REPORT ON THE HARTFORD HERITAGE PROJECT AT CAPITAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE
OR
THE GREAT AMERICAN PSYCHEDELIC HASH BROWN
By Wayne Jebian
“Fool of the eye.”
“What?” I asked.
“Fools the eye.”
Nefris Esther Quiterio Sanchez’ heavy
Spanish-Caribbean accent meant that she
sometimes had to repeat herself, and when she
dug for the words to capture her deeper
thoughts, she could give the listener’s ears a
workout. We were at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum, looking at a picture of a clock and some
currency rising off the background of a painting in
false three-dimensionality, so Nefris’ meaning
was clear.
“Tromp l’oeile,” I replied.
“It’s like when you see it, you think you
can really touch it, like it’s three-dimensional,”
she said. “It’s just a painting, but it’s like jumping
out of the picture. Oh wow, I’m gonna tell my art
teacher that I saw an example.”
“The clock, the money…what caught your
eye first?”
“The money.” She grinned wide and
started to laugh. “Definitely the money. If I could
just grab it…”
The name of the picture hanging in a rear
gallery of the Museum was “Time is Money,” an
oil painting on canvas by Ferdinand Danton, an
American who lived from 1877 to 1939. This was
masterful work, with illusory texture applied not
only to the solid objects in the frame, but also to
the wood in the background.
I had come with Nefris to this museum on
a scouting mission, to determine which works of
art would most resonate with the students. She
stood staring at the painting; it was definitely a
winner.
Nefris Quiterio was fully representative of
the students at Capital Community College in
some respects and utterly unique in others. She
had come from the Dominican Republic less than
five years earlier, and her life experience had
Nefris Quiterio with “Time is Money”. Photo by Wayne
Jebian
honed an innate gift for pragmatism, a genius for
knowing the shortest distance between two
points: Time = money. She valued money from
the experience of not having enough of it. She
labored intensely to make it, working at
McDonalds plus two or three other jobs at once,
going to college full time, impatient for more
earning power. This was what she had in common
with many other students at Capital, a hunger for
success every bit as immediate as actual hunger.
But she was different in other respects.
Many students were single-mindedly focused on
professional degrees like nursing, and only took
classes that would get them into a well-paying
field in the shortest amount of time. However,
Nefris was self-aware enough to know that the
most lucrative degree didn’t necessarily line up
with her own passions, so she took art classes and
whatever felt most interesting to her. Even
though today it was covered up by the gangsterstyle bandanna that she had worn to the
museum, she boasted a brain so formidable that
most instructors caught on right away that here
was someone truly special.
Should she be steered toward a liberal
arts degree? As we stood in front of this painting
of money, I thought about how she displayed the
outspokenness and clear-headedness of someone
who should be the boss – a CEO or a community
leader. As much as I would have loved to see her
passions followed to an MFA, I also thought she
would make great use of an MBA.
We were at the museum that day courtesy
of the Hartford Heritage Project, which was made
possible by a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH), secured for Capital by
Dr. Jeffery Partridge, chair of the Humanities
Department. Thanks to additional donations to
the Capital Community College Foundation, the
school was able to purchase institutional
memberships, allowing students access to the
Mark Twain House, the Harriet Beecher Stowe
House, the Wadsworth Atheneum and
Connecticut’s Old State House just by showing
their Capital identification cards. I had actually
forgotten mine, but Nefris had remembered hers.
The people at the front desk of the Atheneum
were gracious about my absent-mindedness.
It was invigorating to hear the mental
gears of a student who took art classes clicking
productively in this environment. It suddenly hit
home that Capital Community College had moved
just up the street from a world class museum
over eleven years ago, and we were finally able to
take advantage of it fully. It was a long overdue
synergy.
Nefris moved along the paintings, looking
at each one. We approached a picture of two
natives getting ready to scalp a settler woman –
“The Murder of Jane McCrea” by John Vanderlin.
Nefris didn’t pause for even a second before
saying, “I have hard time feeling sorry for the
settlers. Where I come from, most of the
indigenous were killed.”
“On Hispaniola?” I asked, referring to the
island shared by the nations of Haiti and the
Dominican Republic.
“Yes, there were almost none left.”
We moved quickly out of the room and
into the hallway, where Nefris stopped to
comment on a drip painting by Jackson Pollack.
Looking for all the world like a psychedelic
hash brown, the painting’s composition gave
Nefris food for thought: “I was asking my art
teacher, when an Artist makes a piece of art, are
John Vanderlyn, The Murder of Jane McCrea, 1804, oil
on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,
Purchased by Subscription, 1855.4. Used by
permission.
they just doing it the way they feel like doing it, or
are they following techniques, rules, principles,
and she was like, ‘we might not appreciate it
because we don’t know about art, but as simple
or complicated as we see that art, the Artist was
using techniques. Everything that we see is
techniques, strategies that the Artist is using. So
it’s not just a simple work, just because all we see
is two lines in a picture.’ Know what I mean?”
Nefris knew how to pick them. I used
these three paintings and told the students in my
entry-level English class to write a descriptive
paragraph about each of them. The Atheneum
paintings became one of those memorable
assignments where I ended up learning more
from my students than whatever they might have
learned from me. I had the chance to observe
brain science through art, theories that I had only
read about at UCONN and CCSU, and to learn the
teacher’s Big Lesson: Students will almost always
process a stimulus in the context of their own
experiences. It’s the sort of lesson that teaches us
“experts” how to teach more effectively.
The Hartford Heritage Project also helped
me to appreciate the visual learning component,
and how much stronger the responses can be to a
picture than to boring old black and white font on
paper or a computer screen. This assignment
produced amplified reactions, jumping off the
page like Danton’s dollar bills. If Nefris’ response
to the Vanderlin painting felt particularly intense,
I soon learned that this level of cultural specificity
was the rule rather than the exception.
“What the heck are these locos doing with
that poor woman?” wrote Norma Liz Soto, who
grew up in Puerto Rico. “I see fear and the look of
begging for mercy on Jane’s face. As for the
native Indians, they have avenging expressions
that say, ‘You are going down.’” Like Nefris, Ms.
Soto put her Caribbean spin on the work: “I would
say that these homicides happened a lot when
the Indians were rising up against the Spaniards
to have their normal lives.”
Jamie Zene, an African American from
Connecticut, wrote, “The Indians are right now in
control of the situation. Normally, they don’t
have control over the colonists.”
The grim realism of “The Murder of Jane
McCrea” made a surprisingly effective cultural
Rorschach test, with clear lines of delineation.
What about Jackson Pollack’s hot mess of streaks
in his “Number 9”, which bore a closer
resemblance to an actual Rorschach test? Since
Pollack’s painting lacks an obvious narrative, the
students’ reactions made less blatant reference
to the viewers’ own cultural narratives. There
emerged common allusions to nature, with
elemental, primordial expressions showing the
ways that we all think alike. “Many people
express the emotional effects of colors,” wrote
Nefris.
“I can see a deer formed in the upper left
hand side,” wrote Dominique Jackson. “I feel
happy when I look at this painting.”
“They are warm colors. While looking into
this picture I see a reindeer, kind of,” wrote
Tashanique Blizzard.
“In my head, there is a hidden butterfly
with its head facing the right side of the portrait.
In other perspectives, it can be confused with the
shape of a heart,” wrote Bryan Martinez.
Welcome to life at Capital Community
College, as amplified by art. From the elevators to
the classrooms, it is a veritable Jackson Pollack of
accents, complexions, idioms and expressions.
Our common humanity is literally in each others’
faces, while surprising differences blindside us the
moment we get complacent. Viewing it all
through the lens of the American masters at the
Wadsworth Atheneum gave me that feeling of
being shaken out of the reverie of the routine, of
understanding and appreciating the extraordinary
in the everyday, including the colorful
personalities underneath the black and white
fonts on paper that are handed in to me.
“This painting’s idea arises during a period
of labor unrest and deep economic depressions,”
wrote Nefris Quiterio about Danton’s “Time is
Money”. “Ferdinand Danton, Jr. is characterized
by his Tromp l’oeil, landscape paintings, and also
for his work as an art forger. Brown and dark
green are the predominant colors. The colors that
most draw my attention are the beige of the clock
and the stack of money. Definitely the most
striking thing about this painting is the impression
of reality that makes our eyes think that it is real.”
A few weeks later, Nefris announced that
she had a new favorite artist: Jackson Pollack. This
made me feel happy. At Columbia, where I went
to college as an undergraduate, studying art had
been mandatory. Some students had grumbled,
wondering what such classes had to do with our
careers; after all, I ended up teaching English, not
art. But this term, thanks to the Hartford Heritage
Grant, I got the chance to stretch once again,
much like the opportunity that it gave to my
students.
Wayne Jebian is an Instructor of developmental English at Capital Community College and Goodwin College. He is
also a correspondent for CTLatinoNews.com and CTNow. Follow Wayne Jebian on Twitter!