Allegory combines the question of what you see and experience with why it is there. Why do artists use storytelling to speak to larger social, political, or spiritual ideas? How does the world around us inform artists’ and viewers’ ideas? Students explored these questions through two special MOCA exhibitions this fall. 

Celebrated Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca began her collaborative, portable mural World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear in 1990. An ambitious, utopian, and international project, World Wall employs figurative and symbolic visual vocabularies to depict a vision of the future without fear.

Artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, southern culture, and the history of film in the United States. Employing a collaborative and research-based approach to filmmaking, Bradley constructs a visual archive of early African American cinema and poignantly asks what it might mean to model a history of black visuality and representation that privileges depictions of pleasure over spectacles of pain.

Inspired by these exhibitions, artworxLA students discovered their own allegorical approach to collaborative storytelling through painting, photography, video, and sound.