Aikú, Cuba is a photographic series created during the XXXII Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. The project captures a bembé—a ritual celebration rooted in Yoruba tradition that fuses music, dance, and spiritual invocation. Performed by a folkloric ensemble from Pinar del Río, each dancer embodies an Orisha deity through distinct colors, movements, and ceremonial attire.
This Campfire session begins with a visual presentation of selected photographs and cultural context, followed by an open dialogue exploring the symbolic language of sacred performance. Participants will reflect on how color, costume, and movement communicate ancestral knowledge and religious identity.
Viviana Torres-Mestey is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and researcher. Her work bridges visual literacy, design, and cultural memory. This project expands upon her doctoral research into the visual codes of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and the role of photography in documenting sacred traditions.
In this campfire session, Eliza Gregory and Emily Merrifield will present their work with a photography history course and solicit feedback and dialogue from participants around alternative pedagogical structures for teaching visual literacy, research, and the value of original scholarship. The Sacramento State context comes with specific challenges—students are often food and housing insecure, provide caregiving for family members, work full time while attending school, and many are first generation to college. Figuring out how to push students intellectually while they are dealing with profound logistical challenges on a daily basis is difficult. We will also be eager to connect with colleagues around how to meet students where they are, and evaluate what skills are most crucial to their success going forward, while operating within a vast bureaucracy with little formal support for pedagogical innovation.
Maps have long served as more than just tools for navigation; they carry symbolic and ritualistic significance, shaping how individuals engage with the territories, the sacred, meaning making, history, and experience. This fireside session explores how maps communicate ideas through visual literacy, comparing historical and contemporary practices. We consider maps as both practical tools and metaphors for transformation, shaped by cultural perspectives and visual symbols—some universal, others deeply rooted in place and identity. Researchers will share insights from undergraduate projects that investigate mapping as practice, navigation, and symbolic exploration. A 20-minute hands-on workshop will follow, inviting participants to map a personal experience. This activity will support reflection on how we use visual communication to express meaning, and how maps can act as cultural artefacts as well as tools for connection and understanding.
This presentation explores tarot card decks as powerful visual systems that live between sacred imagery and artistic expression, serving as both a spiritual tool and a dynamic storytelling medium. As visual texts, the cards tell universal stories: of growth, loss, transformation, discovery, love, and death, that are constantly reinterpreted by artists who call on their own cultural and lived experiences to develop the visual lexicon of their tarot deck. After learning more about the long history of tarot imagers and artists who create them, attendees will be invited to reinterpret a card from the Major Arcana—the 22 tarot cards representing archetypes and life stages. Participants will be guided through the process of creating a card of their choice, incorporating their own cultural, spiritual, and personal symbols. This activity offers a fresh perspective on cultural reinterpretations of universal stories through visual language.
