The Arts: Inspiring Minds, Enriching Lives

Not limiting my range of modest talent to music alone, I was honored to join the principal actors of the Davidson Theatre Department’s production of Julius Caesar, directed by Professor James Webb. Specifically, as part of Wildcat Weekend, I hosted a public conversation with parents and family members on the exciting things happening on campus. Because we were in the Duke Family Performance Hall, I was standing onstage, on the set of the Shakespearean tragedy. When I mentioned Julius Caesar, the student actors appeared — in costume, in character. As directed, I began to recite Marc Antony’s soliloquy (“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” etc.). The student actors, bewildered and unimpressed, walked offstage as one of them proclaimed, “So let it be with Caesar!”

It is a thrill to witness the talents of our students across music, theatre, the visual arts, dance and creative writing. It is inspiring to walk across campus and encounter the outdoor sculptures, not to mention the powerful bronze by Rodin in the atrium of the Belk Visual Arts Center. The arts are more present than they have ever been within Davidson’s liberal arts education.

As I walk past the Cunningham Building every day, I remember warmly a favorite routine I followed as a student at Davidson. In the evenings, I would stop by the auditorium that used to be in the center of Cunningham. On stage there was a massive Bösendorfer concert grand piano. I’d relax by listening to my classmates, including my roommate, Robert Austell ’90, bring that piano to life. Whether it’s in the Sloan Music Building or the Duke Family Performance Hall, I am still moved to hear students and faculty share their prodigious talent.

For decades, English and theatre majors encouraged their classmates to take a course from Professor Cynthia Lewis. I wanted to take her Shakespeare course (had I done so, perhaps I could have done better with the soliloquy), but that was a high-demand course and I was a lowly sophomore. So, I enrolled in “English Drama to 1700,” informally known as “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries.” This was intimidating since, prior to taking the course, I was unable to name any such literary contemporaries (I can now!). Cynthia had us reading, discussing and acting in class. It was an intellectually tough and exhilarating course.

Another arts experience at Davidson influenced me profoundly. I enrolled in the course, “The Art of the Prado,” which, as is fitting, was taught onsite in the Prado Museum during my Davidson semester in Madrid with the late, great Professor Sandy Kemp. To learn the trajectory of Spanish art from El Greco, through Velázquez, to Murillo and Goya, and then on to Picasso, Miró, and Dalí was a genuine gift.

Two decades later, I stood at the front of a college classroom, teaching an ethics class. I have never feigned expertise in the arts, and yet my Davidson education fueled my passion and enabled me to integrate artworks into my teaching. I displayed Picasso’s magnum opus Guernica on the screen, and we discussed its political and social context, its expression of the despair of war and the glimmer of hope for peace. I told the class, “When we stand before the Guernica as a class in a few weeks in Madrid, I want you to notice its massive scale and its use of multiple religious and political themes taken from earlier Spanish artworks.” Nothing about that sentence would have been possible without my education in the arts at Davidson College. Experiential arts opportunities like this abound for current Davidson students.

I’m willing to bet that most of you readers who are alums can narrate your own stories of how the arts have shaped you. We at Davidson are striving like never before to ensure that the arts come to life for current and future students. Our graduates need that, and the world needs graduates who have developed humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds.