Student Filmmakers Featured in “Who is a Citizen?” Exhibition

Gabrielle Paulina-Hamill, NoPlaceForMySpace (video still), 2019. Courtesy the artist.

Student filmmakers are among the eight artists whose work was selected to appear in the exhibit Who is a Citizen? at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The exhibit is part of a larger group of events surrounding MacArthur Genius, Guggenheim Fellow and acclaimed author Claudia Rankine’s Signature Lecture November 12 (registration and more information.)

Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric was taught to at least 19 classes at MSU in Spring 2020, which inspired entrants into the Who is a Citizen? contest. Students Gabby Paulina-Hamill and Maggie Lupton created their pieces as part of their FLM 260: Introduction to Digital Media coursework. Paulina-Hamill created her stop motion piece NoPlaceForMySpace utilizing stop-motion techniques, a new form for her. “In this narrative,” she explains, “the girls in white are simply driven to claim what isn’t theirs because they can.”

Lupton partnered with fellow MSU student and poet Vanessa Thompson to adapt Thompson’s work of poetry into a film. It aimed to, as Lupton said, “tackle the notion that although you may be a legal citizen, you might not be treated as one.”

Maggie Lupton and Vanessa Thompson, Civil Trinity (video still), 2020. Courtesy the artists.

Read curatorial text from this exhibition, view the artwork created by MSU student artists, and share your response to their work through a virtual exhibition companion here

Who Is A Citizen? installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad
Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2020.
Photo: Eat Pomegranate Photography.