Howard University student Lydia Hill, who received an AIIS Digital India Learning Initiative summer student fellowship, created a virtual exhibit “A Peek Into Indigenous Furniture: Through the Eyes of Lydia Hill,” that was featured in the U.S. Department of Education’s widely distributed September 2022 IFLE Newsletter.
Lydia Hill
The exhibit, which is available on the Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds (VMIS) site, focuses on cultural artifacts of functionality (furniture and other accoutrements intended to accommodate bodies). It incorporates a first-person essay where Ms Hill weaves together a discussion of the particular contexts of the cultural artifacts and insights into the echoes she discerns with African-American cultural traditions and practices. The exhibit has great potential to be used as a resource for middle and high school educators to include in their classroom curricula.
Ms Hill noted, “throughout this exhibit, I take you along my journey of understanding the relationship between functionality, style, and Indian furniture. This is through the eyes of an African American woman. So I am taking my own experiences and my own relationship with my culture to apply to these indigenous furniture pieces. These pieces were specifically chosen because of either my curiosity or parallelism to my own heritage.”
The AIIS DIL student fellowships, which were partially funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, supported digital sonic and visual projects. The five recipients spent two months during the summer of 2022 carrying out original projects using the resources of the two AIIS research centers in India (the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology and the Center for Art and Archaeology) and resulted in the creation of a digital exhibition, digital curriculum, or other creative products intended for varied audiences. The goal of this program was to: foster the digital production and dissemination of knowledge about India; promote the creation and use of digital resources and media for the study of India; and promote digital collaboration.