Above: Staff Bulletin: The Transformation of Activism, Found, reproduced and altered administrative ephemera, dust jackets, postcards, staff away sign, and button recovered from UCSB Ethnic and Gender Studies Library, bulletin board, thumbtacks, printed chiffon, 36” x 24”, 2024

Staff Bulletins, 2024

Staff Bulletins are part of Dust Jackets, an ongoing body of work responding to the history of the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collections (EGSC) at University of California Santa Barbara’s Library.

In 2023, I was invited to participate in a pilot program where I was paired with the UCSB Library as an artist-strategist. Over the past year, I have built relationships with library staff, led workshops with students that engaged with archive materials, and researched in UCSB’s Special Collections.

The works in Dust Jackets, including the Staff Bulletins, transform archival materials from the history of UCSB’s Ethnic Studies programs into sculptures, weavings, and garments. Many of my source materials were recovered from abandoned staff offices in the UCSB Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection whose remaining contents were slated to be discarded.

One of the objects that struck me most vibrantly in the abandoned EGSC offices were large bulletin boards covered with former staff’s personal ephemera including memos, flags, postcards, motivational phrases, staff away signs and social justice posters. Staff Bulletins remix and reimagine bulletin boards.

Read more about the Dust Jackets project and the history of UCSB’s Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection here.