African American Dreams: Visual and Verbal and in Dialogue

Created Jan. 24, 2024 by Bryan Harvey, Janet Copenhaver



African American Dreams


VMFA website
aadreams_JnlCarD.JPGVMFA website

VMFA website


Visit Virginia Museum of Fine Art's African American Dreams Art in Depth page to find eight American artworks from the Colonial period through Interwar period.   Each artwork is shown alongside contextual information and is paired with a text from the same historical period as the artwork.  


Ideas for classroom use:

Students may use in conjunction with the Library of Congress Primary Source Analysis Tool 

The resource may also be useful as a conversation starter or tool for personal reflection. 

Challenge older students to find other examples of art in VMFA's extensive collection of African American Art to explore the African American experience throughout history.  Can they find primary source texts that could effectively be paired with these works? 


Additional writing tasks for creative synthesis:

The ideas that follow here are in addition to the original lesson plan authored by Sarah Rasich are therefore a remix of the original lesson plan (included above) with the goal of promoting acts of synthesis (pairing sources to create new and original content) as part of a creative process as opposed to simply part of a traditional research paper. 

Have students select a painting from the online gallery. Then have students select two characters from a literary work who happen to hold opposing worldviews from a philosophical standpoint, or who happen to possess experiences that provide them with antithetical vantage points. Then have students place these characters in dialogue about the painting selected from the VMFA collections. So, for example, students might create a dialogue where Jim and Huck Finn discuss a particular painting. Or perhaps students might select two characters from A Raisin in the Sun, The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or any other canonical work. Teachers can then opt to assess to what extent the creative dialogue reveals an understanding of the characters or to what extent the dialogue analyzes and accounts for possible interpretations of the painting. 


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