For Slow Art Day 2025, students at the University of Alabama participated in a project titled Walking In It, developed under the direction of Professor Sharony Green and presented in connection with the Gorgas House Museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The project focused on an experimental video that encouraged people to notice walking and to think about it as something shaped by history and circumstance, not a simple experience that everyone can take for granted.
As part of the project, students enrolled in Professor Green’s Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 history courses contributed 30-second long videos of themselves walking through campus and around Tuscaloosa. These clips were combined into a single “digital quilt” bringing together repeated movement across shared spaces.
The completed video was featured online and projected onto the exterior of the Gorgas House Museum on April 4, 2025, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The projection was designed as a come-and-go experience, allowing Slow Art Day participants and passersby to encounter the work throughout the day. The setting of the projection on Gorgas House, the campus’s oldest dwelling constructed in 1829, provided historical context for the project’s focus on movement and access.
Watch the video projection:
Additional components were coordinated by Sonya Harwood-Johnson, Director of the Gorgas House Museum. These included interpretive displays featuring nineteenth-century shoes and an interactive station where members of the campus community could decorate miniature boots produced with a 3D printer, inspired by a Mexican artist’s project.
In addition to the video projection, the Slow Art Day project included a campus-wide scavenger hunt. Participants were invited to move through campus using the scavenger hunt prompts, with a prize offered to those who completed the activity.
Students also created a short video previewing the event, offering viewers a sense of the site and project setup:
The project received coverage in The Crimson White – Gorgas House hosts The University of Alabama’s submission to global Slow Art Day – the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, which reported on the Gorgas House Museum’s participation in the global Slow Art Day initiative. Across digital platforms, the project reached a wide audience, with more than 1,100 views on Instagram and over 1,200 additional views and impressions across other social media channels.
We thank Sharony Green, Sonya Harwood-Johnson, and the participating students for their innovative Slow Art Day events, and look forward to seeing what they come up with for Slow Art Day 2026.
– Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl
P.S. Read more about the project, Walking In It: An Experimental Video, on the Gorgas House Museum website. You can follow the Gorgas House Museum on Facebook and Instagram.
