For a more perfect definition of eclectic, you don’t have to look far with artist educator Steve Prince, the Director of Engagement at William and Mary’s Muscarelle Museum. It may be difficult to see what Egypt, Malcolm X the movie, fried turkey, and Mardi Gras have in common, but Prince brings enthusiasm for a wide variety of experiences to his life’s work as an artist, colored by his deep belief that creating art is a crucial pathway to healing and communication. A New Orleans native, Prince came to Williamsburg in 2022 as the college’s Distinguished Artist in Residence and continues in that role as well.
His childhood in New Orleans raises memories of sweltering heat and mosquitoes along with the rhythm of jazz in dancing relatives and unique colloquial expressions and patterns. The bedrock belief in community and faith, integral to his family, followed him to Xavier University as an undergrad where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts, and on to Delaware for graduate work. “Although I dreamed as an altar boy of becoming a priest, I chose to have a family. I have since become a lay minister and in 2006 I preached my first Visual Sermon at St. Stephen's United Methodist Church in Burke, Virginia.” For Prince, art and faith are one.
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Prince spent part of his summer teaching art skills to Native American youth, one of several multi-day workshops in between his planning for regional and national presentations and exhibits of his work. His approach to teaching conveys a recognition of the creative fire in children. “It’s important to create a safe place for them to be expressive and explorative. Whereas with adults, I try to engage them intellectually and get them to see the myriad connections of art to everything around them.” In workshops he has designed and led around the world, Prince believes “the creative process enables the student to find a healthy pathway to express elements that may be negative, damaging, and painful, buried deep within. It is cathartic when we create in a collective setting.” Moving from verbal to visual is part of the healing capacity of art, a tenet centered in Prince’s teaching and mentoring.
Steve Prince
Creating book illustrations is another facet of Prince’s career. “It is critical for me to read the text and allow it to inspire my creative expression. I attempt to create a meta-narrative that embraces what the author is expressing while at the same time I attempt to interpret the text and offer a response to what I am reading.” His background as a Black man growing up in the deep South flavors his interpretation of the world as does his education in Catholic schools and his family’s commitment to a life grounded in faith and love of community, reflected in his compositions with Biblical images and references to gospel scenes. “I straddle the fence between commercial work and fine art because I work thematically, and my art is fixated on communicating about this human experience and finding pathways to peace and understanding.”
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Beginning July 25, his work is featured at Tappahannock Artists Guild ‘TAG’ in an artist author collaboration gallery show entitled ‘Paint Me A Story.’ The two month show displays Prince’s striking black and white block print illustrations for WHY DO THE HEATHEN RAGE?, Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished and unpublished novel, accompanied by the literary analysis of Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. Additional original pieces by Prince and the illustrated books will be available for sale. The show includes five other collaboration teams and runs until September 21, finishing with the September 27 5-hour workshop on linocut block printing led by Prince. Limited to 20 students, each will design and create a linocut block to print that day and take home for future printing. The community art center’s website links enrollment and details for visiting the 400 Prince Street gallery near the Rappahannock River.
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Another recent project included an art installation with his wife, Leah Glenn Prince, a dance professor at William and Mary. As an experienced dancer and choreographer, she created choreography to accompany ‘Kitchen Table Talk,’ Prince’s art pieces centered on three sacred spaces in the home: the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. The dance portion utilized kinesthetic empathy to express the myriad ways we communicate, reflecting the artwork’s call for ‘deconstruction of the walls of separation.’
Even as Prince examines human interactions, positive and negative in history and society, he works to illuminate pathways to understanding. “I look at the world through a poetic lens, searching for beauty.”
