The first floor of York College’s Academic Core Building is home to the York College Arts Gallery, which undergoes a transformation on a monthly basis. This month, Caroline Voagen Nelson, Assistant Professor for the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at CUNY York College, has converted the space into a capsule of history using animation, digital art, and installation. In her exhibit, Augmented Archives – Surreal Recollections of History in Moving Images covers the beginnings of currency to the women’s voting rights, Nelson weaves multiple mediums with a style that captivates the eyes and injects knowledge.
Pandora’s Box: What are your earliest memories that you believe inspired your creativity?
Caroline Voagen Nelson: Drawing was my first love and passion. I drew everywhere as a kid. I remember being so passionate about drawing that my parents would carry pens and pads of paper with them wherever we went. I observed and drew life as much as I could as I experienced it as a child. And I still live that way, carrying a pen and sketchbook with me every day.
Pandora’s Box: Did you know when you were a child that being an artist was your destiny?
Caroline Voagen Nelson: Yes, I did know being an artist was my destiny. I felt deeply connected to art at a very young age and knew it was my life’s purpose. I was making art in different forms all day long. Creating art felt the best approach to process and understand the world we live in, feel engaged with the community, and invent new ways of seeing.
PB: What was your favorite animation to watch growing up? Why?
CVN: I loved watching so many different kinds of animations growing up, from the mainstream cartoons to lesser-known films from previous decades. I watched probably every episode of shows from Nickelodeon’s 90s golden age of animation, which I dearly loved. When I was 16, my art teacher showed me the 1973 Oscar-winning short animation Frank Film by Frank Mouris. It was an experimental, stream-of-consciousness cut-out collaged animation critiquing the cultural consumerism of the 70s at the same moment as a narrator reflects on his own life. Seeing how animation could be a critical visual tool to connect one’s life experiences with the context of the larger world was incredibly powerful.
PB: What was the most important part about pursuing your MFA in Digital Art from Pratt Institute and BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago?
CVN: Receiving my Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art gave me the foundation to begin a career as an artist and has many applicable skills to work commercially. At SAIC, I lived (metaphorically) in the dark room and learned as much as I could about photography. That rigorous discipline led to my career as an editorial photographer for more than a decade in NYC. But as years passed, I knew I needed to make work that connected to my love of drawing, cinema, storytelling, collage, and history. Working with a camera alone was not enough. I realized the best medium for my practice was animation, as a technique to combine all of my methods of making. I spent a year developing prototypes and teaching myself animation skills before fully committing to a Master’s program. Understanding the kind of projects I wanted to create and the skills I needed to obtain were imperative in finding the right path for pursuing a Digital Art MFA degree.
PB: Is there a singular experience that you believe shaped your approach to your artistry over the years, or is it an accumulation of experiences?
CVN: My approach to artistry is an accumulation of experiences. Growing up in the South, I felt deeply aware of extremes with classism and witnessed ableism in my community. My family valued studying history, and we took countless cross-country road trips with a history road map itinerary. It felt like those efforts were an aim to understand the context of our world more as I was growing up. Conceptually, I’ve continued to gravitate towards themes of environments in flux, extremes in economics, and moments in history recontextualized. Puzzles were an important approach to problem-solving as a kid, particularly jigsaw puzzles. My artwork approach is informed by the process of gathering puzzle pieces from archives I collected and reconfiguring them to build a project, whether the end result is a film, an installation, or a multimedia sculptural piece.
PB: Was being a professor at York College what influenced you to bring your exhibit to the school?
CVN: I was honored when York College’s Fine Art Gallery Director, Nicholas Fraser, asked if I would be interested in showing a retrospective of my work after learning about my artwork. It’s a privilege to be able to share a decade of my video artworks with the community here at York (where I’ve also been teaching almost as long, since 2017).
PB: Your award-winning short film, Code Ruth, is the real-life story of your grandmother finding romance as she taught Morse Code during WWII. Why was it important for you to share her story?
CVN: It felt important to share my grandmother Ruth Voagen’s story because it represented many aspects of values in my upbringing. Showing a strong, intelligent woman teaching a telecommunication device during WWII felt empowering to share, as well as having my mother narrating her story. I wanted to tell a family history origin story that can connect with how we all communicate through the generations.
PB: Your multimedia piece, Your Vote, is a celebration of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. In 2025, do you feel the weight and responsibility of that more or less?
CVN: Absolutely. My piece, Her Vote, was first shown during the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020, when the world shut down during Covid. I felt great responsibility then, as I do now, to share the stories of suffragists who worked tirelessly for the rights of women (many who still struggled to vote after it passed due to their ethnicity and race) to vote during a movement that spanned over 70 years. In our current climate, it’s more important now than ever to share the stories of how difficult the amendment was to pass (it was by the margin of one vote) and how critical voting rights and equal rights are today. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was introduced during the suffragist movement, has still not passed at the federal level and continues to be debated on its passing, though the New York State Constitution officially passed the amendment as a state-level amendment this past November. I have continued to show the work during Women’s History Month for the past several years, and each iteration of the site-specific installation has had a new life depending on its location in New York City. When visitors scan the augmented reality prints of the work, an animation is activated to share the story of each suffragist profiled, to learn their unique story. It feels important to continue exhibiting this project to inspire others to learn more and be inspired by such a tireless movement that shook the world.
PB: What is at the top of your creative bucket list of projects you’d love to work on?
CVN: I plan to continue to make larger and more expansive educational Public Art installations around the world.
PB: What is one piece of advice that you would give to a student interested in animation and digital art, but doesn’t know where to begin?
CVN: I would recommend they begin by taking classes in the Communications Technology program I help run at York College! Sign up for my classes as I teach many different techniques of animation, ranging from 2D, stop motion, 3D, and hybrid compositing of animation within live action footage.
