the art of allegory
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
How do images, objects, and stories hold multiple meanings?
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.
artworxLA Teaching Artist Tasnim Boufelfel engaged her students in The Art of Allegory by teaching students how to produce their own video projects. Watch this sizzle reel of student footage to see life in Downtown Los Angeles through the eyes of her students.
test your knowledge on allegorical art and moca’s exhibitions with the art of allegory quiz!
explore student artwork.
Jack London High School
Jack London Community Day School
Valley Independent Study
Central High School - Melrose
Central High School - Bellevue
Stoney Point High School
Listen up.
Press play to hear “Blue Skies,” a collaborative sound project based on Judy Baca’s painting Balance from students at Will Rogers High School. In Fall 2022, these students spent a semester making connections between World Wall and music with artworxLA Teaching Artist Sebastian Fernandez. Students learned various ways of expressing themselves through music-related forms such as lyric writing, music producing, painting in correlation with sounds and songs, music theory, music history, music in film/tv, and vocal recordings.
