Since its inauguration in 2001, the Overseas Ministries Study Center artist in residence program has hosted outstanding Asian Christian artists: Sawai Chinnawong; Marit Kartveit; Hae Sook Chung; Jae-Im Kim; Nyoman Darsane; He Qi; Emmanuel Garibay; Wisnu Sasongko; Huibing He; Hanna Varghese; Nalini Jayasuriya; and Soichi Watanabe.
With initial assistance from the Foundation for Theological Education in Asia, this unique program has been further supported by a special fund honoring the memory and sustaining the artistic vision of the late Paul T. Lauby (1925-2003). Dr. Lauby, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, taught at Silliman University in the Philippines from 1953 to 1968, and then served in New York City as president of the United Board for Higher Education in Asia from 1969 until his retirement in 1989. His interest in Asian Christian art and artists was well known, and he did much to encourage the development of emerging artists.
This program has enriched the local Christian and art communities in New Haven as well as the international sacred art milieu, including the Summer 2007 exhibition "The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today," held at MOBIA (Museum of Biblical Art) in New York City, which featured four former artists in residence.
Re-imagining Theologies: Asian/American Artists and Faith is currently at the Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center and features work by Asian and Asian-American Christian artists: David Chang, Sawai Chinnawong, Deborah Fung, Emmanuel Garibay, Huibing He, Nalini Jarasuriya, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Carrie Myers, Wisnu Sasongko, and Hanna Varghese. Their art offers multiple perspectives on Christian faith across cultures, and implicitly addresses outdated assumptions that “most good ideas, including Christian ones, flow outward from the West.”
The Asian artists featured here from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, are “part of the great reversal now taking place, joyfully bringing the Good News back to societies now jaded by outworn theologies and wearied by irrelevant, conformist 'churchianity.” Together with their Asian-American colleagues with roots in China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, these artists re-imagine what poet Karen An-Hwei Lee calls “theophanies. . . or God visible in our world.”
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Karen An-Hwei Lee - On Hierophany.
Showing posts with label mobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mobia. Show all posts
Friday, 8 May 2015
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Beasts of Revelation
Beasts of Revelation was a recent exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery in New York. The press release for the exhibition seems in line with the premise of my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series when it states:
"What aggravates us now? Religion, a taboo subject in the art world, is a strong candidate. As
our elders might say, "Let's not talk about it.” But this exhibition, Beasts of Revelation,
does just that ...
Even for secular audiences, religious images are everywhere, filling museums and saturating
popular culture. Centuries of representations are embedded in our psyches. So it is no
surprise that virtually every major artist has been tempted, at some point, to engage with
this giant visual inheritance ...
The focus of this exhibition is twenty-first century American (ir)religiosity with expressions
that are alternately ambiguous, questioning, transgressive, and open-ended ... In dozens of different voices, images like these testify to Christianity's insidious aquifer of metaphorical power."
The New York Times concurred saying: "Religious imagination animates a lot of art being made these days but is rarely a topic of serious critical discussion." Similarly for the MoBIA blogger, the show "emphasized just how ingrained the word [Christ] is in our cultural psyche" - the "Western world is brimming with it [the Bible]" - even alterations to it, as with Dana Frankfort's “TSIRHC” placed on a stark white wall, cannot disguise it.
For the New York Press and Art Review, however, the issue with the exhibition was simply that the art included didn't do what the press release promised i.e. it didn't aggravate or provoke:
"Here, promotional blather about religion diverts attention from the crucial question: Is the art any good?
Some of it is, much is not. Even so, Rosary Society matrons will have a hard time finding offence. This is an unexceptional summertime porridge of appropriations and approximations of traditional iconography. Several pieces achieve a seriousness that is no less real for being unintended. The only insidious item on show is the press release."
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Bill Fay - Time Of The Last Persecution.
"What aggravates us now? Religion, a taboo subject in the art world, is a strong candidate. As
our elders might say, "Let's not talk about it.” But this exhibition, Beasts of Revelation,
does just that ...
Even for secular audiences, religious images are everywhere, filling museums and saturating
popular culture. Centuries of representations are embedded in our psyches. So it is no
surprise that virtually every major artist has been tempted, at some point, to engage with
this giant visual inheritance ...
The focus of this exhibition is twenty-first century American (ir)religiosity with expressions
that are alternately ambiguous, questioning, transgressive, and open-ended ... In dozens of different voices, images like these testify to Christianity's insidious aquifer of metaphorical power."
The New York Times concurred saying: "Religious imagination animates a lot of art being made these days but is rarely a topic of serious critical discussion." Similarly for the MoBIA blogger, the show "emphasized just how ingrained the word [Christ] is in our cultural psyche" - the "Western world is brimming with it [the Bible]" - even alterations to it, as with Dana Frankfort's “TSIRHC” placed on a stark white wall, cannot disguise it.
For the New York Press and Art Review, however, the issue with the exhibition was simply that the art included didn't do what the press release promised i.e. it didn't aggravate or provoke:
"Here, promotional blather about religion diverts attention from the crucial question: Is the art any good?
Some of it is, much is not. Even so, Rosary Society matrons will have a hard time finding offence. This is an unexceptional summertime porridge of appropriations and approximations of traditional iconography. Several pieces achieve a seriousness that is no less real for being unintended. The only insidious item on show is the press release."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Fay - Time Of The Last Persecution.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Is the Art world anti-Christian?
Tyler Green's interesting and perceptive 'Art and Life' piece in the April edition of Modern Painters asked the question 'Is the Art World anti-Christian?' By doing so, Green followed the current trend in mainstream Art magazines to discuss the relationship between Art and Christianity without then taking the next step and giving significant examples of active modern or contemporary engagement between Christianity and the visual arts (see my post on the Art and Religion edition of frieze). Green ultimately presents only part of the story while arriving at the accurate conclusion that, while certainly not being anti-Christian, the art world seems ambivalent, conflicted or indifferent to Christian engagement with contemporary art:
"Given that the American people are conflicted about religion, it shouldn’t be a surprise that our artists and art institutions are too. As I worked on this column, I searched and searched for scholarly museum exhibitions that chronicle how today’s artists examine religion. I couldn’t find a single one. The only curator or critic I could find who has addressed religion in contemporary art in depth is James Elkins, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins’s 2004 book "On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art" didn’t exactly kick off a flurry of discourse. Take that as another indicator of the art world’s indifference toward religion."
Green's article focussed particularly on the way in which museums display their collections of Christian art making some astute observations along the way. The changing approaches to this issue that Scott Schafer speaks about in the article are not only a current phenomenon. For example, the latest edition of 'Art and Christianity' includes a review of A Place for Meaning: Art, Faith and Museum Culture which "reads like a thoughtful how-to: how to display, explain and make relevant religious art to a wide museum constituency." The book's reviewer Ena Heller writes of having had to address the same issues of how to educate a secular or multi-faith public without alienating the community of the faithful when she was, in the early 2000s, "struggling to articulate a vision and a realistic strategy" for the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. Heller wrote in 2004’s Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue that recent years had witnessed an increased dialogue, through both exhibitions and publications, and that "museums are ideally positioned to advance this dialogue, as they bridge the worlds of religion, art, and scholarship." Such work, however, is generally under-reported.
As we have noted Green writes of being unable to find scholarly museum exhibitions that chronicle how today’s artists examine religion and of James Elkins being the only curator or critic who has addressed religion in contemporary art in depth. Again, he is right in terms of what features on the radar of the mainstream art world but again there is much that is significant which goes under-reported. Periodic exhibitions chronicling how contemporary artists have examined religion have been held such as Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination (Australia), Perceptions of the Spirit in 20th-Century American Art and The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (US), Prophecy and Vision (UK), and Traces du Sacré (France). While such exhibitions have been few and far between they indicate that there is a largely untold story of Christian engagement with the development of Modern Art which includes:
Following on from Green's article, could Modern Painters break the mould by featuring or surveying the kind of work noted above, demonstrating that there is actually more to the art world's engagement with Christianity than ambivalence, conflict or indifference?
"Given that the American people are conflicted about religion, it shouldn’t be a surprise that our artists and art institutions are too. As I worked on this column, I searched and searched for scholarly museum exhibitions that chronicle how today’s artists examine religion. I couldn’t find a single one. The only curator or critic I could find who has addressed religion in contemporary art in depth is James Elkins, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins’s 2004 book "On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art" didn’t exactly kick off a flurry of discourse. Take that as another indicator of the art world’s indifference toward religion."
Green's article focussed particularly on the way in which museums display their collections of Christian art making some astute observations along the way. The changing approaches to this issue that Scott Schafer speaks about in the article are not only a current phenomenon. For example, the latest edition of 'Art and Christianity' includes a review of A Place for Meaning: Art, Faith and Museum Culture which "reads like a thoughtful how-to: how to display, explain and make relevant religious art to a wide museum constituency." The book's reviewer Ena Heller writes of having had to address the same issues of how to educate a secular or multi-faith public without alienating the community of the faithful when she was, in the early 2000s, "struggling to articulate a vision and a realistic strategy" for the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. Heller wrote in 2004’s Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue that recent years had witnessed an increased dialogue, through both exhibitions and publications, and that "museums are ideally positioned to advance this dialogue, as they bridge the worlds of religion, art, and scholarship." Such work, however, is generally under-reported.
As we have noted Green writes of being unable to find scholarly museum exhibitions that chronicle how today’s artists examine religion and of James Elkins being the only curator or critic who has addressed religion in contemporary art in depth. Again, he is right in terms of what features on the radar of the mainstream art world but again there is much that is significant which goes under-reported. Periodic exhibitions chronicling how contemporary artists have examined religion have been held such as Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination (Australia), Perceptions of the Spirit in 20th-Century American Art and The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (US), Prophecy and Vision (UK), and Traces du Sacré (France). While such exhibitions have been few and far between they indicate that there is a largely untold story of Christian engagement with the development of Modern Art which includes:
- the work of Adams, Aitchison, Barlach, Bazaine, Bernard, Boyd, Camilleri, Chircop, Cingria, Cocteau, Collins, Congdon, Denis, Desvallieres, Dottori, Feibusch, Filla, Finster, French, Gill, Gleizes, Herbert, Hone, Jellett, Jones, Kalleya, Kurelek, Manessier, Mehoffer, Minne, Morgan, Nesterov, Nolde, Piper, Previati, Rohlfs, Rouault, Serusier, Servaes, Severini, Smith, Spencer, Souza, Sutherland, Toorop, van de Woestyne, Van Rees, Verkade, Vrubel, among others;
- the writings of Christian philosophers and theologians who engaged specifically with the visual arts such as Hans Urs Von Balthazar, Jane and John Dillenberger, Jacques Maritain, Hans Rookmaaker, Calvin Seervald, Mark Taylor, Paul Tillich, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, among others;
- the commissioning of contemporary artists to create work for churches that was initiated in France by Couturier and Regamy (Assy, Ronchamp, Vence), in Britain by Bell and Hussey (St Matthews Northampton and Chichester Cathedral) and by Bogucki during the Sacrum period in Poland; and
- the building of modern churches - see, for example, Contemporary Church Architecture by Heathcote and Moffatt or Architectural Guide to Christian Sacred Buildings in Europe Since 1950: From Aalto to Zumthor by Stock.
- the work of artists such as: Breninger, Cazalet, Fujimura, Hawkinson, Howson, Kenton Webb, Nowosielski, Rollins and KOS, Spackman and Westerfrölke;
- exhibitions organised by the Wallspace Gallery which over its four year lifespan essentially surveyed the diversity of contemporary religious engagement with the arts including shows with Chapman Brothers, Douglas Camp, Hirst, Pacheco, Taylor-Wood, iconographers, visionary artists, and contemporary artists commissioned by churches;
- exhibitions/events such as: Crucible, a review of British sculpture held at Gloucester Cathedral; Enrique Martínez Celaya's recent The Crossing project at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine; and the King James Bible Bash in the recent London Word festival; and
- a continuing stream of church commissions for contemporary artists including Cox, Emin, Gormley, Houshiary and Plensa, among others.
Following on from Green's article, could Modern Painters break the mould by featuring or surveying the kind of work noted above, demonstrating that there is actually more to the art world's engagement with Christianity than ambivalence, conflict or indifference?
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The Innocence Mission - You Chase the Light.
Friday, 19 November 2010
Why Have There Been No Great Modern Religious Artists?
Stoneworks has information about a symposium entitled Why Have There Been No Great Modern Religious Artists? organised by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York next February which would seem to be discussing issues that are central to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts.
The Symposium summary states: "Mirroring the complex presence of religion throughout the 20th century, there has been a proliferation of religious expression in the visual arts. Many of the most prominent and celebrated artists of this century have employed Christian themes, iconography, and forms in their work. However, many of these artists and their works have been ignored, dismissed as aberrant, or condemned as an improper union of incompatible traditional and avant-garde values. The diverse and contradictory manifestations of religious expression in the art of this period, from private devotion to liturgical practice to critical commentary to creative expression pose methodological problems for narratives of modernist and post-modernist art history that have tended to omit serious consideration of Christian strains in 20th century and current artistic practice."
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Martyn Joseph - All This Time.
The Symposium summary states: "Mirroring the complex presence of religion throughout the 20th century, there has been a proliferation of religious expression in the visual arts. Many of the most prominent and celebrated artists of this century have employed Christian themes, iconography, and forms in their work. However, many of these artists and their works have been ignored, dismissed as aberrant, or condemned as an improper union of incompatible traditional and avant-garde values. The diverse and contradictory manifestations of religious expression in the art of this period, from private devotion to liturgical practice to critical commentary to creative expression pose methodological problems for narratives of modernist and post-modernist art history that have tended to omit serious consideration of Christian strains in 20th century and current artistic practice."
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Martyn Joseph - All This Time.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling
The Museum of Biblical Art (MoBiA) currently has an exhibition exploring Marc Chagall's use of biblical narratives in his art. Entitled Chagall's Bible: Mystical Storytelling the exhibition runs from October 7, 2008 - January 18, 2009:
"No other modernist painter melded the traditions of Jewish Hasidism, eastern Orthodoxy, and western catholic tradition into such dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives. From his White Russian youth in Vitebsk to his professional life as a painter in Paris, Chagall recorded in his graphic works and paintings symbolic elements derived from each of these religious traditions. The intersection of Hasidic and Christian iconographies in Chagall's representations of biblical heroes, prophets, or scenes of the Crucifixion yields an intriguing dynamic tension, which has never been adequately addressed in a major museum exhibition. This exhibition will identify salient details in Chagall's oeuvre that demonstrate the intersection of his fascination with Jewish and Christian traditions, as well as, the interaction between his cultural roots in Russia and his fondness for France."
The exhibition booklet, written by art historian Tom Freudenheim, is a musing on the theme of transgression in Chagall's work and specifically in his use of Russian, Jewish, and Christian symbols. The illustrated text explores Chagall's unique iconography and continuing influence today. This is MOBIA's second volume in its new "Art and the Bible" series of exhibition brochures. Volumes in this series will continue to expound upon themes in art inspired by the Bible and will be produced for future MOBIA exhibitions.
A new and well-reviewed biography of Chagall has also recently been published:
"In it, Jackie Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall's complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, "under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting," and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall's work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life; ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth."
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Deacon Blue - I'll Never Fall In Love Again.
"No other modernist painter melded the traditions of Jewish Hasidism, eastern Orthodoxy, and western catholic tradition into such dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives. From his White Russian youth in Vitebsk to his professional life as a painter in Paris, Chagall recorded in his graphic works and paintings symbolic elements derived from each of these religious traditions. The intersection of Hasidic and Christian iconographies in Chagall's representations of biblical heroes, prophets, or scenes of the Crucifixion yields an intriguing dynamic tension, which has never been adequately addressed in a major museum exhibition. This exhibition will identify salient details in Chagall's oeuvre that demonstrate the intersection of his fascination with Jewish and Christian traditions, as well as, the interaction between his cultural roots in Russia and his fondness for France."
The exhibition booklet, written by art historian Tom Freudenheim, is a musing on the theme of transgression in Chagall's work and specifically in his use of Russian, Jewish, and Christian symbols. The illustrated text explores Chagall's unique iconography and continuing influence today. This is MOBIA's second volume in its new "Art and the Bible" series of exhibition brochures. Volumes in this series will continue to expound upon themes in art inspired by the Bible and will be produced for future MOBIA exhibitions.
A new and well-reviewed biography of Chagall has also recently been published:
"In it, Jackie Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall's complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, "under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting," and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall's work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life; ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth."
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Deacon Blue - I'll Never Fall In Love Again.
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