Over the past year and a half, faculty and staff at UC San Diego in La Jolla have worked with professional artist Jay Schlossberg-Cohen to bring an experimental course to life and ultimately create a mural for the university’s Sixth College Commuter Center.
The project, “Earth and Water: We Are the Watershed,” was publicly unveiled June 6.
The ceremony included remarks from Schlossberg-Cohen and several organizers who helped bring the project to fruition.
One of them was Bill Geibel, an assistant teaching professor and associate director of experiential learning at Sixth College, which focuses primarily on culture, art and technology.
Geibel helps coordinate, teach and design experience-based courses and identify professors to teach them. In this instance, Geibel’s responsibilities included creating a syllabus for the mural-making course.
At the suggestion of Sixth College Provost Lakshmi Chilukuri, Geibel reached out to Schlossberg-Cohen about co-teaching the course. It eventually became a collaboration with Kristen Goodrich, coastal training program coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric istration’s Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.
Goodrich feels the mural’s water-inspired theme is especially relevant.
“I think right now … as we face climate change and the stressors it is causing on our many systems, water is particularly important,” said Goodrich, who has an extensive social science background. “It’s important to the San Diego region and really our cross-border region.”
The course, which fulfills a general education requirement for Sixth College, officially began in January and wrapped up in March. Sixth College then hosted community paint days for other students to contribute to the mural.
The class’s focus was twofold: produce community-based art and educate students about how access to clean water is increasingly at risk and the disproportionate impact that has on lower-income communities.
The first five weeks of the course leaned more on the social science side, while the rest was a blend of lectures and art workshops. Students from The Preuss School, a charter middle and high school on the UCSD campus for students from low-income households, ed in the project at the halfway point.
The work of an estimated 200 participants was included in the mural — 25 from Sixth College, 35 from Preuss and nearly 140 others.
“The inspiration really comes from our commitment to experiential learning and this idea that … these students are brilliant,” Geibel said. “They’re so smart now and they have so much technical skill. … I feel like experiential learning and civic education is really about giving them opportunities to think about ‘What can I do with that knowledge?’”
The final product is an amalgamation of the students’ work. Rather than one uninterrupted mural, more than 10 art pieces tell a singular story.
“It’s really their project,” Schlossberg-Cohen said. “I feel my job on a community-based project is to sort of harness their imagery, their thinking, and try to heighten it because I’m a professional artist. …
“They — because of their voices — made that work happen. If I had another 60 people, the work would look entirely different.”
Jeanne Monahan, Sixth College’s experiential learning coordinator, helped with the mural’s installation, purchasing materials and coordinating painting sessions.
Schlossberg-Cohen put the final touches on the mural last month, and students got to see it for the first time June 5.
“I was just excited that it was so colorful, and I’m excited to look at it all in detail and see what I might have contributed or what I recognized,” said Eva Barbosa, a second-year neurobiology major. “It’s so much different than what I imagined, but I’m glad I was part of this.”
Jayden Towe, a second-year media industries and communications major, said “A lot of us started this class saying we weren’t artists, that we don’t really do art or it was something we used to do as children. So it kind of felt like you were reconnecting with that inner child and putting that into a bigger project.”
Bo Oliver, a fourth-year political science major, reflected on his two years living at Sixth College with a comparatively plainer Commuter Center, which provides study and socializing spaces and amenities for students who live off campus.
“Now that I can see that it has a little bit more culture [and] a little bit more of a community feel to it, I’m really excited for future students to just be immersed in what Sixth always really meant to me through the class schedule,” Oliver said. “We learned about really important things. I just never felt like it was reflected in our community. This feels like a steppingstone for that to be the case long-term.”
Geibel said he hopes the project will inspire students to be creative and take action in their lives beyond the campus.
“Engaging students in this mural-making project is part of filling that void that might exist and them not feeling like they have ownership over this space,” Geibel said. “And it’s also a part of a longer-term effort to get them to realize the agency that they do have — that they can make an impact where they are, whether it’s a college, a job or a community.” ♦
