Today's Hours
By Ellen Handy
CCNY’s Community Engagement Network, sponsored by the Moxie Foundation, supports faculty development of new course initiatives that will involve 
students in community engagement projects. In Spring 2020, Ellen Handy (Art) and Ed Keller (MCA) partnered to create a new course in which 20 students from many different majors would study the history of visual communications as social advocacy while working in teams to produce visual communications projects for a community partner organization, The Fortune Society. The course promoted students’ experiential learning through team projects, encounters with our community partner, and exploration of CCNY Special Collections materials housed in Cohen Library. These class visits to Special Collections to view historical examples of visual communications were planned as part of the course design from the start.
The mission of the Fortune Society is to support individuals with incarceration histories with education, housing, meals, job training, community-building, health and mental health care, and other resources. One of the Fortune Society’s sites is a few blocks from our campus, and the staff of the Fortune Society welcomed the opportunity for collaboration with our talented students enthusiastically. The students thus have the opportunity to learn about the Fortune Society, about the issue of incarceration in general, and about how to frame visual communications to do the work of social advocacy.
Our readings and classroom discussions touched upon historical topics like Picasso’s Guernica, the artists of the New Deal Federal Arts Project, the work of designer and art director George Lois, documentary as a genre, as well as the visual expressions of contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. The class made two visits to CCNY Special Collections in the library, one to the George Lois Archive, and one to the CCNY Archive to view Art Collection and Rare Books materials like 1930s copies of Life Magazine and Picture Post magazine, American Civil War era issues of Harper’s Weekly, and Federal Art Project prints. Students marveled at the relationship between advertising and editorial content in the periodicals, and they studied the material qualities of the images as objects.
Spring 2020 was a semester unlike any other, and one in which many plans had to be revised when the campus closed owing to the COVID pandemic. It required extraordinary resilience from students, faculty and staff, as we pivoted from the semester we had planned to the reality which occurred. Closure of both our campus and the Fortune Society prevented our students’ teams from completing the visual communication projects for the Fortune Society they had originally envisioned, so the final course submissions took the form of polished portfolios of the students’ weekly response papers from the semester. In many of these, students commented on the power and impact of their visits to our Special Collections. When the course is repeated in 2021, we plan to build upon this experience to incorporate further encounters with these images, texts and objects.
Linking the unique resources of our own Library, our students’ creativity, and our relationship with the urban community in which our campus is located, fulfills the goals of the Community Engagement Network and provides a foundation for understanding and practicing visual communication in the service of social advocacy.
Images
Ida Abelman, Father and Children, 1935-43, published by the Federal Art Project, linoleum cut, The City College Art Collection.
Cover, inaugural issue of Life Magazine, November 23, 1936, CCNY Art Collection.
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