An insight from the Myths, Legends and Fairytales seminar I gained was how much stories influence our lives. For example, after we read the Metamorphoses by the Roman author Ovid I began to realize its impact more often in the world. During research I learned that the English playwright Shakespeare was influenced by Ovid and motifs of art during the Renaissance also appeared in his writing. (29) Visiting a garden center this June in Connecticut I saw a plant pot shaped like a unicorn. It reflected with comedic ordinariness of something extraordinary within daily life echoing from the Renaissance to today. This summer while doing charcoal drawings I recognized a scene from the Metamorphoses in a painting by the artist Titian of The Death of Actaeon, from 1559 – 1562, located in the National Gallery, London. (30) I chose to draw the figure of the goddess Diana in charcoal because of the painting’s atmospheric values. In the description of the painting in the book The History and Techniques of The Great Masters: Titian, I found a link between poetry and visual art. According to Titian his paintings were mood poems.
The belief was held in the classical world that painters and poets shared basically the same functions was taken up again during the Renaissance, poets being referred to as articulate painters, and painters as mute poets. (31)
About a month before my father passed away in his sleep in October 2023 he said he was proud of me for the publication of my unit The Dream Keeper’s Quest. He was a pulmonologist who dedicated his research to the impact of environmental air pollution on black neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York from truck traffic on the Peace Bridge. This spring I read the play Enemy of the People written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in 1882. (32) The play made me reflect on how telling the truth can be complicated by economic and political interests.
As Minister of Education of Uganda, Kalibala set a precedent for restitution of materials from Cambridge to the Uganda Museum in 1961. (33) I referred to this historical event as evidence that restitution to the continent was possible in my article, The Thinkers. (34) Like Wakaima beating the drum, it was a message communicating within Uganda and across the African diaspora regarding the materials contained in museums abroad. In June 2024 Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology restituted materials to Uganda and made a pledge to return more. (35)
There is a description in the first chapter of the book Imaginary Animals, by Boria Sax about how imaginary animals like unicorns relate to “ideas about life, death and time,” and that the fantastic “extends to every single creature, from the dragonfly to the dragon.” (37) During the development of this unit I corresponded with the Yale Professor Nicole Sheriko, Assistant Professor of English about puppetry. Sheriko shared a wealth of ideas regarding how this unit can be expanded to relate to animal masks in African storytelling traditions and the materiality of puppets in discussion of unicorns. A watercolor drawing of my grasshopper can undergo topographical transformations that metamorphose in the mind from crustacean automaton to rhinoceros to a unicorn and into a knight’s horse or a cow without a tail. There are many opportunities for interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange throughout this visual arts unit.
