The night of Thursday, Mar. 7, Augustana College hosted a Zine making workshop in Centennial Hall. A Zine is a self-published collection of text and/or images, usually photocopied or otherwise printed by hand. The workshop was co-sponsored by Public Health and the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art (ATMA), supported from a grant from Shout your Abortion, and hosted by members of For the People Artist Collective.
The Zine making workshop is part of a series of events that have been brought to Augustana through the collaboration of Dr. Claire Kovacs, director of the ATMA, and Dr. Lena Hann, professor of Public Health in the last 2 years to introduce the topic of abortion to Augustana’s campus.
Last year’s event was a pop up art show titled #abortionisnormal which had art generated by reproductive health rights and justice individuals and organizations and several guest speakers who worked at clinics or advocacy organizations. Dr. Hann spoke about last year’s event.
“The point of last year’s [event] was to get the conversation around abortion started on Augustana’s campus,” Dr. Hann said. “We weren’t trying to frame it like a debate—that was not what we were interested in—we were interested in reflecting Shout Your Abortion’s mission of letting people who have had abortions tell their stories on their own terms”.
Dr. Claire Kovacs also talked about the past event.
“Last year was more quiet listening and learning and looking, we had a pop-up art exhibit and a number of speakers. This year we wanted to think about how we could have more active learning and engagement around the topic,” Dr. Kovacs said.
This year the first event was the book club—where over 50 people came to discuss the new Shout Your Abortion coffee table book.
Dr. Hann commented that “the Zine-making workshop was a compliment of that. Folks who felt they wanted to have a creative expression in thinking about abortion, pregnancy, or reproductive justice. The Zine making workshop could capture that energy and also let us learn about the history of Zine-making as a movement.”
Zine making has a history of being a means of which information is conveyed outside of formal publications, and also has a long history with marginalized communities. Zines help share information and tell personal stories and puts the artistic production back in people’s own hands for them to tell their own stories—which is the heart of Shout Your Abortion.
Dr. Kovacs states that art and Zine making are being used to discuss the topics of reproductive justice and abortion.
“One of the roles of the Teaching Museum on our campus is to think about the ways that art embodies the liberal arts experience. For me, any exhibit or programming on campus should do at least one of these things: help us grapple with contemporary questions, allow us a new way into those conversations, or think about how art can be used to broaden interdisciplinary conversations. This project helped us do both of those things.”
The speakers for the event were members of For the People Artists Collective from Chicago- a collective made of women and gender non-conforming people of color. The collective creates work that uplifts and projects struggle, resistance, liberation, and survival within and for our marginalized communities and movements in our city and our world.
Dr. Hann said, “Both the book club and the Zine workshop had women, men, and gender non binary people participate which showed that the topics of abortion, pregnancy and reproductive justice are important to people of all genders.”
