Hand-lettered posters in bold colors line the walls of the ground floor of the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Though designed over 50 years ago, they don't seem like objects of a distant past but artifacts of an activist playbook still in use.
The exhibition “Radical Posters: Women’s Graphics Collectives” showcases posters and archival materials donated by the estate of Barbara Morgan, AM’65, a historian, artist and activist who helped found the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective in the 1970s before later establishing Red Pepper Posters in San Francisco.
However, the real story isn’t just about Morgan. It’s also about how the exhibition was made.
Rather than curators quietly assembling the pieces behind the scenes, the College Summer Institute project had UChicago undergraduates design the display. The students navigated the entire process themselves, from opening the boxes for the first time to constructing the final exhibit. According to faculty director Prof. Daisy Delogu, the experience was fundamentally different from normal student research.
“Some of our students go to archives, but that’s to look at stuff that’s already been organized by someone else,” said Delogu. “To actually be unpacking these boxes and not knowing what you’re going to find in there, that’s a very unique experience.”
Unboxing a life
Ahan Jayakumar, a third-year in the College and one of the students on the project, explained that the exhibition process began with four big cardboard boxes.
“My role was to help Special Collections sort and index the contents of every box,” he said. “This involved reading through her personal and work journals, going through photo albums and all sorts of miscellaneous stuff.”
Jayakumar and the other students worked with these archival fragments to reconstruct decades of Morgan’s life and activism. The diaries became central to the project and served almost like a roadmap written by Morgan herself.
“Something that really stood out to me was how meticulously she had logged her weekly life,” Jayakumar said. “We would often come across personal struggles like breakups, professional struggles with funding or other work-related issues and even her thoughts on how to organize group meetings.”
The result was a kind of historical intimacy that’s hard to achieve through textbooks. Rather than through theory, Jayakuma was able to learn about the movement through Morgan’s personal diary as she figured it out in real time.
After the archival work came the difficult task of turning the raw history into an organized public exhibition. The students decided to divide the gallery into thematic zones, writing wall text under strict museum-style word limits and guidelines. Although the team collaborated with advisors from across the University, Delogu emphasized how “the students really did all of it.”
Along the way, Jayakumar said the posters changed how he thought about art and activism entirely.
“Working on this project opened my eyes to how the process of creating art is a unifying phenomenon,” he said.
The posters were not meant to be stored away or held in exclusive galleries. They were designed collectively, cheaply printed and meant to circulate everywhere, functioning as community-building tools.
That’s also what visitors are meant to notice, according to Jayakumar.
“It is not just ‘art with a message’; it represents a more sophisticated movement to empower women and build community,” he said.
Like the posters, the exhibition was a group effort built collaboratively and meant for public use. Through working together to turn Morgan’s private materials into shared public history, the students did not just study activism this summer, they lived it.
The exhibition is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will remain open until the end of the Winter Quarter. A closing event and panel discussion are scheduled for Tuesday, March 3, at 5 pm CST. It will be a hybrid event and all those interested are encouraged to attend.
—This article was originally published on the UChicago College website
