This exhibit contains artworks created by students in the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine. Inspired by their study of the course theme, Animals, People, and Power, students submitted these creative pieces to Core's Annual Arts Competition. This year's competition focuses on the theme Dreams, an idea derived from our study of Surrealism and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Now in its sixth year, the Arts Competition encourages students to engage in creative, experiential learning; to extend their understanding from art as objectual to art as experiential. Understood in this way, the creative experience of art helps students connect to humanistic inquiry, their own humanity, and diverse communities. It occasions creative connections between students, their ideas, and the public.
This creative space is a Public Humanities project that places multiple publics in conversation about contemporary culture. The creative, energetic, and communicative aspects of these collective experiences have motivated former Humanities Core students to develop a variety of community-engaged projects like this one to explore cultural issues of importance to them.
Please enjoy this year's collection that imagines "dreams" as nightmares, alternative realities, and even magical worlds. You will be guided by our Humanities Out There interns, who have imagined the collection as addressing themes of environmental destruction, trauma, fractured identity, creative imagination, generational dreams, and structural oppression.