces that an array of artists such as Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Katherine Dunham lived, played and worked in Miami between the 1920s and 1950s. This project challenged users see what was not readily accessible within the contemporary landscape, and invited communities to engage with the spatiality of urban life through the lives and times of various artists. The Miami site was followed by Providence, RI (2013) and later Denver, CO (2016) both of which took on different time periods, but emphasized African Diasporic and Chicano art histories respectively.

While thinking through the prototype for my Black Atlantic Map which was also preoccupied with questions of space, place and race, I often cited Mapping Arts as an example of the way digital mapping could be used to generate new knowledge on local histories. Then in 2016, while teaching CSUF’s first Digital History course I invited Dr. Pardo to provide a guest lecture and share a behind the scenes look at what it takes to not only build a successful public facing digital history project but also show students how she sustained it over the years. One way to build sustainability and expand the site was by weaving Mapping Arts into courses she taught at Brown University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. This presentation, inspired me to begin thinking about how the Mapping Arts platform could be integrated into CSUF’s Digital History Practicum. The DH practicum is intended to give students hands-on experience and facilitate a space in which DH theory and practice merge. So, after the lecture I reached out to Dr. Pardo Kirby and proposed Orange County as the next site on Mapping Arts. Dr. Pardo Kirby not only said yes, but became an immediate supporter of the burgeoning idea that would become Mapping Arts OC.

With this green light, I then began to think about what my dream practicum course might look like and what it could mean for students to truly engage local history and local communities in ways that promoted soft skills such as storytelling, collaboration, and project management while also developing technical skills using web mapping, desktop publishing and mobile app software. Identifying the skills I wanted students to develop through the course was important, because I always view my courses as opportunities to go beyond the book: to fuel curiosity, and impart a love of lifelong learning. In fact,

One small piece of advice I have for students is to measure their academic growth in ways that go beyond a letter grade, and to instead think about what kinds of skills and experiences they would like to acquire before they leave the university.

Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu, Faculty Spotlight, Humanities and Social Sciences, CSUF

To this end I applied for and received the first of three grants that would support this project from course development to implementation. The first was a Faculty Enhancement and Instructional Development Award (FEID), through CSUF in 2017. This award was followed by a California Humanities, Humanities for All Quick Grant awarded in 2018, and a College of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty Legacy Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activity and Innovations in Pedagogy in 2018. The FEID supporting me in researching and preparing the course in summer of 2017 during which time I developed the thematic focus on public art and identified Santa Ana as the geographic focus. I also began assembling new course material, defining the learning objectives and establishing contact with potential community partners.

One such partner was Manny Escamilla, a Santa Ana based community archivist and urban planner. Escamilla had been working with local artist to compile and maintain a list of public art pieces, each with varying degrees of metadata. So, in 2018 on the heels of yet another defacing of the public mural, Among Heroes which pays homage to Mexican-American veterans – I shared my vision for this project with Escamilla, who then shared the initial list that became the building blocks for the Mapping Arts OC data set. Yet, while the course and community partnerships were coming together there was an element that was missing.

For a project invested in mapping public art as a way of better understanding how artworks that are produced for public consumption do something to the landscape, I also needed to make sure that the project’s impact was felt beyond the walls of the classroom, I needed to build in deeper public engagement. As such, I applied for a California Humanities, Humanities for All Quick Grant, which supported the development of three distinct public products and thereby three ways of accessing Mapping Arts OC based on age, and technological preference. So in addition to the digital map we used the same data to create a mobile walking tour of downtown Santa Ana’s murals, and an illustrative history (aka coloring book ) geared at a k-5 audience. This work transformed the city’s murals into coloring outlines and educational activities for a younger audience. Together, these works represent the true potential of what it means to create digital projects for the public; because by developing transformative public products we can both engage local communities and increase digital and visual literacy skills.