An epic is an extended narrative poem that celebrates episodes of a people's heroic tradition. An epic can also suggest a historical event or movement that is defined by its grandeur, scope, and/or thematic scale. Discuss the definition of the epic with students and identify specific examples. Consider the word as both an adjective and as a noun and incorporate examples such as “The Odyssey” by Homer, the “Aeneid” by Virgil, or “Beowolf.” Ask students to brainstorm a list of epics in other media (film, novels, poems, songs, etc). Ask them why they consider them to be epics, and finally, what makes an epic, an epic?

This activity focuses on two artists who are influenced by grand or epic literary sources and construct vast visual stories of their own. Kara Walker’s historical research and interest in melodramas has inspired larger-than-life silhouettes that re-tell a controversial past while Matthew Ritchie incorporates religious narratives, philosophical treatises, and scientific principles into his multi-layered installations, drawings, and sculptures that attempt to describe the breadth of human knowledge.

In her silhouettes and drawings, the artist Kara Walker has re-imagined the events of the antebellum South in a visual narrative that is based on the historic journals and diaries of slaves as well as “Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell, a novel that tells stories both true and imagined. Walker is also interested in relating the past to the present. Her work is based on the idea that epics are timeless; that the stories they tell can transcend a particular time and place to become relevant to other times and places, most significantly, the present. In her installation work “Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On” at the Guggenheim Museum, Walker incorporated overhead projectors that integrate the viewer’s shadow in the events acted out by her silhouettes. These shadows suggest a connection between these “imagined” events from the past and the viewer. She says, “Overhead projectors are a didactic tool, they’re a schoolroom tool. So they’re about conveying facts. The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts.” Select passages from “Gone with the Wind” and compare it to Walker’s imagery and information from her interview (see link above) and video segment from the Stories hour. Have students identify the epic moments from Walker’s visual narratives and Margaret Mitchell’s narrative.

Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission is no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe: its creation, development, and the structures of knowledge and belief people use to understand and visualize the world that they live in. The artists’ massive project, big in both physical scale as well as conceptual scope, is continually expanding and evolving, much like the universe itself. Ritchie is inspired by diverse sources, from Judeo-Christian religion, Occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and his own imagination. Ritchie describes his practice, “I’ve been working for a long time on this series of linked projects that deal with a group of properties, 49 properties or characteristics. And at times I’ve written about them as stories or as characters. And each of the properties or characteristics represents a sort of function of the universe.” “What I’m interested in is what happens when you heap all of the stories together and say, well what’s that like? And it starts to emerge out of this kind of pattern, this kind of enormous, multi, multi, generational attempt to understand and to go, sort of push it out.” View Ritchie’s segment from the Structures hour and read his interview (see link above). Discuss how specific examples of Ritchie’s work such as “Proposition Player” and “The Lytic Circus” relate to the genre of epic literature and to the narratives that Walker constructs in her work.

Have students create their own epic narrative based on your discussion of these two artists. Ask students to address issues of scale, time and timelessness, and melodrama. To complement the written narrative, create a temporary, room-sized, temporary installation that represents an existing literary epic or a new epic written by the class. To design the installation, consider using colored paper cut-outs or silhouettes, symbolic or representational objects strung or suspended in different ways, and text. As a group, create a design for each wall, floor and ceiling surface that will determine how the narrative will be read. Divide the students into small working groups to undertake specific sections of the room and/or portions of the narrative. Invite other classrooms to groups to visit the installation and offer their own interpretations of the story.