I assisted with his project in which we taught kids in schools surrounding Charlottesville (I chose Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind to utilize my budding Sign Language skills) about Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From the story, music and language, they would create what they thought Puck’s love-causing flower would look like.  These flowers were collected from the participating schools and combined on pages of the manuscript placed side by side on a large canvas for the final installation.

What struck me though was the installation that accompanied our creation, which for years I have remembered as Color of Happiness. However, as I wrote this I finally went back to research more about this piece to find that it is in fact called, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (after Harriet Jacobs). My theory is that I was speaking to Rollins about the piece and asking the significance of the multicolored ribbons that literally flow off of the page to curl into a heap on the floor, and he answered that it was to represent the color of each person’s happiness as they worked on the piece. I have always admired Rollins’ approach to art and engaging inner-city kids in what was surely a thankless and unique approach to learning about literature and art, but this was a new level for me. How might we represent our happiness? I like the idea that happiness can be represented in a color unique to each artist, captured in an (inadequately) vibrant ribbon, which has such length and weight that a canvas cannot contain it, so it simply rests on the floor in abundance, intermingled with its neighbors.

I hope this blog will attempt to represent my happiness (and sorrow and confusion and every thought and emotion that may end up here) in the same feeble, yet poignant way, which hopefully flows in abundance to tumble into other’s words and ideas.

So to begin, what color is your happiness?

Mine is green—a vibrant, life force of green which is both calming and energizing all at once.

Photo from University of Virginia Art Museum.