Description
The title of this course takes its name from a 1943 article by Langston Hughes following the breakout of the Zoot Suit Riots in the East LA and Boyle Heights neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Seen largely as the result of rising tensions between marginalized communities and elevated nationalism spurred by wartime propaganda efforts, the uprisings tell an unlikely story about measurement and form. The excessively oversized Zoot Suit ran directly counter to the “Victory” austerity measures directed by the War Production Board to restrict the quantities of fabric used in clothing resulting in the omission of superfluous elements such as pleating, collars, and full sleeves. Following the previous year’s course, the story of the Zoot Suit, among others, will be used to explore the conceptual, formal, and optical dimensions of measurement and the processes that translate this data into novel visual and material outputs. Taking a cue from the literary format of anthology serials, we will study in