In My Family, Creative Chaos Is A Way of Life

How many times have you heard someone shrug their shoulders and say, “I wish I were more creative.” As if it’s something each of us is either born with or without. Sure, some of us may have a knack for drawing or a keen eye for aesthetic judgment, but studies show that only about a quarter of our creative capabilities, at least when it comes to drawing, can be attributed to genetics. If creativity is more strongly influenced by nurture than nature, it is no wonder that creativity flows through my family like a fountain, oozing into quilts, sweaters, paintings, and stories, with no end to the stream in sight. 

Recent conversations with the many women on my maternal side of the family have revealed that it was the imaginative environments we grew up in—rather than an innate magnetism toward the arts—that inspired each of us to shape our adult lives with creativity at the core. 

As Betty Harris, my maternal grandmother declared, “Everybody comes into the world as a creative person.” In addition to holding a PhD in Art History, Betty is an exquisite quiltmaker, fabulous cook, and devoted matriarch who beautifies her Virginia home with collected art and handmade objects (many created by her daughters)—not for show but to set an example, as her mother did for her, of the healing power in diverse and expressive displays of self. 

Though my great-grandmother was a refined Southern woman who did not consider herself an artist, her love of beauty was apparent in how she wrapped presents, dressed herself for her husband’s return from work each evening, and sewed sequined stockings for the church bazaar, some of which still hang above my grandmother’s fireplace each Christmas 80 years later.

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My great-grandmother also kept a flower room in her basement, always working with a lazy Susan and a mirror to ensure the flower-to-foliage-to-stem ratio was right from every angle. While Betty’s mother’s creative acts may have seemed small, they were significant, encouraging Betty to imagine, and later build, a career that put creative expression first. During a time when many housewives sat in their own discontentment, “afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’” as feminist Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique, Betty became a modern dancer. 

In addition to running the dance division at her local fine arts center, Betty co-founded Dance by Two, an organization that brought modern dance and movement to 25,000 public school children across central Virginia. Performing expressive, unrestrained movements, Betty and her Black dance partner helped children in the segregated South see that the body moves in the ways it wants, outside of the racial borders and boundaries imposed by systemic racism.

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Betty married a criminal lawyer by day who was a magician, comedian, and fine artist by night, and the couple raised three daughters who became artists. My mom remembers fabric swatches overflowing from her mother’s purse (constantly redoing the decor with new textures, fabrics, colors, and trimmings) and sitting down to family dinners with dancers from near and far who “high kicked” across the dining room before dutifully folding their napkins over their laps.

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I imagine the energy in the Harris household as manically creative—a daily race for self-expression in all of its forms. Wild as it was essential, enacted with a lucid certainty that this is the way to live, the only way to live. That frantic, joyful energy still pulses through my mother today, who creates art from her home studio in mediums not limited to collage, ceramics, encaustic wax, monoprinting, jewelry, fiber arts, wearable art, and garment making. 

In an exhibition of my mother's last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, my mother, Frankie Slaughter, described her work as being not about “closure or tidy packages” but “braving unrefined chaos.” A cascading, 15-by-10-foot monochromatic textile titled Pathways to Understanding was the exhibition’s showstopper, which took her two years and multiple assistants to create. Through each handsewn quilt square, she seemed to be capturing, maybe even calming, the energy that had fueled, guided, and defined her identity and spirit.

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My mom’s younger sister, Lyall Harris, is a painter, poet, and renowned book artist whose gorgeously crafted art books defy the boundaries of an already boundary-defying medium, finding homes in Special Collections libraries across the country. My mom’s older sister Elizabeth Logan Harris is an established writer who recently described her life as a winding road—one marked by “things backwards” and “many false starts”—which she’s come to see as “part of my creative path as well.” All three sisters have come to view their own lives as an art form, the blurriness and messiness beginning to feel like a creative process. Life’s incongruous happenings inevitably become reorganized and reinterpreted in the mind with time, until finally the collage, painting, or story—depending on how you see it— begins to take a pleasing form. 

All families are connected to each other, and while I can’t speak to how others experience that bond, I know this: when I read my aunts' reflections on our family’s creative inheritance, they feel like my own. I think what all of this reflection distills down to is the idea that creativity has been a lens of understanding for each of us Harris women—not just into our life’s purpose, but our lineage, ourselves, and each other. 

For my sister Preston Slaughter, that lens into self-discovery looks like crafting a life rooted in presence, purpose, and play. As the founder of a Richmond, Virginia-based non-profit called L.O.C.A.L. Adventures, she brings mindfulness, yoga, and artmaking to inner-city children and teens. “The ultimate act of creation,” she says, “is crafting a life that feels joyful and intentional, through work and play, every single day.” Easier said than done in a society driven by profit margins and productivity. If creativity isn’t about using your imagination—and if imagination isn’t what helps us build the lives we dream of—where would my family, and the world, be today?

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All of this—the kids and quilts, dance and poetry, gardens and garments—adds up to more than a family history, it’s a language, a way of caring, and a map for life. Which is why I feel so at home in my role at Bond & Grace: as Editor and Curator, I’m able to write, create, and revisit the legacies of artists, both young and old, living and deceased, passing on the values my great-grandmother instilled in my grandmother 70 years ago, one carefully arranged bouquet at a time.

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Last year’s Alice in Wonderland Art Novel in many ways felt like creating a miniature portrait of the Harris family. It features an illustration by my grandfather and three original artworks by my cousin, the enormously talented New York Academy of Art MFA candidate Isabella Ronchetti. Using her impeccable technical skill and sharp conceptual brain, she imagined Lewis Carroll’s autobiographical white knight as an empowered woman, proving her belief that the creative act is a “birth,” as she called it, “embodied, procedural, inherently feminine. A vibrant living lineage.”

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In 2021, my mom and her sisters published a catalog called Loose Ends of my grandfather’s whimsical, Edward Lear-inspired line drawings. He loved fishing just as much as he loved drawing, and in an accompanying interview, he described the parallel between fishing in the open seas and pulling something out of the depths of your mind. On both occasions, “you have an almost endless variety of possibilities,” he said. “The wider the water, the wider the mystery.” Since his passing this past December, that mystery feels even more alive, and our family’s creative fortune wider, and more fortuitous than ever. As my aunt Elizabeth wrote just last week after returning to her childhood home:

“I lay there, reflecting for a long while on my great good fortune to be born into this  veritable nest of creative energy, into an open-minded family with the means to educate us in the importance of celebrating artistry, originality, and kindness.”

When given the right nest to flourish in, our imaginations become vast, open oceans. If you can learn to embrace my grandfather’s message—to patiently trust what those waters hold—you, too, can make creative chance, in all its unpredictability, a way of life.