At one table, a student was making a maze, another a train. Nearby, a student was molding clay to make a head, and others were building a mirror, making a music box, and creating a chess board.  

It was February 26, one of the last days of the winter term, and the Pearse Hub for Innovation (PHI) surged with creative energy as students in the College-Level Harlem Renaissance term course prepared their final projects. 

Two days later, these objects took on greater meaning in their finished forms as the students presented their projects and explained what they had built in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, an important period of African American literature, art, and culture that they had studied during this senior elective course. 

This is the third year that English teacher Fiona Mills has taken her class into the PHI to cap off the course. The Harlem Renaissance spanned the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, a time when mass migration to northern cities brought together numerous African American writers, artists, scholars, and musicians in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. 

Students were asked for their final project to create an object or some representation of an aspect of the course. Typically, Fiona said, the project is grounded in something the students read. This year there was an additional layer. The class had to work together to develop overarching themes and topics that would allow one project to tie into the other.  

February 26 was Day 3 in the PHI, and the students were busy building as Fiona moved from one student to another to talk about each project. 

“I really appreciate the design-thinking aspect of the PHI, and while our course is housed in the English Department, it is very interdisciplinary due to the nature of the Harlem Renaissance,” said Fiona, also the assistant director of the Kravis Center for diversity, equity & inclusion curriculum development. 

Students in the course examine literature, artwork, music, theater, history, and the politics of the time. 

“It seems fitting, given the nature of the course, [that] the students would come here and make a project that is beyond the confines of a traditional English essay,” Fiona said. 

There is nothing traditional about the PHI, a place where interdisciplinary studies meet imagination. And Fiona’s students were not the only ones in the PHI on February 26. It was as busy as Santa’s workshop.  

“This class centers on so many different African American writers, thinkers, creatives, and artists that the students walk away with a much more heterogeneous understanding of the Black experience,” Fiona said. 

Senior Ian Abreu said the train he created symbolized the transition of Blacks from the south to the north. When it was complete, the painted cardboard train included some red paint, representing the blood of the struggle. Ian also added some music notes to represent music’s integral part of the Black experience during the Harlem Renaissance.   

The sculpture of a head by senior Scott Boutry created curiosity in its finished form. String surrounded it, and a cutout section of the head exposed the brain. Scott said his creation was about the character Levee from Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and concentrated on external and internal self-expression. The strings represented the white-dominated society keeping Levee “under wrap,” Scott said. “If you look at his brain there are music notes, which was his dream, to become a big artist. So he is limited by the outside world on what he can do.” 

Senior Jaleen Kairys constructed a maze.    

“It symbolizes a journey of self-discovery in a world that is dominated by agency and performance,” Jaleen said. “I wanted to have some characters at the exits of the maze to symbolize that they do not perform for the white audience and are able to leave the maze because they do not apologize for who they are.” 

Senior Leah Ozgun created a deeply detailed painting, some of the themes of which were music, performance, and self-expression.  

In addition to creating and presenting their projects, each student also wrote an artist's statement to accompany their work. Senior Jackie Ryckman explained her use of dominoes, saying she chose them “as the marker due to the urge many will have to push them over, forming the cascading effect of oppression on Black everyday life. The dominos display 2, 4, 6, 8; however, anyone who has ever played Dominos knows that the blocks only go up to 6 per side. I chose to display these specific numbers, a common way of counting in dance and music, through burned etching to recognize Blues as a coping mechanism for the scars of systemic violence.” 

The assignment’s added layer, with the individual projects connecting to others, was a success, creating a sum of the whole.  

“Some of the best ideas that came out of this were those bounced off other people,” Leah said.