Free student event.

In collaboration with TREK, The Corrington Award, and our fall museum exhibitions, Centenary and local high school students are invited to share their literary, visual, or performance art inspired by nature.

Find more information about art shares and multidisciplinary prompts to create your own works inspired by nature below.

Art Share How-To

Step 1:
Bring your visual or literary work with you!

Step 2:
Visual artists: hold your work up for people to see and state the medium used
Literary artists: read your work out loud
Performing artists: perform your work

Step 3:
Talk about it!

· What inspired this piece?
· What did you learn about yourself through making this piece?
· What risks did you take while making this piece?
· Why did you choose this artistic medium or writing style to convey your message?
· Is there an artist, writer, or performer who inspired you?
· What was a challenge you faced while making this piece?
· What do you hope people who see, read, or watch this piece will take away?

Art Share Prompts: Nature

1. Write/create/perform a self-portrait piece. However, instead of being a self-portrait of yourself, you will be writing a self-portrait as something else. Choose something in nature and create a piece titled “Self Portrait as X.” If you took your interiority and transported it into the “body” of this thing, what would happen? What would be revealed? What metaphorical connections might you make between yourself and your chosen container?

   Examples of self-portrait poems include “Self-Portrait as a Scallop,” “Self-Portrait as Meadow,”and “Self-Portrait of Body as Night.”

2. Create a nature invective. An invective is a song of anger toward something. Your “song” can be a piece of creative writing, visual art, performance art–anything! Invectives use humor and often have curses: these curses are often not hopes for death and tragedy but are instead a little bit silly and witty. The invective subverts the expectation of nature art as idyllic. What will you do with this subversion?

   An example is “Invective Against the Bumblebee.”

   This prompt has been provided by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, this year’s Corrington Award recipient.

3. Aimee Nezhukumatathil says that when she doesn’t feel like creating, she thinks smaller:

   Brick by brick. One line. One anecdote. Make a blank journal a sky journal. Nothing fancy, a spiral notebook will do. Even if you can’t make a full poem or essay, you can designate a notebook into just having a place for your observations about the sky. In it you can record the day/time of your observation of the moon. Or make a cloud report. Describe and/or sketch the clouds. Teach yourself to identify at least five different cloud shapes: cirrus, cumulonimbus, etc. Sketch them. Make a sunset report, even if it is just from your window. What do you hear at sunset? What do you smell? How about at sunrise? (Interview with Poets & Writers)

   In your journal, create a report on something in nature you see frequently: clouds, moon, sunset, cardinals, soil, acorns–anything. Then, turn this report into a piece of writing, visual art, or performance art. Consider the patterns you identify in your report and what these shapes reveal.

4. Take a walk around the campus arboretum. Choose one plant and spend time researching it (they are labeled to help you!) Research its common names, scientific name, taxonomy, habitat, uses, and symbolic connection–really dig in! For example, did you know the arboretum has a strawberry bush, which is also called “hearts-a-bustin’?”

   Connect your research from the campus arboretum to something larger: yourself, a friend, a relationship, a feeling, this state, the country, an issue important to you, etc. What might be revealed by connecting something small and specific with something more global? You might find inspiration in the Centenary College Arboretum Blog.

5. As Edward Hirsch points out, “Our concepts of nature are relative, historically determined.” Therefore, art about nature is “affected by ideology, by literary conventions as well as social and cultural ideas” (A Poet’s Glossary).

   Using this knowledge, create a piece of art that combines the natural world with the historical, political, or environmental. Work hard to connect the concern you have chosen and the specific history, appearance, and symbols of the nature you focus on.

   You might find inspiration from a tradition called “ecopoetry,” which “takes a more critical lens towards humanity’s relationship with the planet. Rather than rely upon grand scenes of nature unfolding for the observer, ecopoetry strips away the illusion of our observer status. We are nature, entangled in its movements” (Book Riot). How might you create to reveal this entanglement?