In 2016, The Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies proudly announced the inauguration of the first graffiti mural on the Ohio State campus titled Formación. This title speaks of the constant state of becoming and formation that is at the core of non-oppressive and anti-colonial thinking. Formación thus celebrates ambivalent, in-between and continually evolving states of being. The work is currently located at the entrance of our offices in 286 University Hall. This collaborative mural project “Graffiti School Comunidad Ohio” was led by Chilean graffiti artist Marjorie “Gigi” Peñailillo and was completed with the assistance of Guisela Latorre, Lynaya Elliott, Tess Pugsley and Jackson Stotlar. The images were completed mostly through the use of spray paint. With the departmental name change to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies in 2011, the mural illustrates an ongoing shift toward more inclusive understandings of feminisms as well as the expansive new direction the program took in autumn 2020 with the launch of the LGBTQ+ minor. Symbolic of the department’s progress in the past ten years, the mural has become central to the planning of the upcoming 50th anniversary celebration.
Guisela specifically shared that the aspiration for this mural project was to signal to visitors that they are entering a decolonial feminist space and to celebrate graffiti as an honored art form and legitimate public intervention rather than a criminalized act of vandalism. Those who designed the mural intentionally incorporated iconography such as a gender non-specific being, indigenous cultural elements of Ohio’s history and local geography such as the white trillium flower, cardinal and ladybug and connections to knowledge creation, textured experiences and feminist education as allegorized by the central figure whose mind is visibly open to multiple and complex possibilities. To Guisela, Formacíon “symbolizes being in the process of becoming, being in the process of forming a feminist consciousness,” and that this process is ongoing and iterative.
To engage this idea of becoming that Formación evokes, Guisela will be hosting a mural-making event as part of the upcoming 50th anniversary commemoration. She shares the following statement to galvanize and inspire our movement as feminists in the current tumultuous political moment: “For the 50th anniversary of the department, we are going to create another mural. This may be a temporary mural, but it will speak to our feminist thinking in the current moment. Especially focused on healing, we will be thinking about what healing can look like in the current political moment. We are going to ask attendees: “What [does] healing look like to you? How do you survive? How do you create joy in these difficult times? The idea is that we work collectively: we all have different ideas about how to survive as a feminist or as a gendered other, so we think working collectively will do a lot to imagine and form communal healing. We are so excited to be able to do this while our department is celebrating such an important milestone. We are one of the leading departments of gender studies in the country, and one of the oldest! So, we are hoping to honor this within the mural as well.”
