In order to create our zine, we went through multiple stages of development. We started by learning about social justice issues in humanities. We read through the Black Panther Party’s list of demands, watched a documentary on the ban of ethnic studies in Arizona, read “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, and studies the bill of rights. In biology, we started learning about the basic and social needs of humans and how our brain is affected if we do not receive them. Through lots of discussion in both of these classes, we ended up formulating ideas about what topics we were interested in learning about. Next, we created social topic proposals so that we could share our formulated ideas with the class and our peers. This helped our teachers put us into groups with other students.
Once we were in our groups, we started working with the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego to learn about concept art, meaning art that holds a deeper message about, typically, a social justice issue. We visited the museum several times, completing many workshops along the way. After this, we started brainstorming our own ideas for a zine cover that would share a message that could connect all of our topics together. We decided to go with Nick’s idea of having a picture of the Earth with an X through it because it was simple and all encompassing of our topics.
Next was the phase of refinement, refinement, refinement. We got critique from peers, teachers, and the museum in order to make our cover better. The cover developed as we started developing our persuasive essay, making the concept behind it grow as well as the visual aspect. With our essay, we began by creating our thesis, then we made an outline, a first draft, a second draft, and a final draft. Each time we would put our revised writing into a revised zine template with our revised cover on top. Everything came together in the end once we condensed our essays to 500-700 words, making our zine more concise for readers to enjoy. We included pictures, an introduction, community resource page, and more. Throughout many drafts, our cover lost the X, lost the original pink background, and gained the title, “Out of Orbit”. The theme was now of the earth being off balance and falling through space. To show this further, throughout the zine we included pages with a variation of our cover, but with the world getting smaller each time. This could be seen as the world falling away or us zooming out to see the vastness of the void it was falling through.
We exhibited this zine 3 times. Once was at school for our annual Festival del Sol, another at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, and finally at the Chula Vista Zine Fest.
Group work
Working with my group to combine our topics into a zine cover was difficult at first because we had not yet begun our research. How were we supposed to connect the themes or endangered animals, sustainable fashion, mental health in nature, and environmental racism into one piece of art without leaving out critical themes? We did not want just a tree or a wolf on our zine, we wanted something more conceptual. It really helped once we started being more experimental with Nick’s design after doing our initial research on our topics. Once we had found root causes of our issues, we realized that there was an overarching theme of not only environmental degradation, but power structures that were allowing for corporations to make gain off of it. The problem with environmental issues isn’t going to stop if a person decides to stop wearing furs or starts riding their bike to work because as long as someone can make a profit off of those furs or the gasoline that the person is giving up, people will find ways to keep their money flowing.