Spring Exhibition / BC FP Showcase 2024 Post

Hey Y’all, Max here. 

This will be my last blog post of grade 11 so I hope you, the reader, is mentally prepared. Okay, now let me tell you about both the Spring Exhibition and the accompanying project. 

The end of this year was hectic ( it’s summer, I’m writing this over summer 🙁 with so many things happening inside and outside of school. The project we did for the exhibition was about upstanders, people who have made noticeable positive changes throughout history. The project was kind of sprung on us out of the blue. Initially, we were going to do strictly a First Peoples exhibit, but then it became clear that we were going to do not only the PLP exhibition, we were also doing a First Peoples Exhibit, and both would feature one project between the two. At the time it was really confusing to me what we were doing, so I kind of just went along and adapted to whatever I needed to do. PLP has taught me well to do these kind of things. 

So I decided to work with Sepaus. We hadn’t really worked on anything in all the time we’ve been in PLP, which is really surprising in retrospect but not all unintentional. I wrote about it in my Tpol, you can read that here. 

With the upstander project being for Humanities, Sepaus and I collectively chose to research Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was a very important, albeit not entirely well known protestor and organizer of the entire anti-war movement in America during the 60’s and 70’s. He wasn’t our fist pick but he was fairly unique, so we decided to challenge ourselves. We challenged ourselves further by connecting Abbie Hoffman and the Vietnam War to Residential Schools, the aspect from BC First Peoples we decided to cover. It is worth mentioning again how it was not easy to cross over these two events and that it took a lot of explaining to visitors for them understand.

We ultimately made a monument/ display that showed both focuses equally. We incorporated boots and shoes to show the children who died in Residential Schools and put flowers in them in a direct reference to a common act by protestors during the Vietnam war, which was putting flowers in the rifles of police and national guardsmen.

I almost forgot, but Sepaus and I created a zine and printed it, about Abbie Hoffman / the  Vietnam War and Residential Schools. In my opinion this was the best work I’ve done in a while. It was informative, unique from other exhibits, and in a medium I loved and didn’t have prior experience with. I was very proud of the work I did on it, and in my Tpol I mention that. 

The exhibition this year was pretty low key. That’s not to say it was worse or whatever, it just felt very tame. It could also be the fact that I presented the same exhibit two days in a row. In any case, there wasn’t a whole lot of remarkability. 

The BC First Peoples exhibit the next day was more or less the same as the PLP Exhibition, just with the mainstream 11’s joining in. I thought it was funny that the people who came up and talked to us acted like they were at gunpoint or something. It was pretty clear they were forced to come, whereas the people from the previous night were parents or teachers and it felt like they were genuinely interested in what we had made. 

I keep mentioning my Tpol but I honestly think this is the best work I did this year. It was a partner project so obviously I can’t take all the credit but the final product we made was impressive to us, and we felt validated when people we didn’t know who didn’t even know what our display was about came up and told us it was great, or that we put a lot of time into it ( which we did ). 

I’m glad both the PLP Spring Exhbition and the First Peoples showcase went so well, and that I could work to create a great display to show my learning. This is also my last post of PLP 11, so thanks for reading and I’ll be back in September.