Humanities Truck Community Archive

With the political climate of 2019, there was a strong need to showcase our connection with people of all kinds, rather than what separates us. For this reason, Faculty Fellow Naoko Wowsugi created Group Portrait Journey in D.C., which is a series of group portraits that will visually trace the intersectional nature of personal identity and our intangible connections as one large community in Washington, DC. The goal of the project was to document a series of social groups in formal portraits over the course of a year to visually show how, through one individual, diverse groups within the city are connected to one another. In the process, the project aimed to explore what we mean by the word “group” and invited participants to elaborate on their own notions of belonging—and perhaps surprise viewers by showing how many social roles one person can occupy. The project was part documentary, part archive, part participatory, and part community art. This collection contains documentation from the project, which was cut short by COVID-19. Additionally the ollection includes photographs from an event in October 2019, when Chun brough her Group Portrait Journey Exhibit to a photography class at American University.