CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Artist Jorge Lucero recently invited people from around the world to meet via Zoom and share an object that was important in their lives – telling their stories through their belongings and turning the grid of video teleconferencing boxes into a cabinet of curiosities.
Lucero, a professor and the chair of art education for the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created the virtual “Museum of Us” in an online workshop in June for the Art Institute of Chicago. The ephemeral live museum lives on through Lucero’s website, where he has archived screenshots of many of the submissions. He is accepting more contributions to the museum.
“I was thinking of Zoom as artistic material and using it to do something that is simultaneously teaching and art,” Lucero said.
Workshop participants spoke about their objects in what Lucero described as a “souped-up version of show-and-tell.”
“The workshop challenges the ideas of what artwork should and has to be. It’s not a conventional object in that it doesn’t get hung on a wall or exist in a gallery. It’s more performative and time-based, like a piece of video or a website or a performance. An important part of it was to do it live and have the experience together,” he said.
All of the participants wrote something about their items in the style of an informational placard that would accompany an artwork displayed in a gallery. Having each person write about their possessions was important to the project because it emphasized the subjectivity and personal stories behind the objects, Lucero said.
“That’s really what makes it a ‘Museum of Us,’” he said. “They were all objects that don’t have a larger market value, but to the individuals they are important because they are connected to specific memories or relationships or things they’ve learned in life. That’s the potency of the objects – a connection to stories.”
One of Lucero’s favorites: “A woman had collected a stone from the place claimed to be where David killed Goliath. Stones play such a significant role in that narrative. For her to show us that stone was really fantastic,” he said.
Lucero also presented a stone that he collected at the Great Salt Lake. While on a trip to Utah, he visited the lake to see the Spiral Getty earthwork sculpture and the pearlescent purples, pinks, reds and whites of the water at dawn. The rock he picked up on the shore is similar to the ones used to make the sculpture.
Another “Museum of Us” participant showed off her accordion. Playing it helped her regain some of the dexterity in her hands that she had lost due to an injury. One of the most touching moments of the Zoom workshop for Lucero was when a woman talked about a stuffed animal that she had given to her mother when she was a child. The woman said her mother kept the stuffed animal on her nightstand for the rest of her life, and she now keeps it on her own nightstand to signify the love between herself and her mother.
Lucero has developed other projects with similar concepts to the “Museum of Us.” Two years ago, he invited people to display collections of items and develop an educational tour, lecture or workshop around it for the “YOURSTUFF MUSEUM” at Compound Yellow, an arts venue in Oak Park, Illinois. In 2015, he created the “Barack Obama Presidential Library” at the Hyde Park Free Theatre in Chicago and invited people to share their artifacts, thoughts and stories about the president.
The important aspects of such projects for Lucero are rethinking who has the capacity to create or pass on knowledge and changing the hierarchy of learning environments.
“What I love about that is it destabilizes what a classroom or an educational exchange should be,” Lucero said. “Most of my work is about making a more horizontal learning experience. Instead of always designating certain people as experts, I try to see how many more people we can identify as experts by asking, ‘What are you the expert of?’ You are the expert of your trips, your family history, the collections in your home. There is so much creative potential in the individual expertise of the people who are around us.”