From the woman who walked to the Gilded Canopy

Decentering collections of natural history through comics

Who am I?

Name: Florence Okoye

Profession: UX Designer

Likes: anime, purple, afrofuturism, languages, web development, alternative history, C++, pigeons

The Designer

The User

The Provider

Credit: Abigail Daker http://www.abigaildaker.com/architecture/natural-history-museum

"Arguably, it is the combination of printed words and visual images that allows for such a multitude of… approaches...

"While, on the one hand, the very nature of comic art ... encourages a closed textual zone that imposes a preferred reading...

"...its visual techniques open up and ‘play’ with narrative… encouraging multiple interpretations."

Janice Morris, 'Of Mice and Men: Collaboration, post memory and working through in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale'

Source: https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W2vqXikAACcA8rV5

Art by Rob Bidder

Source: https://www.sammyborras.co.uk

Art by Sammy Borras

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/evelyn-cheesman-comic.html

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/slavery-and-the-natural-world.html

"[C]omics is the only form in which past, present, and future are visible simultaneously."

Scott McCloud, 'An Interview with Scott McCloud'

Source: https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-scott-mccloud/

What next?

"as we distance ourselves from grand narratives in the writing of history, comics offer a way to democratise an interdisciplinary study of the past..."

"...as they offer a means to explore the relationship between history and memory, between lived experience and representation..."

"and to confront official accounts with what Butler... terms “the discarded negative of the official version”..."

"—those lived experiences that have been excluded from conventional frames of representation."

Claire Gorrara, 'BLACK OCTOBER: Comics, Memory, and
Cultural Representations of 17 October 1961'

Thank you!

@FINOkoye

f.okoye@nhm.ac.uk