Humanities Core Arts Exhibition: More Than Human Stories

The Humanities Core Arts Exhibition is a showcase of Humanities Core student art that engages the Humanities Core ideas, texts, visual images, artists, narratives, and experiences that have inspired their curiosity, creativity, and sense of connection.
Students who have submitted their work for the Humanities Core Arts Competition will have their work exhibited, and winners of the competition will be announced.
For this year’s competition, Humanities Core students were invited to submit original works of art in any medium - including photography, original musical composition, and dance - that are centered on the theme More-than-Human Stories.
Themes of storytelling and more-than-human connection are threads woven throughout Humanities Core lectures, which are centered on the year-long theme of Environment - Encounter - Entanglement. Through stories that position humans as part of–rather than separate from–the natural ecology, we have begun to question the hierarchies that claim to distinguish us from other life on the planet. Recognizing our interconnection with all living beings reframes what it means to be human with the more-than-human world.
The more-than-human has come alive through a number of course texts. We witnessed the fox hunt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, were unsettled by Annihilation’s Crawler, and explored the boundaries of plant-sentience and interspecies kinship in our unit on the Plant Humanities. We also studied the work of Kent Monkman, whose mythologies challenge our naturalized assumptions about the more-than-human world and invite us to rewrite the stories of setter colonialism. Monkman reminds us how vital stories are to our understanding of ourselves and our place within the more-than-human world.
In this exhibition, student works reflect upon how the Humanities Core theme of Environment - Encounter - Entanglement helped them reimagine their relationship to the more-than-human world. They imagine new possibilities for connection, new ways in which to tell stories, and new models of sustainability.
For more information, see: https://core.humanities.uci.edu/index.php/awards/arts-competition/

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