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 Artist
of the Month: Ginger Geyer
Ginger Geyer's conceptual works in porcelain remind us that art, at
root, is fundamentally about play. Play in the deepest sense. Play as
fun, mischief, and the free exercise of the imagination. But like all
the best forms of play, Geyer's work has plenty of rules. In her case,
they involve the limitations and demands of a difficult medium-porcelain.
Combining both ordinary objects and classic works from the repertoire
of Western art, Geyer's pieces stimulate our minds and yet at the same
time they leap directly over our linear mental processes. Just when one
of these creations is tempting you to think out the allusions and theological
implications, they sneak in under our emotional radar, evoking what T.S.
Eliot called "memory and desire." But if you're ever tempted
to think Geyer's just a Texas trickster, keep in mind one final thing
about play-and that's that, as any child knows, play is always a serious
business.
click here
to visit her Artist of the Month page.
 Objects
of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith
James Romaine
Compiled by James Romaine, Objects of Grace is a colorful and
concise collection of interviews and art from some of America's most intriguing
Christian artists. Romaine interviews ten artists, presenting color reproductions
of the artists' work along with the text of the interviews. Each artist
dialogues on what it means for a Christian to engage in the creating process.
The artists interviewed in Objects of Grace represent a diverse
and talented bunch, including several who have been profiled in Image
over the years. They are Sandra Bowden, Dan Callis, Mary McCleary, John
Silvis, Edward Knippers, Erica Downer, Albert Pedulla, Tim Rollins, Joel
Sheesley, and Makoto Fujimura. This group gives a vivid account of what
it means for God's grace to be incarnated into the visual arts in our
postmodern world. This volume is brought to you by the same publisher-Square
Halo-that will soon be releasing Gregory Wolfe's collected editorials
from Image (a book to be called Intruding Upon the Timeless).
The folks at SH are quickly becoming leaders in the realm of Christianity
and the arts, threatening to surpass many of the more established (and-dare
we say it?-more timid mainstream religious publishers) in this area. The
sheer beauty of the design and production values of this book is itself
a major achievement, one that gives hope both for the church and the larger
culture.
For more, visit
the publisher's website.
God
and the Imagination
Paul Mariani
As we've said before in other contexts, Paul Mariani was one of the
earliest supporters of, and contributors to, Image-way back in
the late 1980s, when we published our first pilot issue. One of America's
leading poets and literary biographers (he's written bios of W.C. Williams,
Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell), Mariani holds a Chair in
English at Boston College. God and the Imagination is a collection
of essays-literary, theological, and personal-that explore aspects of
the intersection between faith and literature. We're proud to say that
several of the key essays in the book first appeared in Image and
were delivered at Image's national conference or Glen Workshop.
Mariani is thoughtful and learned without being abstruse. He writes with
humanity and honesty about the possibility that writers in a secular may
still convey the mystery of transcendence. There are also essays in this
collection of the subject of biography, and on writers such as Galway
Kinnell, Robert Frost, and Thomas Hardy. In these occasional pieces we
sense not only a generous and wise guide, but an overarching vision that
holds the disparate material together in a large embrace. In short, Mariani
is one of our literary treasures. This book allows you to pilfer that
treasure to your heart's content.
To learn more about
the book, click here.
 Ruth
Weisberg exhibit:
Love, Sacred and Profane
The title of Ruth Weisberg's exhibit refers to the centerpiece of
the collection, which derives its name from Titian's 16th Century painting,
Amor, Sacro e Profano. Weisberg's interpretation portrays a modern
day couple dancing against the backdrop of the scene portrayed in Titian's
painting. Images blend and blur in the piece as history and the present
compete to come to the surface. The painting encourages an encounter with
memory in the context of love and desire. The exhibition will include
several of Weisberg's paintings, as well as drawings from her series Canto
V: A Whirlwind of Lovers, which was an exhibit commissioned for the
Huntington Library. Weisberg's work is extensive and highly acclaimed,
having been exhibited in museums around the country, including the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Love, Sacred and Profane will be showing at the Jack Rutberg Fine
Arts gallery in Los Angeles, California, March 7 - April 30, 2003. For
more on this exhibit, go to the gallery's
website.
Featured in our last
issue of ImageUpdate, the following exhibits are still running!
Catch them while you can…
Joel C. Sheesley,
Intimate Geography
Narthex and Stairwell Gallery at St. Peter's Church, New York City. It
runs through March 10, 2003. Read a review of Sheesley's art at here.
Bruce Herman, The
Body Broken
The exhibit, located in the Alva deMars Megan Chapel Art Center at Saint
Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, runs through March 15, 2003.
Click here
for more.
God at the
Ritz
Lorenzo Albacete
In our
experience, most artists and literary types are not enamored of the form
of religious discourse known as "apologetics." Generally speaking,
apologetics tends toward vigorous, and occasionally violent, rational
argumentation about religious doctrine. Of course, the greatest masters
of apologetics have transcended the stereotype: in the modern era, writers
such as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis (not to mention Malcolm Muggeridge,
see below) have leavened the form with heavy doses of imagination, metaphor,
and narrative. So we feel justified in promoting God at the Ritz,
which is a witty, wry, and yet passionate apologetic for belief in the
Christian faith. The title of the book comes from a time when the author,
in the midst of filming an interview for a PBS special at the Ritz Carlton
in Pasadena, was besieged by reporters wanting to ask fundamental questions
about belief in God. Monsignor Albacete, who has advanced degrees in space
science and applied physics, includes chapters on the relationship between
science faith, the reality of suffering, "sex, money, and politics,"
and more. Albacete, a frequent contributor to The New York Times
and The New Yorker, is the chief American representative of a growing
Catholic lay movement, Communion and Liberation (CL), which was founded
in Italy. CL's founder, Don Luigi Giussani, has long been an ardent supporter
of the need for Christian faith to be made incarnate in contemporary art
and literature.
To read an interview
with Albacete on a site that also gives you a chance to learn more about
Communion and Liberation, click here.
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