As the fall term comes to an end, students present their term-long projects. On Dec. 5 in the EMU Ballroom, two of UO’s First-Year Interest Groups, Hip-Hop and the Politics of Race, and Remixing Media, Critiquing Culture, held their annual end-of-term events, the UO Hip Hop Jam and the UO Critical Art Show.
The events, open to all students and Eugene community members, aim to bring together music, culture and art in an engaging way, with an art show on the outside and local performers and dancers inside.
FIGs are programs for first-year students at the University of Oregon. These classes aim to build community among incoming students looking to meet peers with similar interests. The small student groups take the same classes surrounding a specific topic of interest.
Both FIGs, taught by Andre Sirois, allow first-year students to work together over the course of the term to eventually hold this two-part event. According to the online description, Hip-Hop and the Politics of Race, “encourages students to explore artistic practices of hip hop and learn how to produce and promote a hip hop music/art event.” The students discuss race, gender and sexuality in relation to hip-hop and rap music within the 21st century.
The Hip-Hop FIG students put together the Instagram account @uohiphopjam to promote the event, designing colorful graphics and interesting posts. They made t-shirts and stickers and reached out to local performers and dance groups for the event.
Lucie Leblanc, first-year student in charge of social media outreach, said, “I wanted to do something fun, a class I enjoyed while learning and getting my credits out of the way. It was really cool putting the event together this term. It’s gonna be a fun night.”
Local performers and dance groups Duck Street Dance Crew, Flock Rock, Vursatyl, Coloxho and many others took the stage as lights flashed and the crowd danced along to the music. While the show went on inside the ballroom, on the outside, the Art Show was just as vivacious.
Many mixed media pieces and digital art pieces were on display at the Critical Art Show. This FIG aims to encourage students to produce pieces of cultural critique, remixing existing pop culture imagery with commentary on social and political issues.
Student pieces produced remixed art on vaping, environmental harm, animal testing, large corporations and many other important social issues.
Sarada Cooper, first year student, took the FIG because she needed an art credit. For her piece, she redesigned the packaging of popular menstrual products to comment on their true ingredients and misleading marketing.
“It’s a critique on the ingredients in tampons and how they’re toxic, but they’re not really marketed that way,” Cooper said. “Most of the tampons and pads in the grocery store have carcinogens or toxic metals or plastics in them. For some reason, the government doesn’t really put a lot of regulation on them and it’s really harmful to people, so I wanted to do my project about that.”
The art pieces, produced by FIG students, as well as faculty and community members, produced insightful commentary about the world we live in in an engaging and interesting way. Andre Sirois, a first-year seminar instructor at the UO, encapsulated the event perfectly, saying, “These events by nature, they are inclusive. They are diverse. They are activist. It’s important to have that on campus.”
Sirois has been a part of the dual event since its inception. When asked about the FIGs, he said, “For so many students, they come to UO for four years and just take classes and party. They don’t get involved in the campus community. With the FIGs, I wanted to inspire first-year students to get out there and put these kinds of events together, for both the campus and student communities.”
The Hip-Hop Jam and Art Show events did exactly this, encouraging first-year students to come together and showcase exactly what being a Duck is all about.
