About

Mapping Arts OC is a high impact public digital humanities project produced in collaboration with undergraduate students at California State University Fullerton (CSUF), artists and community partners throughout Orange County, California. This project seeks to build an interactive, digital map that invites new spatial and cultural interpretations into existing conversations and historical narratives regarding public art and spatial practice in Santa Ana and the greater Orange County region.

This project constitutes the fifth installment on the geographically multi-sited, Mapping Arts platform. Mapping Arts was started by Blackbird Arts and Research, a nonprofit dedicated to innovative arts and research projects that connect the arts, history, and the public. The Mapping Arts OC portion of this platform contains images, and original research by graduate and undergraduate students, who worked work alongside community advisors to construct the key content areas of the site.

This project has three desired outcomes, with the first being to enhance public understanding of marginalized artists in Orange County both past and present. The second is to increase public engagement with the Digital Humanities by placing humanistic research within a free, accessible, open-ended deep mapping platform that users can access far beyond the project completion date to map and learn about local artist and their legacies within Orange County. The third outcome is to center first generation college students within the public digital humanities.  As such, student work on this publication was led and supervised by Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu, as part of Cal State Fullerton’s HIST 403B Practicum in Digital History Course.

In addition to this site, Mapping Arts OC has also created a companion walking tour of several murals in Santa Ana’s Downtown region, as well as a K-5 Coloring book that presents the projects key humanities questions to a younger audience.

Learn More About Digital History/ Digital Humanities at CSUF

CSUF history class goes digital to tell story of Santa Ana’s public murals

The Mapping arts project is hosted on the larger Mapping Arts Project platform which was created by artist and cultural anthropologist Lara Kirby Pardo, and is run by Blackbird Arts and Research, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to innovative arts and research projects that connect the arts, history, and the public.