“You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Maya Angelou’s affirmation of the indomitability of her spirit–and, more generally, of Black people–is timeless. Mr. Nicky Enright’s Projects in Contemporary Art (PICA) class certainly affirms that. 

An innovative art class at Riverdale Country School that uses contemporary art as a vehicle for inspiring and engaging various communities, Mr. Enright’s PICA class, in its tenth anniversary, has created a website to honor exemplary Black figures of excellence, dignity, justice, and love. With a diversity of role models displayed on the website including novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison and NASA research mathematician and Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning Katherine Johnson, Mr. Enright noted that Black History Month definitely inspired the making of the website, as his class started and finished the website in February. 

PICA student and tenth grader Isis Rodriguez said, “We were watching a movie in class called Race, and it was about a famous Black track star [Jesse Owens] who went to the Olympics […] when they were hosted [...] in Nazi Germany [...] We wanted to play off that idea of Black excellence and achievement and since it was Black History Month, we thought [it would be] the appropriate time to do that project.” 

However, PICA faced challenges when constructing their website. Many of PICA’s past projects have in part been predicated on the physical school campus. For example, “Chalk Perspective” was a past PICA project in which students used chalk to depict a school hallway with hard, rectilinear features but then filled it with softer, curvier, more vibrant colors. According to Mr. Enright, some “saw it as a metaphor for the organic life that gives vitality to the institution that is a school.” Indeed, projects like this were a demonstration of the vital essence of the arts–PICA has the ability to both create beautiful artwork and also generate content relevant to our community (such as by reminding us of the organic spontaneities of school life, or by honoring historic Black role models). Unfortunately, the pandemic has, in a way, threatened this vital power of the arts by making on-campus projects like the “Chalk Perspective” incredibly difficult. Consequently, PICA needed to grapple with new technology to effectively represent Black figures. 

The class used Thinglink, a technology platform where users can make images interactive. With the click of a button, users can enter the section of Katherine Johnson, read a biography on Maya Angelou, or watch a talk by Malcolm X. The interactive and multimedia element was, according to Mr. Enright, challenging but also fun.

“Because it was a new technology, there were some issues with it,” Mr. Enright said. But at the same time, he noted that the PICA class also viewed this technological challenge as an opportunity to learn. “[We wanted to] play around with it and see if we [could] combine the idea of a Black History Month project, where we’re raising awareness about certain people that some people might not know about, [with] technology and [have] fun with it and doing something cool with it, which we finally did,” he said.

Additionally, he mentioned that though the virtual nature of the project was challenging, it was also its greatest benefit. “In the middle of the pandemic with a hybrid schedule where people are not spending as much time on campus as they used to […] we take advantage of the virtual space as a space to exhibit art in, to share art in, to share projects in […] [It] makes it so easy to share something online,” Mr. Enright said. “The downside is that […] it’s still more screen [time.] But these are trade offs.”

When creating the website, students drew inspiration from the fact that they personally connected to many of the Black figures. Awa Diop, an eleventh grader in Mr. Enright’s class, is a self-described “avid Toni Morrison fan.”

“She’s one of my favorite authors [...] I read Song of Solomon in ninth grade, and I also read The Bluest Eye in eighth grade [...] I just wanted to know more about her early life,” Diop said.

She certainly had the opportunity to do just that by creating a section of the website devoted to Morrison. Her section, like all the other sections in the website, contains various multimedia elements–a button that links to a typed biography, a list of her most well known books, a description of her marriage, and a button that links to her 1993 Nobel Lecture, placed fittingly on top of an image of Morrison’s lips. 

What stands out in this gallery? Well, it depends on the person viewing it; for one person, a particular element of this display might stand out, and for someone else, a completely different part of the gallery might strike them. For me personally, it reaffirmed my love for Black literature. It made me marvel once again at Morrison’s transformative ability to simultaneously expose the oppressive realities Black people face and triumphantly affirm the human capacity for decency and selflessness, for redemption and love, for forgiveness and joy. But that's just what speaks to me. Someone else, for instance, might marvel at Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Aaron's remarkably courageous refusal to quit playing the game he loved in spite of receiving death threats. It's okay that Morrison sticks out more to me, while Hank Aaron stands out more to the other person – therein lies part of the power of this gallery: its diversity of inspirational Black figures.

Ultimately, through displaying the extraordinary work and achievements of various Black activists and role models on their new virtual art display, the PICA class (on its tenth anniversary!) aims to inspire Riverdale viewers to, in the words of Amanda Gorman, “raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.”

Click here to visit PICA’s site with ThingLink.