On Tuesday, July 2nd, the Department of Writing and Communication (DWC), within NSU’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS), held the inaugural gallery opening for “Critical Making: A CRDM Exhibit” in PVA Gallery 217. The event brought together graduate students in the M.A. in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program, other interested students, alumni, and faculty from across CAHSS for an evening of celebration and critical making.
The exhibit included a wide range of CRDM students’ physical projects (board games, print pamphlets, printed posters, fabric bags, etc.) intermingled with several interactive digital projects (websites, audio recordings, etc.) presented on tablets and computers throughout the gallery. Every project in the exhibit was labelled with a placard along with a quick response (QR) code linking attendees to a digital version of the gallery that curated and contextualized the projects by the classes for which they were created. The exhibit also offered information about the courses within the CRDM program, while highlighting many of its unique pedagogies and assignments.
In addition to learning about the different multimodal and digital projects graduate students create in CRDM courses, attendees were introduced to the concept of critical making and the DWC’s Production and Preservation Project (P3)—a new initiative the department is undertaking to digitally archive and showcase student works. Attendees were also invited to practice critical making during the event by collaboratively contributing pages to a zine memorializing the exhibit’s opening.
The exhibit will run through August 12, 2019 in the PVA Gallery 217 in the Don Taft University Center. To view photos from the event, check out the slideshow below: