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Marshall Harris: Arts and Athletics in France

Marshall Harris, a football player-turned-artist, flew to France for a three-month residency. His travel companion and journalist wife June Naylor shares the story.

By TCU Magazine

May 17^th, 2022

by June Naylor

Residing in an unfashionable neighborhood just outside Paris was the last thing my husband and I expected to miss after a three-month residency in France.

But Saint-Denis had grown on us — watching the planes make their approach to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport a few minutes east of our flat; hearing the tram’s bells through our open window; saying hello to the Turkish owners of the grocery where we bought fresh ingredients.

From our home in a suburb that many Parisians regard with disdain, we discovered a life we treasured — and one that left us changed.

The invitation to spend last fall there landed in my husband’s lap two years ago. A former TCU football MVP and NFL player, full-time studio artist Marshall Harris ’79 was exactly who the French American Creative Exchange wanted for its 2021 artist residency-mentorship program. Our understanding of why would grow as we got to know the organization and its work.

Marshall Harris, center, helped coach the Flash, an organization that plays American-rules football in France. Courtesy of F.A.C.E., France, Mentor Project I

The French Connection

Before the 2020 lockdown, Marshall met fellow Texas artist Jovelyn Roden at a gallery event in Fort Worth. Taken with Marshall’s work and his story of transitioning from athlete to artist, Roden introduced him to Monte Laster, her neighbor in Santo, Texas, and her colleague in a nonprofit with homes in France and Texas that sponsored the cross-country exchange. The organization endeavors to bring creatives and artistic projects to underserved communities in both places.

Over a period of months, the three artists continued having conversations. Marshall became fascinated with Laster’s story of working as an artist near Paris, where he has spent most of his time for 40 years.

Marshall’s football career, Laster said, made him the ideal artist for the nonprofit’s three-month residency. One of the exchange’s newer and more enthusiastic supporters is a football organization called the Flash, one of hundreds of programs playing NFL-rules football in Europe.

While the connection between a football club and a nonprofit art entity didn’t compute, Marshall and I, as a pair of self-employed creatives, understand making leaps of faith. We realized Marshall wouldn’t only be creating one of his larger-than-life drawings, but we weren’t sure what he’d be making.

“Taking on a completely new process — especially when you’re someone like me who maps out an entire artwork before starting — was both exciting and scary,” he said. “But often the lessons you need to learn most are the most uncomfortable to face.”

Laster directed us to read all we could on the concept of art as a social practice — a medium that promotes social exchange through creativity.

Marshall ate up this foreign concept more focused on process than product. His signature pieces, often life-size pencil drawings of vintage saddles or cloudscapes or human anatomy, tell stories of history, nature, pain or joy.

Between taking in city views, visiting museums and sampling the world-famous cuisine, Marshall Harris and June Naylor thrived as temporary residents of France. Courtesy of Marshall Harris

The more we learned about the nonprofit and its history of supporting education and mindful civic revitalization in disenfranchised suburbs of Paris, the more excited Marshall became.

The project would involve Marshall’s mentoring of junior high students in art and address the theme of resilience, a concept everyone has had to embrace in the age of Covid-19.

Marshall Harris: Arts and Athletics in France

In the Neuf Trois

Settling into the city, we got our bearings by shopping at the massive fresh food market that was a 10-minute walk from our modern flat and exploring the magnificent basilica, dating from 1135, whose steeple and rooftop we admired from our huge sixth-floor windows.

We spent our first days with Dee Curtis, project manager for the exchange in France. She acquainted us with the district of Seine-Saint-Denis, which locals call the 93, or Neuf Trois, a reference to the postal code. The area encompasses 40 townships and municipalities — including Saint-Denis, our temporary home; La Courneuve, home base for the nonprofit in France and the Flash football organization; and Aubervilliers, the town where the junior high students involved in the resilience project live and go to school.

Friends in Paris were astonished that we’d landed in Saint-Denis. A longtime home to industrial plants and low-income immigrants, the city was labeled a dangerous ghetto after riots in 2005 and a 2015 suicide bombing at the enormous soccer stadium near our flat.

But Saint-Denis’ image is changing, thanks to the local government’s focus on boosting its cultural appeal — and the national government’s desire to make it a proper headquarters for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Introductory meetings took place with teachers at College Miriam Makeba, the junior high where Marshall would work with students, and with the general manager and coaches at the Flash, who also are involved with the resilience project.

Marshall Harris reflects on art as a social practice in a studio in Le Moulin Fayvon, a historic building in La Courneuve outside Paris that was saved from demolition in the mid-1990s by fellow artist Monte Laster. Photo by Monte Laster, F.A.C.E., Mentor

The students, mostly 11 to 13 years old, were fascinated by this American giant (he’s 6-foot-7) who makes a living as a visual artist and played in the NFL.

Twice a week we rode a bus to the school, where Marshall, using elaborate video presentations, introduced new subjects to two classrooms packed with multicultural and multilingual kids.

His presentations ranged from the basics of American football to the grid method he employs when creating his signature graphite drawings to the communications that transcend common language, such as sign language and cave paintings, both with deep roots in France.

He also talked about resilience — the same word in English and French — and its essential value in everyone’s lives, especially today.

Students got excited about trying something new, like the grid drawings, and they put thought into writing about the resilience they’ve seen in their families and their communities. We were eager to see what they’d bring to class and pinned every piece on a big wall so they could see what their peers were producing.

Near the semester’s end, Marshall assigned the creation of a giant mural spelling resilience.

Dividing the students into small groups to create a panel with one of the 10 letters, he required that they use the grid drawing method and also show interpretations, in art or writing, as embellishment on their panels.

Marshall Harris' students create a mural spelling out the word resilience. Courtesy of Marshall Harris

One student, gunning for the MVP award that Marshall promised, took time over a weekend to draw a portrait of Marshall based on a college photo found online. The student also translated several lines of Maya Angelou poetry.

The students spent time on the school’s playground with Guillaume Buquet, coach and former player for the Flash, learning American-rules flag football. They enjoyed watching Monsieur Marshall — more than 30 years past his playing days — in the thick of it with them.

The residency also provided time and space for creative work. On days that Marshall wasn’t scheduled to mentor students, we took a 30-minute tram ride to a century-old mill building that houses the nonprofit exchange and the French residency program.

The second story holds a studio, complete with a view of the mill’s rustic vegetable and herb garden. There, Marshall created a massive drawing of the Arc de Triomphe and prepared a botanical drawing series from photos snapped both in the 93 and on a weekend trip to Champagne.

At the large table downstairs, we joined Laster and Curtis for simple, seasonal lunches of fresh-from-the-market goods and Sancerre wines that Laster brought back from his travels. We learned the art of bringing together unconnected ideas while breaking bread with creative spirits from other parts of the world.

During his residency in France, Marshall Harris created a drawing of the Arc de Triomphe using colored pencils on black paper. He employed the grid drawing process he taught to students there. Courtesy of Marshall Harris

Grid Art to Gridiron

Marshall’s role on the French football field would be just as gratifying as his work in the school.

He walked away from the gridiron in 1985 after seven years in the pros as a defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, New England Patriots and New Jersey Generals.

The college years were tough — the Frogs rarely won in the late 1970s. He was just as surprised that he won MVP his senior year as he was about being inducted into the TCU Lettermen’s Hall of Fame in 2013 because a losing football experience is grim.

After a career in graphic design, he found fulfillment in his 50s as a studio artist — and football became a memory.

His perspective rebounded on the sunny September afternoon we met Bruno Lacam-Caron, general manager of the Flash, at the practice facility in La Courneuve.

Walking onto the field for the first time, Marshall knelt down to feel the grass. Wonder washed over his face as he looked up at Laster, Curtis and me. “I think I might get a little weepy,” he said.

Later, he told me that he always gets nostalgic when he walks onto a field: “It’s such a visceral memory.”

Over a big lunch spread with Lacam-Caron and other staffers, Marshall fell into easy conversation about the game. He noted how the football club operates differently from teams in the U.S.

First, the Flash is a not-for-profit organization. It holds American-rules football programs for kids, teens and adults — both male and female. The Flash’s top-level men’s team plays in a league of a dozen teams, drawing thousands of fans to games. Several coaches are volunteers, and many are part-time employees. The players aren’t paid much, and most have full-time jobs.

“Because there aren’t team sports at most public schools in the Paris area, the Flash is special in that it provides those valuable soft skills, such as commitment to team above self, cooperation and camaraderie, and, of course, resilience. It gives meaning to so many,” Marshall said. “The organization is the polar opposite of the profit-driven NFL. Here, the Flash is all about social outreach and community service.”

Though he retired from the NFL in 1985, he said returning to a football field can be an emotional experience. “It’s such a visceral memory.” Courtesy of Marshall Harris

Lacam-Caron asked Marshall to help coach the defensive line for players ages 16 to 19. He was paired with a new coach, Olivier Pinard, who speaks no English. Through hand gestures, translation apps and bilingual players, the two worked well together.

Marshall marveled at kids who traveled as much as 90 minutes each way, after school or work, to endure tough practices a few nights a week. After one particularly hard practice, the head coach doubled over laughing after a player told him, “That American coach almost killed us.”

A night later, Marshall received a personal message from that player via Instagram, and I saw him get teary-eyed. Willyam Tang, one of the big, hardworking linemen, wrote, “Thank you for all you’re doing to coach us. I will be a better player because of you.”

We fell hard for the City of Light, stealing the odd moment away from Marshall’s project to explore the Louvre, revel in the d’Orsay and marvel at the Pompidou. We discovered pure joy in the food and drink available on every corner of Montmartre, the Marais, Saint-Germain and more.

But it was residing and working in the 93 — a no-go zone not too long ago — that filled us both with a sense of purpose.

“The Neuf Trois was that unfamiliar territory that forced us to become flexible, to open ourselves to what we found was such a gracious, openly helpful community,” Marshall said. “To experience another culture, to feel like you’re part of that fabric, even briefly, is powerful and connecting.”

Laster’s promise came true: The social practice, in fact, is the art.

As part of his cultural exchange fellowship, Marshall Harris taught French teenagers the finer points of American-rules football. Courtesy of F.A.C.E. France, Mentor Project I

Footnotes

Editor’s note: June Naylor ’79 is an author and journalist. She traveled with her husband, Marshall Harris, on a fall 2021 residency in France.

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FootNotes

Editor’s note: June Naylor ’79 is an author and journalist. She traveled with her husband, Marshall Harris, on a fall 2021 residency in France.