Announcing the Luci Shaw Fellow: Caitlin Cogan
We are pleased to announce Caitlin Cogan as our Shaw Summer Fellow for 2007. Image established the Shaw Fellowship to pay tribute to one of the most luminous poets writing today (and the founding patron of Image journal) and to enable the best and brightest young people to work and learn at Image for a summer without having to pay their own way. Our third fellow, Caitlin is a woman after our own heart—a senior next year at BIOLA, she’s currently spearheading a student literary and visual arts journal that she hopes will reflect “a union between art, philosophy, and faith.” She’s also the founder of the BIOLA Shakespeare Society, which we like to imagine involves spontaneous soliloquies delivered between classes by troupes of actors in doublets. Caitlin will spend the summer in Seattle helping to support all the goings on at Image—from editing the website to helping to run the Glen Workshop. At the end of the summer, she’ll join us in Santa Fe to audit the class of her choice and help the staff serve our attendees. We’re looking forward to welcoming her to the team.

For more on the Shaw Fellowship, click here.

To find out how you can support the Shaw Fellow, the Milton Center Fellow, and scholarships to Image events, click here.

Jumping Out of the Self-Referential Box: May 18-19, 2007
“Jumping Out of the Self-Referential Box: Certainties and Adventures for the Arts in the 21st Century,” an international arts convocation, will be presented on May 18–19, 2007 by the Washington Arts Group at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Artists of all kinds will join with art lovers to explore how ancient foundations of faith and the power of the Holy Spirit influence creativity, art, and life. This convocation, accompanied by an art exhibition and evening concert, will explore how faith is a powerful model for artistic inspiration, one that counters society’s tendency toward self-centered isolation. Participants will leave with a fresh perspective on the creative process and the critical need for truth in beauty. Together we will gain a deeper understanding of the need to engage the culture through the arts. Featured speakers include experts from a variety of artistic disciplines, including: Stratford Caldecott (U.K. Director of the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture), Greg Wolfe (founder and editor of Image journal), Dr. Tom Howard (writer, scholar, and a friend of C.S. Lewis), Tony Jones (National Coordinator of Emergent Village), Eric Metaxas (author of the recent best-seller Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery), Joseph Pearce (professor and author of biographies on such luminaries as C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Oscar Wilde), and Norman Stone (director, producer, and filmmaker on projects for the BBC and the award-winning movie Shadowlands). Breakout sessions will cover such topics as social compassion, architecture, publications, the performing arts, art collecting as a vocation, filmmaking, and literature. The accompanying exhibition will feature two-dimensional and three-dimensional works by artists from around the world. In addition, convocation attendees and the public will join together for An Evening of Brilliance: Past and Present, a concert with choral music, instrumental music, dance, and dramatic reading on Friday evening, May 18. The convocation will conclude on May 19 with a closing musical celebration and art installation.

For more information or to register online, visit: www.washingtonartsgroup.org/conference.shtml. The early registration deadline is April 20, 2007. The final registration deadline is May 12, 2007.

Peter La Grand: Duende
Released last month, Duende is Peter La Grand’s follow-up to his independent debut, Falling Down in Place (ImageUpdate #75). Split between traditional folk and a foot-tapping, southern-influenced rock, many of the songs carry biblical themes addressed through lyrical midrash. The album’s brooding opener, “Judas,” borrows lines from poet James Wright and an apocalyptic mood from the biblical narrative, and gives the listener a twist on a familiar story—a haunting, first-person account from the Passion’s most renowned scapegoat. “Send an Angel” finds a Cain-like narrator yearning for salvation; “Brother of Mine” fashions itself as a retelling of the prodigal son: “Someday this will kill me Lord, if you would be so kind.” The album’s title is taken from Spanish mythology and art. As quoted in the liner notes, Edward Hirsch—discussing the poet, Federico Garcia Lorca—describes the power behind the word: “Duende rises through the body. It burns through the soles of a dancer’s feet, or expands in the torso of a singer. It courses through the lungs and breaks through a poet’s back like a pair of wings.” Yet, while soaring passion is evidenced on La Grand’s sophomore effort, such flight only serves to bring into greater relief the sorrow of the album’s cast of earth-bound characters. Desperate, mostly alone, they wrestle with the reality of brokenness, as in “Evil Intent”: “Heaven ain’t so easy to locate. Hell is always around the bend.” Though it could easily lead to cynicism, each song’s wrestling lends the album a sense of fragile hope. The narrators, in fact, seem more often weary than anything else, as in the album’s final words: “So I lie and watch the stars slowly fade.” Produced by La Grand and engineered by Patrick Tittmar, the album was recorded in La Grand’s hometown of Vancouver, B.C. Musicians include Vaden Cox, Jono Ryan, Kenton Weins, Jonathan Anderson, Kurt Armstrong, and Jeanette McKay. In addition to his own solo work, La Grand, along with Ben Keyes and Jill Zimmerman, also released In the Town of David in December (ImageUpdate #113). La Grand continues to play concerts throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in support of Duende.

For details and updates, visit Peter La Grand online.

The Water Will Hold You by Lindsey Crittenden
Lindsey Crittenden’s new memoir, The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray, is by turns lyric, wise, dark, and cheerfully neurotic. An earnest spiritual seeker who can also laugh at herself, in the tradition of Paula Huston and Anne Lamott, Crittenden is the cautious one in her family, the good daughter and sister, the one who wants to do everything right. When her troubled younger brother dies, leaving behind an unsteady wife and an infant son, the grieving family—Crittenden and her aging parents—step in to take over. Against this backdrop, through the challenges of this new shared burden, and through the friendship that develops with her nephew, she finds herself drawn back to the habit of prayer, something she imprinted on in early life but had struggled with and left behind. She finds herself drawn gradually and sometimes reluctantly into the teachings and community of the Episcopal Church, particularly the English mystic Julian of Norwich. The inevitable charge against this kind of memoir is of self-absorption, but Crittenden is winning enough to get away with it. Her prose is effortless and elegant, her sense of story engaging and true, and the people in her life delightfully drawn—especially her mercurial, tragic brother and her bright young nephew. Best of all is her voice: she attains just enough critical distance from her own good-girl neuroses to invite you to laugh at her and feel with her at the same time as she strains toward that most difficult lesson that competent people have to learn: how to release a measure of control and lean back into God. Chapters have appeared in Image issues 37—that one was also chosen for Best American Spiritual Writing 2004—and 53 (just printing now).

Click here for more.

Wolfe and Image Artists Appear on Passion of the Christ DVD
Whatever you think about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the film has generated a great deal of reflection, both about its own artistic merits and the relationship between film and religious subject matter. Now, over two years after the release of a bare-bones DVD comes the “definitive” two-disc set, complete with mini-documentaries, commentary, galleries of photos and production designs, and more. One of the documentaries draws directly on Image’s network of contemporary Christian artists. “Through the Ages” is a featurette about the history of Christian art—and three of the four people interviewed for it have Image connections. Editor Gregory Wolfe is joined by two artists who have appeared in our print journal over the years: Wayne Forte (our current Artist of the Month) and Alfonse Borysewicz. Against a montage of many classic paintings, the commentators speak about the relationship between visual art and faith, as well as provide brief insights into such artists as Giotto, Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, and El Greco. Image was pleased to act as a consultant to Sparkhill Productions, which made the featurette.

To read Gregory Wolfe’s editorial statement about the film, “Picturing the Passion,” click here.

To order a copy of the DVD, click here.

Reading by Debra Dean
April 5, 7:30 p.m. at Seattle Pacific University
Join Image on April 5, at 7:30 p.m., for a reading by novelist Debra Dean. Dean will read from her first novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, in the Art Center Gallery (3 W. Cremona) at SPU. Told from the perspective of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s who was a docent at Leningrad's Hermitage Museum during WWII, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a spare and eloquent tribute to the beauty and resilience of memory and the devastation of its loss. Isabel Allende describes the book as “elegant and poetic, the rare kind of book that you want to keep but you have to share.” It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Borders Original Voice, and a #1 Booksense Pick, as well as a finalist for the Quill Award and the Guardian First Book Award (UK). An excerpt appears in Image #49. Dean worked as an actor in New York for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. She teaches occasionally at SPU and lives with her husband in Seattle. Co-sponsored by Image Journal and the SPU Department of English, this event is free and open to the public.

For directions to Seattle Pacific University, click here. For a map of Seattle Pacific University's campus, click here.

The House As Fortress
The Gallery at Gordon College’s Barrington Center for the Arts presents its new show, an exhibition of twenty prints by Dan Steeves that subtly explores the contradictions inherent in the notion of the house as a fortress. The House as Fortress: The Dichotomy of Symbolic Structure runs from March 3 - April 13, 2007, and examines how the insulation of home not only protects from outside elements, but may also confine and isolate those inside. The artist’s concern for both the structure and the human history of a place—the relationship, the memories, the meaning—is powerful and engaging. All exhibitions at the Barrington Center for the Arts are open to the public, and admission is free. Gallery hours are Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; the gallery is closed between exhibitions.

For more information, contact Amber Primm, Gallery Assistant, at (978) 927-2300, ext. 4751, or amber.primm@gordon.edu.

Angels of Light
The Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) invites you to a lecture and special preview of its upcoming exhibit, Angels of Light: Ethiopian Art from the Walters Art Museum. By the fifteenth century, Ethiopia had developed a tradition of icon-painting that rivaled the Orthodox empires of Byzantium and Russia, its artists transforming their models with a unique sense of form and color. Angels of Light: Ethiopian Art from the Walters Art Museum features approximately 40 pieces (icons, manuscripts, bronze processional crosses, etc.) from the Walters’ permanent collection—one of the largest and finest collections outside of Ethiopia itself—including recent acquisitions. There will be a preview of the exhibit and a lecture by Dr. Gary Vikan on March 22, 5:30 p.m. The exhibit runs from March 23-May 20, 2007. MOBIA is located at 1865 Broadway at 61st St, NYC.

Visit http://www.mobia.org/ for more information on MOBIA or the exhibit.

If you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an email to gwolfe@spu.edu.

Christians in Theatre Arts Networking Conference and Auditions
Breeze into the Windy City to join us June 13-16, 2007 at Moody Bible Institute for an extraordinary conference focused on excellence and aesthetics. An American cultural capital, Chicago is a city that appreciates beauty, theatre, and art. The 2007 National Networking Conference involves four days of challenging workshops, inspiring presenters, and passionate performers. Attendees will enjoy hearing from remarkable speakers, including Colin Harbinson (Toymaker & Son), Calvin Seerveld (Rainbows for the Fallen World), and Ken Wales (producer of the Christy TV series and Amazing Grace), and spend an afternoon and evening taking in Chicago’s world-famous museums, some of the country’s best live theatre, and the other unequaled attractions of The Second City. Come to network with old friends, meet new ones, and be encouraged, equipped, and filled with a fresh aspiration for excellence as Christians in the Theatre Arts celebrate the aesthetics of our craft. There are discounts for early registration and groups. Registration rates include options for discipline tracks, workshops, plenary performances and the opening gala networking reception.

Register now here. Call 877.277.CITA or email admin@cita.org for more info.

A Variety of Gifts: The Episcopal Church and Visual Arts announces an exhibition at the Trinity Museum, Broadway and Wall Street, New York City. “A Variety of Gifts” will run from April 1 to June 5, 2007. For more information contact: John Moody or Krystyna Sanderson.

Abstract Realities: Robin Haines Merrill: The Upper Room Art Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, presents artist and social justice advocate Robin Haines Merrill’s exhibit, Abstract Realities through April 30.

Register Now for the 2007 Glen Workshop!
"God of the Desert: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the Prism of Art"
July 29 - August 5, 2007

The Glen Workshop is an illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. By exploring this year's theme, "God of the Desert: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the Prism of Art," participants will share a common ground for discussion during the week. This year's faculty includes illustrator Barry Moser, playwright Mark St. Germain, poets Scott Cairns and Daniel Tobin, musicians Linford Detweiler and Karin Berquist of Over the Rhine, fiction writer Moira Crone, calligrapher Timothy Botts, ceramics artist Ginger Geyer, and spiritual writer Ann McCutchan. A seminar class, "Peoples of the Book," will be led by Rodger Kamenetz. Afternoons and evenings at the Glen feature faculty readings, lectures, and presentations. Guest speakers Jamal Rahman, George Dardess, Rodger Kamenetz, and Scott Cairns will explore the relationships among the three Abrahamic traditions and the role art and story play in each during selected evening sessions. Each evening concludes with an ecumenical worship service that incorporates the arts. This year's musician-in-residence, Pierce Pettis, will be giving a concert as well as playing during worship throughout the week. Please note that class sizes are limited: don't wait too long to register!

To register for the Glen Workshop, or to find out more information, click here

A brochure will be printed and mailed in early February. If you are on the Image subscriber list, you'll automatically receive a brochure. If you'd like to have one mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here.