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Artist of the Month Christian Wiman Issue #173 | July 1, 2009 Features
Gallery Watch Message Board ImageNews
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FeaturesArtist of the Month: Christian Wiman
Click here for more. Staff Changes for Image and the SPU MFA
The Other Journal: The Aesthetics Issue
Visit The Other Journal here. Photographing Eden by Jason Gray
Click here to buy the book. Last Minute Openings at the Glen Workshop
Click here to sign up. Gallery Watch Highly Favored: Contemporary Images of the Virgin Mary
Click here to go to the church's website. Catherine Prescott Exhibit: The Quick and the Dead The Arts Center of York proudly presents Catherine Prescott and her newest exhibition, The Quick and the Dead: Portraits and Still Lifes. Prescott has been featured as an Image Artist of the Month and has appeared in multiple issues of the journal. She’s also responsible for the lovely portrait of Greg and Suzanne Wolfe that accompanies their web exclusive interview on our website. As with her portraits, Prescott’s still lifes are uncannily real in a way that is beyond the literal; they look at the heart of her subjects and evoke what’s essential and pure. The Quick and the Dead: Portraits and Still Lifes runs through August 15. The Arts Centre of York is located at 10 N Beaver Street in York, Pennsylvania. For more information, click here. Message Board Studio Art Lessons with Melissa Weinman Image artist Melissa Weinman will now be offering individual and group instruction for adults in her Ruston, WA studio. Weinman has 15 years of full-time college teaching experience and has had solo exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and Tatistcheff Gallery in New York City. She is offering individual studio instruction in solvent-free representational painting, monotype, and drawing for all levels on Saturdays and by appointment. She is also offering an intensive workshop in still life painting on August 1, 2009 and a three week workshop on still life painting / organic and geometric forms during the month of September. Rates range from $50-300 depending on the class. Email Melissa Weinman to register here or call (253) 759-0570. Taproot Theatre Seeks General Manager Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle is searching to fill the position of General Manager. This position reports to the Producing Artistic Director/CEO, and works very closely with our board of directors and marketing and development staff, oversees budgets/finances and our tenants, as well as interacts with patrons, production and artistic staff. The 2009 annual budget is now in the range of $1.7 m, and we serve over 100,000 people a year through the Mainstage, the Road Company and Acting Studio. Taproot is looking for a candidate with strong leadership experience in the not-for-profit arts field who demonstrates solid budgeting and finance skills, is savvy with social media, is a team-player (with staff and the public) and who shares our Christian faith. Contact Scott Nolte or visit the Taproot website for more information.ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs Image Readings: Madeline DeFrees Click here to listen. Up for Auction: Rare Copy of Image #1
Visit the online auction page here to bid. Bidding is now open and will close on the final day of Image's Glen Workshop—at 6:30 pm, Mountain Time, on Saturday, August 1. The 2009 Florence Seminar Subscribe to Image in Print and Get More Art, Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Interviews, and Every Good Thing If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you're ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it's time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work—work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal's content is not available on our website, but only through what we call "the sacrament of print." Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls "evocative and inspiring" and Bret Lott calls "the most meaningful literary journal being produced today." ImageUpdatePublisher: Gregory WolfeManaging Editor: Beth Bevis Layout: Anna Johnson Contributors: Beth Bevis, Anna Johnson, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Julie Mullins, and Gregory Wolfe ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews. ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours—all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website. Copyright © 2009 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved. |
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Christian Wiman is a welcome voice in contemporary poetry. His is a gracious, impassioned intellect, full of both energy and gravity—and here is a broadly read writer who affirms the value of timeless religious questions. Wiman brings the drive and seriousness of his west Texas upbringing to his editorship of the venerable Poetry magazine, using its prominence as a lever to get more people reading good poems. A poet in his own right, Wiman writes vivid, clear-eyed works that are at once colloquial and elegant. As an editor he is committed to finding new voices, and to making the magazine a platform for lively and sometimes controversial discussions, with forums on questions like whether poetry should survive—and whether Garrison Keillor is good for it. In poetry’s ancient territorial battle between elitism and populism, Wiman refuses to let the definitions become oversimplified. He is also a prolific and engaging essayist. Along with the possibilities of poetry, his great subject is doubt. “Honest doubt,” he wrote recently in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, is different from an ironclad commitment to doubt itself. Honest doubt is painful, “but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.” Raised in a conservative Baptist home, when he left for college, his faith “fell away,” as he puts it. But the sense of its absence never left him, and when he was older, it reemerged—and it quietly pervades all of his writing.
The topic of the current issue of 
In Photographing Eden, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize winner Jason Gray takes well-worn poetic forms and infuses them with vitality. Like a sculptor with a block of marble, he looks at ancient ruins, zoo exhibits, and human relationships with an artist's sensibility and draws out their beauty with succinct phrasing and surprising imagery. Inserting Adam and Eve into a zoo, their faces pressed against the glass looking into the “plotted wilderness,” Gray recreates their wide-eyed wonderment in a language modern city-dwellers might recognize. In “The First Mermaid,” Gray breathes life into a mythological creature, elusive and amorphous yet trapped in wall carvings: “One day she must have set her mind to try on / This skirt of sea, and through it pushed her legs... / Her new form freeing but already starting / To freeze into an icon.” Gray looks at the absurdity of a machine-gun-toting policeman stalking the dusty halls of Luxor Temple in "The Little Sphinx," and deftly turns the titular character into an embodiment of cross-cultural fear whose teethmarks are “like bullet holes, both empty and intrusive.” In particular, the poems illustrating art’s impact on both the artist and the audience are striking. “A Generic Pieta” touches on the sorrow of an obscure artist who desires the skill of the masters, “life drawn out of the stone...with the power of Moses and his dowsing rod,” but who keenly feels his own shortcomings as a mediocre copy who produces an “all too common beauty” despite his faithful service. Gray’s poet’s eye illuminates everything he sees, and his carefully chosen words bring a freedom to his lines that easily sweeps up the reader into the world he creates.
A few extra spots just opened up for this year's Glen Workshop, taking place in Santa Fe July 26-August 2. It's not too late to sign up! A limited number of places in the Poetry with Marilyn Nelson, Plein Air Painting, Sculpture and Playwriting workshops are currently available. Some on-campus housing is also available in dorm singles, doubles, and women's triples. Go to the Image 
A Catholic nun for thirty-eight years, DeFrees ultimately found that the experience thwarted her true vocation as a poet, yet her life is like a diptych: inside the convent, she sought words that might reach out, beyond a moralistic legalism, to touch the world; outside the convent, her worldly words reach out for a contemplative stillness—if not the blinding light of epiphany, perhaps the equally valuable moment of slowly-dawning wisdom. Whether she is writing a poem about what she shares in common with Marilyn Monroe or about the experience of eye surgery, poet Madeline DeFrees leads us into a garden of green thoughts—still points where time and the timeless embrace. She is featured on Image Readings this month.
As many of you know, the pilot issue of Image, which was printed just over twenty years ago, has long been out of print. In fact, we only have four copies in our office. We've received many wistful requests for that first issue and have felt bad that we couldn't oblige. But now you can have this extremely rare item for your very own—and at the same time do something good for Image. To help our little enterprise in a tough economic time, we've decided to auction off a copy of issue #1. Though it was the very first issue, the pilot represented the literary and artistic quality that would come to be Image's standard. The editorial statement, “Intruding Upon the Timeless,” provided a rationale for Image that remains fresh and valid today. The front cover featured the painting by Steve Hawley we recently revisited in a web-exclusive 
On September 13-20, 2009, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence and Rome to explore the life and achievements of the sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his works we see the dignity of humanity and its fall, the emergence of the individual and the dangers of individualism, and a fierce struggle to harmonize beauty with goodness and truth. Yet for all the conflict and tension in his work, Michelangelo left us with exquisite images of how God's grace can transform human experience. In Image's twentieth anniversary year, we'll return to Italy to explore how Michelangelo's incarnational vision can inform our own efforts to continue bringing about cultural transformation in our time. Our week together in Italy will begin with a couple days in Rome, where we will visit the Vatican and other sites associated with Michelangelo. The remainder of the week will be spent in Florence, where we will visit the great churches and museums featuring the artist and enjoy exquisite meals at restaurants in the city and the surrounding area.
If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar 
