Poet William J. Harris Inspires Successful Visual Art Activity

My decades-long conversations with poet and literary scholar William J. Harris continue to pay dividends. This week offered one of the best examples.

 
Some years back, I discovered that when Professor Harris visits museums and art shows, he sketches what he sees in notebooks. He’s not a visual artist, but he enjoys tracking and tracing what catches his attention.

 
This week, I encouraged the 300 students enrolled in my African American literary Discovery Labs to follow Harris’s model. They perused art books featuring work by Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jacob Lawrence, and others, and then spent time sketching.

 
To say it’s been a really good week based on their work would be an understatement. I had no idea so many of these students were such talented artists. Even more, I didn’t anticipate how seriously they would take the activity or how focused they would remain for extended periods.

 
We do our Discovery Lab activities in the Redmond Center, and because there are so many students, we have relatively short periods to meet. That’s usually not a problem, as students tend to complete the activity for the week and leave. This week, though, was different. More than with any previous activity, multiple students approached me and asked if they could stay longer to work on their drawings.