At a glance
Sharing Oranges is a year-long initiative at the University of Washington designed to foster creative opportunities and build… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Small
- Awarded
- $5,000
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
- UW Resilience Lab (UWRL)
Sharing Oranges is a year-long initiative at the University of Washington designed to foster creative opportunities and build community through art for QTBIPOC. The project includes a series of accessible art workshops, a self-published zine, and a celebratory exhibition day.
The workshops will focus on artforms like beadwork, ceramics, and screen printing, with all supplies provided and events free to attend in wheelchair-accessible spaces. Online resources will be available for those unable to attend in person.
A zine will feature creative submissions from the community, available online for free and in print on a sliding scale. Contributors will receive free copies to ensure accessibility and representation.
The project concludes with an exhibition day showcasing artwork, live performances, skill-sharing workshops, food, and mutual aid resources, creating a joyful and inclusive celebration of creativity and community.
At the University of Washington, there is a need for meaningful, joy-based community spaces and documented histories of those living at the intersections of being LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (QTBIPOC). This space for joy is critical in cultivating forms of resistance that are sustainable and human-first, undercutting burnout by fostering space for rejuvenation and healing. Simultaneously, there is a dire need for the larger University of Washington community to learn about the stories of our communities in order to truly live up to the university’s values of diversity and inclusion. In Sharing Oranges we seek to address both of these needs by normalizing joyous spaces that center community care and uplifting the historically silenced experiences of QTBIPOC. This is important because it challenges mainstream academia's focus on suffering when it comes to marginalized people’s histories and contributes positively to knowledge bases of both QTBIPOC and the larger UW community and encourages deeper understanding of the intertwined nature of QTBIPOC experiences.
We chose the name Sharing Oranges based on conceptions and practices of love expressed in the Modality collective. A practice of love as mundane and subtle as a splitting of an orange, sharing fruit with our friends is a form of nurturing on physical and emotional levels. For many of us we grew up in families and spaces that understood the sharing of food as critical to cultivating loving relationships. As students we have brought the act of sharing food in our communal spaces here to extend practices of love that have been central to our upbringings. To share oranges is to share space and cultivate beloved community— the goal of our project.
Often queer and people of color feel these identities as separate and irreconcilable. It is difficult to find and cultivate spaces that honor all aspects of who we are. Resources are critical in being able to cultivate spaces for cultural connection and bringing together seemingly disparate identities. With this knowledge, we seek to foster space and creative opportunities that unifies these experiences that have been disjointed by colonialism and uplifts the wholeness of LGBTQ+ identified BIPOC.
Sharing Oranges will be a multi-modal project that will have points for people to get involved throughout the year. It will consist of a series of art workshops, a zine that is available both online and in print, and an exhibition day to celebrate the artists who submit to the zine. The goal of this project is to foster community space for QTBIPOC, bring positive attention to this much neglected community, and provide creative opportunities to QTBIPOC that are often inaccessible .Although this initiative will be primarily led by Rona Eslamy and Jax Wokas, it will be coordinated by the whole Modality officer team. All QTBIPOC at the University of Washington are highly encouraged to participate throughout this project, and the culminating exhibition is aimed to reach all members of the Greater Seattle community regardless of identity.
Throughout the academic year, we will host art workshops aimed towards increasing the financial and physical accessibility of artforms that have historically been exclusive to our QTBIPOC communities. This includes but is not limited to workshop series in Indigenous beadwork, Chinese knotting, ceramics, jewelry making, screen printing, and culturally relevant dance instructions. To ensure accessibility, these workshops will have all supplies provided, be free to attend, and be hosted in wheelchair accessible locations with clear procedures for further accessibility requests. If people are unable to attend synchronously in-person, we aim to make the information from the workshops available online with resources to access the materials used.
To further document the impact of these workshops and community space, we will self-publish a zine consisting of submissions from QTBIPOC featuring their creative work. This zine will have online and in-person options for submission and will be available throughout the academic year. With the knowledge that QTBIPOC are often excluded from artistic publications, it is vital to us to ensure that this zine centers the creative work of QTBIPOC and is made easily accessible. Every artist included in the zine will receive a free copy of the zine, and the print version will be made available to the general public at a sliding scale. Additionally, the zine will be made available online for free digital download and viewing.
At the end of the school year to celebrate the release of the zine and the work of the numerous individuals involved in Sharing Oranges, we will have a day-long exhibition. This will include artwork from contributing artists, food to share love and community, mutual aid resources, live performances and speeches, and skill sharing workshops throughout the day. This celebration is aimed toward cultivating a space of unapologetic joy and resistance for QTBIPOC and invites allies and accomplices to engage as well.
Jax Wokas
Project lead
- modality@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- School of Social Work
Rona Eslamy
Team member
- modality@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- UW Honors Program
Request amount and budget
n/a
Measure the impacts
We will measure the success of Sharing Oranges through the engagement with the various aspects of the project. Our ability to gather submissions to the zine, and cultivate attendance to our workshop series and the final year event will serve as an indicator of the project’s ability to connect with the needs of our community. Throughout the 2024-2025 year the Modality officer team will practice regular assessments on our ability to foster engagement and actively work towards innovating ways to increase our reach. At all times, we will welcome and encourage feedback from the community in order to gauge interest in topics, ways to improve, and any other concerns or comments that may arise throughout the duration of the project. We value taking a holistic approach to Sharing Oranges, and as such are leaving much room for change as the community needs may evolve over the next academic year.