Background
About Zora Neale Hurston
Information on Zora Neale Hurston, including discussion questions and the teacher's guide, is available on The Big Read's web site.
About The Big Read
The Big Read was started by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to restore reading to the center of American culture. The program was parked by a 2004 study that showed literary reading in America declining rapidly, at an accelerated rate, among all groups, especially among the young. Working in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest, the NEA has brought The Big Read to over 400 communities since the program's 2007 national launch. For more information about the national program, visit please visit The Big Read's web site.
How Did Wichita Get Involved?
In 2007, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia visited Wichita to participate in a grants workshop for arts agencies. In his remarks, he talked about this new project -- The Big Read -- and encouraged those present to create a Big Read program in Wichita. When it became clear that the Kansas Book Festival would not return to Wichita in 2008, the decision was clear: Wichita readers, as well as its lapsed and reluctant readers, deserved an opportunity to continue to participate in a community literary event. Due to the success of The Big Read in the Wichita area in 2008 and 2009, with over 20,000 attendees and over 50 community partners and donors, partners sought a third Big Read grant for October 2010. Previous books include Willa Cather's "My Ántonia" in 2008 and "Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" in 2009.
About the Artwork
The following are remarks by Andrea Keppers, Director of Education at the Wichita Art Museum, made at the July 8 news conference announcing the return of The Big Read to Wichita.
The Wichita Art Museum is proud to be a partner of The Big Read - Wichita for the third year. We are also delighted to be able to provide a visual partner to Zora Neale Hurston’s evocative novel. This year’s companion artwork is Girl, by Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, part of the Wichita Art Museum’s collection. This colorful serigraph print is from 2004, one of the last works of the artist’s life. Gwen Knight and her husband, Jacob Lawrence, were influential artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of African American culture and identity in the 1920s and 30s. Jacob Lawrence is one of the most significant African American painters of the 20th century, and while his wife, Gwen, was not as prolific as he was, her artistic contributions deserve their own recognition, as is evident in this beautiful print.
Girl is a serigraph re-interpretation of an early painted self-portrait called Portrait of a Girl from 1940. Gwen Knight was 27 years old when she painted it and it depicts a young woman of elegance and beauty. We see this graceful woman inside a room, in front of a curtained window. Through the window a cornflower hill rises into the lilac sky and a green plant reaches diagonally across the hill. A red flower blooms on the plant and echoes the red, rosebud mouth of the young woman. Floral metaphors pervade the image, from the flowery wallpaper in the background to her large, pink ruffled collar that resembles a peony or mum. This woman is connected to her environment by color and shape. As if to reinforce this connection, she stares not out of the room and beyond her surroundings, but down into the room and really, into herself. Gwen Knight was a dancer as well as a painter, and this element of grace suffuses the print, with sure arrangements of color, syncopated rhythms, and graceful undulations of line. Knight said of her art, “Dance is the way I draw, the way I work. I'm interested in gesture.”
The life of Gwen Knight Lawrence has many parallels to that of Zora Neale Hurston. They were both educated at Howard University, an all-black college in Washington, DC, although Hurston graduated before Knight began. The two women also crossed paths in New York in the creative atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance, and both held positions with the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. Knight was born in Barbados, and often longed for the tropical environment of her youth. Hurston traveled to the Caribbean several times to study the culture and folklore of its people; she even wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" while doing fieldwork in Haiti.
While the biographical connections are strong, the two women share an even greater creative connection. Both artists strove to capture the personal experiences of African Americans and in intimate and universal ways, appealing to the shared humanity of their viewers and readers. It is a rich comparison and fitting that its many layers should be explored in Wichita through the partnerships of The Big Read.