This piece, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream (c. 1595), was created here at the University Art Museum in 1998 during a three-day workshop Rollins led with students from four regional middle and high schools. Rollins followed the model he had developed for decades, first with Intermediate School 52, a junior high in the South Bronx, of merging artmaking with reading and writing skills. On the first floor of the museum, where visitors could witness their creative activity, students read and acted out scenes of the play (guided by London actor David Acton), and then distilled the play’s narrative to a single visual motif they agreed upon: a flower. They individually painted their flowers on the pages from the book itself, disrupting the text while revealing another side of it. Shakespeare’s play, following the inverted narrative of a dream in which things are not what they appear, offers a lesson in disrupting the status quo, a lesson reflective of Rollins’s own radical pedagogy based in collaboration and activism.
–History Lessons