About VG
VG/Voices from the Gaps was founded in 1996 as a collaborative project of the American Studies Department and English Department at the University of Minnesota. In addition to faculty and students in the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts, the site relies upon students and scholars from around the world as contributors.
VG's intent is to use new digital media to preserve and extend knowledge of art by women of color. VG focuses on the lives and works of North American minority women artists and writers, visual artists, performance artists, musicians, sonic artists, and filmmakers. Each artist page presents biographical, critical and bibliographical information about the artist, images and quotations pertinent to her life and works, and links to other resources on the web that provide information about her, including translations and archives.
The site is expanding to also include multimedia - photo collages, sonic streams, video and digital files - relevant to each artist. We are broadening the range of artistic works surveyed from literature to include new media projects, visual culture, the spoken word and other imaginative forms. Our hope for the future includes the staged development of the site into multimedia online exhibits, an online journal, and soliciting new works, including interactive pieces that engage both contemporary issues and aesthetics and reanimate lost works from the past. VG welcomes contributions and collaborations.
Navigating the Site
Artist pages are organized along a set of five indices: by name, by genre, by place of birth or residence, by significant dates, and by 'axes of affiliation'. For example, you will find Toni Morrison listed under "M, fiction, her birthstate of Ohio, alongside the years 1927 (the year of her birth) and 1993 (the year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature), and under the heading African Americans.
Scholarship
VG maintains the highest standards of scholarship in the intersecting areas of womens studies, Asian-American Studies, African-American Studies, Latino/a Studies, American Indian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and transnational American studies. In so doing, we examine how modes of criticism, interpretation and theory affect reception.
Outreach
VG connects scholars and writers across disciplines to students, linking the university to a global community of researchers via the web, and to local community and educational sites in the Twin Cities. Currently, VG is involved in outreach into high schools and the community through College in the Schools and other service learning literacy programs, and is in collaboration with the Womens Prison Book Project (WPBP). If you would like to collaborate with us on any project, please contact us.
About the Civil Rights Memorial and VG
We chose the image of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama as a metaphor for the new VG. It is fitting for several reasons. The collaborative nature of VG is much like a fountain - a community whose contributions are the flow of thought over text. The water interacts with the text on the fountain and indeed, with itself. Furthermore, this site about this memorial, "a web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center" is a unique and interactive website itself, a part of the larger web community into which VG is entering. For example, the site features a page for teachers with lesson plans, much like VG's own section for educators.
Finally, of course, the project of VG is much like the project of this memorial. At once an archive and an act, an art and a praxis.
Image courtesy of Jeanne Goldman
