As part of a course titled “Building Websites for Social Change, a team of students from UCSC’s Oakes College collaborated to create an exhibit for Museo Eduardo Carrillo on Google’s Arts & Culture Platform. Due to the COVID-19 shutdown of in-person instruction, the class was conducted completely online via Zoom. Thanks to the students Davis O’Shea, Jazmin Sosa Herrera and Kaelen Alexander, and to instructor Vicki Winters! Scroll on to read students’ reflections on working on the exhibit, and view the exhibit itself.

Davis O’Shea:

I am a third year at UC Santa Cruz majoring in the History of Art and Visual Culture. I grew up in between the Bay Area and Nayarit. I am especially interested in visual cultural studies, graphic design and sound design.

My experience working on the Museo Eduardo Carrillo exhibition was thoroughly educational and enlightening. Not only was it an opportunity to learn about how to prepare and curate an exhibition as a team, but it was also an opportunity to work with and learn about local latinx artists such as Eduardo Carrillo, Amalia Mesa Bains, and others. Furthermore, it was really a unique experience learning about this entire process (team meetings, curation) in an online setting and exhibiting on the Google Arts and Culture platform. One personal highlight from the project was creating the collage at the beginning of the exhibition. While creating the collage, I was able to fully engage with the artworks directly and respectfully. As I arranged and cropped the artworks, my eyes latched on to the fine details and I grew to appreciate consistencies shared between the pieces. Many of the artworks tell powerful local and ancestral stories which resonate with the Califas Legacy writings. I hope that viewers can appreciate the details and the stories embedded in these artworks and writings. I also hope to apply the knowledge/skills that I have developed throughout this project (such as curation, research and design) in future professional and personal projects.

Jazmin Sosa Herrera

I am a third-year student double-majoring in Spanish Studies and Politics at UC Santa Cruz. I’m from San Diego, CA, and spend the majority of my time working as a Pre-Law Peer Adviser under the university’s Career Success Center, where I mainly focus on providing students with information regarding the law school application process and advise in professional development.

Working on the Museo Eduardo Carrillo exhibit has been a very rewarding and positive experience. Being able to learn how to create and edit exhibits through Google Arts and Culture was a new experience that I was able to use as a creative outlet for myself. The artwork displayed is very touching so being able to view it and structure how it should be displayed in the exhibit was really honorable. One particular thing I really enjoyed about this project was being able to read the Califas Legacy stories and tying them to some of the artwork. Those stories were very fun and relatable for me to read. Some other things I learned besides how to edit exhibits on Google Arts and Culture were how to convert images. I hope to use these skills in the future with personal projects, as well as the data entry skills I honed through this experience.