Humans of Providence College Showcase
The Story Behind the Showcase
During my senior year at Providence College as president of the Photography Club, I designed and organized a Humans of Providence College portrait showcase in the student center. Having worked with the social media project since my freshman year, the showcase was the culmination of 4 years of hard work getting to know the community and relaying their stories in a way that inspires and connects people. What makes me the most proud of this project is how it developed from a lunchtime idea into an art exhibit that will be part of the campus for years to come. In high school, my principal was relentless with his speeches about 'leaving a legacy' wherever you went. If this showcase is my legacy at Providence College, I can take pride in my work and graduate in peace knowing that I am leaving it behind to do what it was destined to do: bring people together and show how special, yet alike, we all are.
I got involved with the Providence College Photography Club my freshman year after Tessa Bui, an executive board member I'm eternally grateful for, verbally harassed me into joining. I have a clear memory of that day that set the trajectory for my time at PC and it makes me laugh everytime I picture her flagging me down at the involvement fair like it was a draft. At that time, Humans of PC was a less-than-year-old page run by the club with a small, but loyal, following. It had an incredible logo, which Tessa designed, and a Facebook page, but it wasn't well-advertised and the posts didn't reach many students. Through starting conversations with people I met on & off campus, students, faculty, and staff starting learning about HOPC. It began to gather a larger following and became something I was known for on campus. People loved seeing their friends & teachers on the page and getting to learn more about those they lived & learned with. They looked forward to reading the stories and they wanted theirs to be a part of the page too. I wish I remembered and internalized more of the nice things people had to say about the page over those 4 years. It really is remarkable watching something you love & nurture grow and seeing others appreciate it along with you. The idea for the showcase came semesters before its inception when my good friend and the vice president of Photography Club, Liv D'Elia, and I were sharing a meal in Alumni Dining Hall. On the wall across from us were canvases of student photographs from 2011 and I thought out loud, 'Why can't we have a wall of canvases celebrating the people here at Providence College? We should do this for HOPC'. At that moment the showcase was just a thought with no path to realization, and it could have very well remained that way, but my Community Organizing class, one of the final classes of my Public & Community Service Studies minor, turned the idea into a project that I was determined to see actualize. I started by pitching my idea to the Assistant Dean of Students who couldn't help with the showcase but directed me to the Assistant Director of Student Activities. After answering all of the Assistant Director's questions about the project, she was on board, but we needed the approval of her higher-ups (whenever she spoke of her "higher-ups" it made me think of the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain pulling the strings: who were these people standing between me and my goals? What was their relation to the college? How much power did they hold and what could make them deny such a great idea? It was advertising for the college after all, and I was willing to do all the work for them.) After sitting around not hearing from anyone for a while, it became clear that I was going to have to spearhead the movement and make those superiors talk about my idea otherwise it may sit on the table indefinitely. I was not their top priorty, but the Photography Club, since its founding in 2014, had been a small, underrated, underfunded club and I wanted to prove just how much our underdog club had grown and was capable of. Financially and logistically, however, Photo Club could not do it alone. This project would cost as much as our yearly budget, meaning if we went through with it we couldn't fund any other Photo Club activities that year. What we needed was a larger organization on campus to amplify our voice: one that had the funds and the influence to back us up to the administration. It wasn't until a conversation with one of my good friends and former roomates, Emily Borrello that the showcase started to materialize. In the stress of the last semesters of college, I was venting to Emily about Photo Club's ideas and lack of funding when she mentioned that the Board of Programmers, one of the college's 3 main student-run organizations tasked with planning campus-wide events, had a Fine Arts Committee with funding reserved for student art endeavors. As a leading member of the board, she put me in contact with Lindsey Madiera, the Fine Arts Committee Chair, without whose dedication and commitment the project could not have been completed. We were similarly hard-working, organized, prepared, determined, and focused which made us a very good team. I would not have wanted to parter with anyone else on a project of this importance and I am so thankful for her. We had a meeting in Alumni Dining Hall, in the same spot where the idea was born, and discussed the logistics of the showcase: where it would it go, what would it look like, how we would chose the photos, when it would be installed. Once she was on board and we agreed on a plan of exectution, we were an unstoppable force. We submitted an official event proposal, and now we could no longer be ignored by the administration. From what I gathered pitching the showcase to Sharon Hay, the Director of Student Activities, she was impressed with how much planning & research we had done and how well we presented our ideas, yet she still had reservations about the showcase since it would be semi-permanent in a very public place on campus. The college was facing a lot of backlash at the time for its treatment of students of color and the LGBTQ+ community, so it was hesistant to permanently display anything that might paint the college in a specific light to prospective students and, most importantly, its esteemed donors. Yet the showcase has never been about pushing a specific agenda on race, religion, or gender, it's about telling stories and celebrating people for who they are. And yes, who they are includes homosexuality and Black Power and atheism and mental health crises which the college doesn't always want to acknowledge, but if that's how these community members identify and want to portray themselves, who are we to say they shouldn't be displayed on a wall for everyone to see. We are all loved, we are all special, and we shouldn't have to water down our stories just to make it easier for those who don't understand to swallow. We scheduled the showcase unveiling for Alumni & Family Weekend at the end of February, and since no one ever told us no, we had no time to waste and kept moving forward with the project. To make the vote as democratic as possible, it was Lindsey's idea to have students, faculty, alumni, staff, and families vote for the 10 photos they wanted to represent PC in the showcase. But to even get to the vote, we had to narrow down about 250 HOPC photos to just 60. It was my least favorite part of the project, taking people out of the running, but logistically there was no way to vote on 250 photos. The number of choices would be too overwhelming - we had to pick strategically. A month before the vote, I made sure it was clear to our followers that anyone could be on Humans of PC and called on everyone who wanted to, to send in their stories. Then I painstakingly chose 60 images to represent as best as I could all the ethnicities, professions, gender identities, class years, student organizations, etc. at Providence College. I quickly eliminated all the HOPC pictures that had no caption or meaningless captions since a large part of the showcase would be the quote portraying each individual, but every other choice was nearly impossible and I wish it hadn't had to be mine to make. On February 4th we opened voting both in-person and online to make it as accessible as possible. Everyone had 3 votes and could only vote online once - Lindsey combed through our online form responses on Excel to delete any duplicates - but we had no system in place to check if someone voted once in-person as well. At our in-person voting station in front of McPhail's, we gave everyone 3 tickets to place in the envelope corresponding to their portrait choice(s). We had laptops logged into the HOPC page so voters could read the individual's caption before deciding. Voting was open on both platforms from 1-7PM, longer than we initially planned to allow for people with late classes to vote. I remember this day vividly because I spent it running around frantically trying to make sure the event ran smoothly and was well-publicized. Between printing 60 pictures at CVS in-between classes to scanning through the online form making sure it was clear & accurate before we released it to coordinating a press release about the vote with the college's head of social media, there were hundreds of details to pay attention to. At the end of the day, I was so burnt out I wanted to cry thinking of all the counting that still had to be done. I was so thankful Lindsey felt energized, as busy as she also was, and offered to count all the votes. I trusted her completely, which if you know me is very hard for me to do, and she did a beatiful job organizing them into an Excel spreadsheet. I couldn't have done it better myself, she was an angel. The Friars had spoken: from 2,079 votes 10 clear winners emerged, but 15 portraits had significantly more votes than the rest so I suggested expanding the showcase to include more portraits. We would have to use smaller canvases, but we'd be able to include a colorful librarian, a Black female scientist, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, an advocate for mental health, and a woman empowered. They were so close to the top 10 and so far away from #16. I fought, I really fought to get them in, but Lindsey was right: we pitched a 10-portrait showcase to the administration and the public. If we changed the plan now it would look like we were tampering with the results. It would also make the wall look very crowded and less focused. To this day I still get upset thinking about the portraits we didn't choose to add, they deserved to be recognized as much as anyone else. Maybe if I had more energy I would've put up a bigger fight. I can't go back and change the past, but I can recognize them here. When I first sketched the layout of the showcase, the wall in the Slavin Center looked very different. A Dunkin Donuts remodel led to major construction during winter break and a completely new layout for the showcase when we returned in January. Thankfully, the remodel worked in our favor because it gave us a bigger gallery wall. All we needed to do was remeasure & reorganize. We had 19 days after the vote to order the canvases, figure out a design for the quote plaques, and install the showcase. 19 days. You could consider that a lot of time if you weren't taking an honors colloquium, abstract algebra, a public service capstone, and trying to eat, sleep, socialize & handle a psychotic roommate at the same time. Sleep goes out the window, eating becomes whatever you can find in the vending machine in the library, and you end up bawling in your professors office like a babbling idiot because she doesn't understand why you're having such a hard time with your research. I reached a new level of exhausted, but it was all worth it. Yet even after all the work we'd done with the event proposal and the vote, we still had not received a definitive yes from Sharon Hay... nor were we told no... so naturally we ordered the canvases ($500 worth) to make sure we got them before February 23rd. It wasn't until after the canvases were completed that Sharon Hay emailed us asking to approve the 10 choices. Lucky for her, none of the selections were particularly controversial (at least that's what I gathered since she didn't make any objections after I emailed them to her), so after a 45 minute carride to Costco in Dedham, Massachusetts with Liv and my boyfriend at the time to pick up the canvases, it finally sunk in that the showcase would soon become a reality. In calling the showcase "semi-permanent", I'm trying to reflect that it was made to stay up longer than the duration of Alumni & Family weekend but it wasn't expected to stay up forever. When I planned it, I understood that the college is bound to change - buildings get remodeled, students graduate and new students arrive, the college values change - so if one day the Photography Club decides that the showcase needs to be updated or moved or taken down I would support that decision. That being said, since the plan was to have it up for at least several years, it needed to look nice & professional even if we didn't have a professional budget. Costco helped bring down the cost of the canvases without sacrificing quality, but I couldn't find a company that made good quality, inexpensive metal plaques. That's where Paul Bienvenue, the mastermind in charge of PC's printing department, comes in and saves the day. I knew him in passing from collecting Photo Club event posters for 4 years, so one day I stopped by his office to ask for design advice. Using his poster board, whose cost was covered 100% by the Student Activities Office, I could design a black & white plaque and add a gray border to give it the appearance of being matted. It was genius - I was so relieved after our conversation that I kind of wanted to hug him, but there was still a ton of work to be done. After each portrait subject was notified of the vote results and approved the use of their image, they chose an excerpt from their HOPC post which I spent hours incorporating into the new plaque design on Photoshop. If you haven't already noticed, I'm extremely detail-oriented: I went through each plaque 500 times to make sure everything was correct before finally submitting them to printing at 3AM. Superhero Printing Paul had them ready by late morning for installation. It felt like all hope was lost when Sharon Hay told us she wasn't sure it was possible to install the showcase by February 23rd. After all our hard work, we couldn't unveil it on the busiest day of the year. I don't know what strings she had to pull but somehow, later that night, she had assembled a team of Physical Plant workers to install it the night before the unveiling. We met with 2 really great guys from Physical Plant at 5PM to go over the layout and left them with a road map to the showcase outlining which canvas we wanted in which position. They had the tools & the measuring tape skills and I trusted them to get the job done. I left to go get dinner but couldn't resist coming back soon after to see how it was going. They were awesome, and it was especially cool to hear them talk about putting up a portrait of one of their own: Mike Desmarais. Thanks to unexpected construction in January, the new column in the middle of the wall was the perfect place to hang our dedication. We needed a title plaque to explain the showcase, so I had created an image on Photoshop and purchased a 50%-off frame from Michaels to display it. It was the perfect centerpiece to tie the showcase together. With the help of friends, I covered up all the portraits and plaques to keep the showcase a semi-surprise (we hadn't released the vote results, but we had told the winners so they could have spread the word). The showcase was coming together and it was surreal. The day was finally here: February 23rd 2019, the HOPC Showcase reveal. I was afraid that Lindsey & I would have to make a big speech in front of the crowd because I hadn't had a moment to think about what to say, but thankfully people treated it like an exhibition: they walked through lower Slavin stopping to look at & read about the portraits. It was nice to chat with people as they came by and watch their reactions to the showcase. I took a bunch of pictures of the winners & their families with their portraits while attempting to take in everything that had led us to this moment. Having my mom there with me too was really special because she knew how hard I'd worked to make the showcase happen and I could see how proud she was of the result. Towards the end of the reveal, a campus visitor who was working a booth nearby started talking to me about the showcase not knowing I had created it. He gave us lots of praise and then mentioned he had seen one of the individuals in the portraits: Michael Gilmour. Mike had passed away suddenly in August 2018 so I told him that wasn't possible, but then I thought to myself that maybe he was there. His BOP friends were all on campus dedicating a plaque to him and they'd come to visit his portrait in the showcase, so I wouldn't be surprised if he did come that day to be with them in spirit. We were certainly all thinking of him. It was a really special day for me, for Lindsey, for Photography Club, for the Board of Programmers, for those in the showcase & their families, and for HOPC. We had worked incredibly hard to build something lasting with the potential to do a lot of good on campus, something we knew wasn't perfect but hoped would inspire people, bring the community together, and remind students having a bad day that there were others who went through the same thing and made it to the other side. I left my legacy in the hopes that it would help to find theirs. Addendum: October 2021 I don't return to campus often, but when I do I always make a point to stop in lower Slavin and check on the showcase which looks just as beautiful now as it did the day it went up. I sit and watch as the prospective students on campus tours stop next to it and contemplate whether PC is the right place for them. I watch as current students greet the now-retired Dot as if they were walking into Raymond Dining Hall on a weekday afternoon. I watch as former students look up at their friends and teachers and remember their legacies. I know that one day no one on campus will recognize anyone in those canvases, but the showcase has always been about more than the images. It's about the stories of those people and how we connect to them, how we see pieces of ourselves and our own journeys in them, and I hope that it continues to have that effect for years to come. |
HOPC Showcase Honorable Mentions
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