CIA's Traveling Sketchbooks make a last stop at MOCA
Students to help visitors create sketchbooks on April 5

After traveling to the CIA Library, the Beth K. Stocker Art Gallery at Lorain County Community College, Rocky River Public Library, and the Cleveland Public Library’s Special Collections Reading Room, a collection of 65 graphic memoirs by CIA students will end its tour at MOCA Cleveland with a free public workshop.

MOCA visitors will be able to vicariously experience the life of a student in the first month of art school when they flip through works in the CIA Traveling Sketchbook Project that will be on display at the museum from March 15 through April 30. On Saturday, April 5, CIA students will help visitors create sketchbooks of their own in a “Build-A-Book” workshop from 12-4 p.m.

The sketchbook experience complements MOCA’s exhibition DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death, on view through June 8.

The CIA Traveling Sketchbook Project started when incoming first-year students were provided with identical sketchbooks last summer and instructed to complete them during their first month at college. The project was designed to support the summer reading at CIA, in which the entire college community was invited to join the new students in reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel by Sherman Alexie, with illustrations by graphic novelist, Ellen Forney.

First instituted in the summer of 2012, CIA’s Summer Reading Program helps unite the incoming class through a common experience that begins even before their arrival at CIA. An additional goal was to select a book that might help students, in the context of going to an art school, to begin to examine themselves in relationship to the local and global communities they inhabit.

Alexie’s novel was chosen as one which might well support CIA’s Cores + Connections vision, including its growing commitment to community engagement practices in the arts and design. Students further explored the book’s themes of racism and social justice for Native Americans when Robert Roche presented a lunchtime lecture at CIA in mid-September. Roche is director of the American Indian Education Center in Cleveland.

Above: ninth graders from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's Facing History New Tech High School looked through the CIA traveling sketchbooks on a recent visit to the Special Collections Reading Room of the Cleveland Public Library.

For more information about MOCA’s Build-A-Book workshop, click here.