Author: Olivia Fredricks Major: Studio Art

The Honors College research grant funded my honors thesis project, which sought to relay the stories of Tibetan exiles through the medium of zines. Zines are self-produced, hand made publications that are distributed through a network. The stories I relayed were collected through the University of Arkansas’s Tibetans in Exile Today (TEXT) program that I studied abroad with in summer 2017.  

This semester, I was finishing up the production of the zines, and focusing on distribution and my final defense. My distribution plan had two parts: donating to public collections and displaying locally. I had originally wanted to sell the zines and donate the proceeds to the TEXT program, but further research into university policies led me to the conclusion that this would be impracticable. Rather than simply handing them out to individuals, I donated them to public zine libraries, university libraries, special collections, and public libraries across the United States and abroad. This would ensure that they remained accessible to the public. I got a number of reactions from the staff at the numerous public collections I reached out to, all of them positive. The Michigan State University Libraries even requested the original interview transcripts to be catalogued beside the zines for research purposes. The second part of my distribution plan was a mobile display case that I set up in various locations around Fayetteville. I chose locations that prioritized education, public access, or Buddhism. This led me to display the zines in the Honors College Lounge, the Fine Arts Library, The Fayetteville, Public Library, Trailside Yoga, Geshe Dorjee’s meditation service at Yoga Deza, and Mullins Library. The response I got from the display case was not as engaged as I would have liked, and I later realized it was a design flaw on my part. The case was relatively flat and showed the zines all at once, which did not really invite the kind of investigation of the objects that I had hoped for. In addition, I presented the zines at the Honors Research Conference in October.  

My faculty mentor, Sean Morrissey, advised me through the whole process and gave me resources and design tips I would not have been able to find on my own. I also met with one of my committee members, Marty Maxwell-Lane, to learn more about how a designer might approach a project like mine. At the end of the semester, I defended my thesis. I set up a show in the Printmaking building gallery that featured the zines and documentation of the distribution. I have one more semester left before I graduate, so I plan on taking what I have learned from my honors thesis and applying it to a new body of work.