Ethnographic Essay Plan

Bennington students use the Plan Process to design an education that responds to their individual questions and passions. Please provide a written response that organizes your ideas for your Bennington Plan. (Political) Arts for Healing .

I plan to study how meaning can be found and learned in art, particularly how issues pertaining to gender, race, sexuality, and class, manifest themselves in our communities. My hometown and high school seemed apathetic towards social injustices, which was both upsetting and confusing, because how does one easily continue their life knowing their locality is pleading for help? These questions drive my interest in creating art that queries my audience’s relationship with society, thus looking at their

The motor skills that go into printmaking can easily be successors for self harming. It involves forcefully carving into mediums such as linoleum and wood. However, working with easier or softer materials like plexiglass and styrofoam requires diligence and concentration that participants with anxiety, OCD etc, might lean more towards. Both mediums can counteract the urges to self harm. I’d like my workshops to have a storytelling focus because I want participants to feel like their experiences are seen and heard. Personal narratives will be developed and could address various subject matter: from what it’s like to be openly gay in a homophobic home, to growing up with a disability in a world that isn’t accessible to you. I want to bring awareness to marginalized groups of people and for their feelings of inadequacy to be acknowledged, but I also want to be able to develop methods on how to move forward and triumph over these

I want to be as inclusive as I can in the ways I create, analyze, and experience art in all forms, that way I can then expound as much of that into my plan/workshops. Taking instrumental, writing, and even theater classes would better prepare me when trying to relate and appeal to groups of people with interests outside my own. Naturally, I’m introverted and soft spoken, so participating in performance-heavy workshops isn’t always my preferred option. But a student that is not so confident in their visually artistic abilities might want to develop a performance piece like a monologue, that would better pertain to them individually and capture their narrative more accurately. Potentiality and talent is revealed in a variety of ways, and for me it happens to be visual arts, but I know not everyone attains this affinity and don’t have to. Regardless of that, I’d like to become a person who is accessible and helpful to those who want to develop narratives in ways that are more engrossing and impassioning to them, in the same way I have been able to evolve