Collective Shade

For an exercise dubbed “Collective Shade,” SEMAP invited artists, students, and community members to respond to the poem “To our Pioneers,” which appears on the first page of the book titled, El Monte: From the Pioneer days History and Biographical Sketches. Using a transparency sheet, more than forty individuals offered their insight and smarts and shade-throwing and shit-talking skills. Together, the textual and visually responses form a chorus that affectively criticizes, deconstructs, laughs at and obliterates the pioneer narrative. These responses were exhibited at LA Public Library’s exhibit Something in Common, May 2022 to November 2022.