During the 2022 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship, and on the basis of early work conducted throughout my career, especially during the Luce Foundation Pilot Exhibition Program and the first exhibition, Collecting Stories: Native American Art, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from April 2018 through March 2019, I developed the FEELS ART PROMPTS©. 

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The prompts use the acronym, FEELS.  

F for First Impressions;  

E for Examine Details;  

E for Explore Responses;  

L for Learn about Context, focusing on the artist’s emotional context, as much as is possible to know from art historical research;  

S for Share your Feelings.  

 

When I met with, Chair, Tyler VanderWeele and Professor, Matthew Lee, of Harvard's Human Flourishing Program early in the Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship year, they encouraged me to draft my own prompts to use works of art accessible in the Harvard Art Museums promote well-being.  I began with the four paintings we filmed for E & G  Art History pilot. 

 

Although Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program is not engaged with the arts, VanderWeele noted the importance of the arts in his article, “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing,” (2017): “There are of course other pathways, engagement with the arts, for example—that may contribute substantially to a person’s life across various flourishing domains, but for which regular participation is perhaps not as widespread.”  He chooses to focus on four pathways, “Family, Work, Education, Religious Community,” as important and common, and “that if efforts were made to support, improve, and promote participation in these pathways, the consequences for human flourishing would be substantial.”   

 

 

Anna Maria Barros, Manager of Campus Partnerships at the Harvard Art Museums, invited me to test the FEELS ART PROMPTS© with Harvard’s First Year Students in the Fine Arts Program as a self-guided activity in August 2022. I redrafted the FEELS ART PROMTPS© accordingly, and created a survey to accompany them for their first testing session in the Harvard Art Museums. 

 

In addition to the First Year Students in the Fine Arts Program, I am grateful to the students in the Public Narrative Course taught by Professor Marshall Ganz and Teaching Fellow Sapna Saleem, and also to the members of the 2022 Advanced Leadership Initiative Cohort, who offered their responses.  Finally, I am also grateful to students in Professor Louisa Penfold’s Arts-Based Research Course and Teaching Fellow in Harvard’s Project Zero, Julia Wareham for their support in testing the FEELS ART PROMPTS© as a guided activity in the Harvard Art Museums.   

 

For Harvard first year students in the Fine Arts Program (FAP), some results are captured below in a table that was also published in my paper submitted to the Advanced Leadership Initiative Final Symposium Panel on Education and Arts & Culture.