Karen Mulder lives under the sign of the ampersand: she is a both/and kind of person. As writer & speaker on art, art history, architecture & spirituality, she is deeply committed to an interdisciplinary way of reading the world. Her charism is for seeing—& showing us—the subtle interconnections among disparate artifacts & different disciplines. She is also gifted with a deeply humane way of looking at art. Though she has one foot in the world of the art academy (she studied at Yale) & can close-read a painting, sculpture, or building with the best of them, she does so without ever losing sight of the way the work was made by a particular person with particular emotions & a particular life story. Art criticism (like any brand of criticism) can sometimes devolve into cerebral game-playing, but Mulder never loses her hold on the human. Maybe it’s because she’s lived such a rich & varied life: she grew up in Australia & Venezuela & has worked in archaeology, advertising, graphic design & publishing. She has traveled throughout the world & studied a range of disciplines, from art preservation to theology. Her story is a testament to the way a person’s true vocation can emerge gradually & make sense of a whole life, like dawn light that shows the path you walked in the night.
Some of Mulder’s work is featured in Image issue 66. Read an excerpt of her essay here.
Biography
There is no concerted career path in my example, yet I have always ended up going in the right direction. After growing up in Australia and mostly Venezuela, where I worked on digs along the Orinoco River with 1988 MacArthur laureate Dr. Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, I began formal studies in archaeology at Boston University, gaining the most useless undergraduate degree ever devised. I picked up graphic design in the pre-PC era by freelancing, applying such lessons to design jobs for Harvard University, a Madison Avenue geegaw company, and Crossway Books. Meanwhile, I felt called to create or support fellowships for artists in Boston and New York, culminating in Christians in the Arts Networking. Although I eventually took arts-related courses at the Boston Art Institute, Radcliffe, and Parsons, I observed that artists of faith were terribly underrepresented in the culture during the 1980s, and decided to remain focused on arts networking rather than praxis. This led to hundreds of speaking invitations on all but the icy continents, in all sorts of situations (sometimes, without electricity, in China; sometimes, at flooded outdoor rockfests during thunderstorms, while plugged into slide projectors and a mic at Greenbelt, in England). I began writing about art in various forums, and served on conference committees and boards for the C.S. Lewis Foundation (CA), CIVA (MA), and the Newington Cropsey Cultural Studies Center (NYC).
After teaching studio classes in several art departments on Christian campuses, networking among artists in Europe, and studying art history more concertedly at Swiss L’Abri, I gradually realized that I deserved credentialing and a theory base for almost 20 years of concerted interactions with contemporary art. I entered a graduate program at Yale University that concerned itself with the sacred in art, and cut my formal art history teeth in seminars ‘downtown’ with various Yale worthies, concurrently studying theology at Yale’s Divinity School. The Yale thesis investigated a German artist, Johannes Schreiter, who radically altered the content of large-scale glass windows on renovated historical sites in Germany’s postwar context. What began as an exploration of shifts in visual iconography tempered by the Holocaust led to doctoral studies in architectural history at the University of Virginia, focused on context more than the content of window programs. This path naturally led to discourses in preservation history, monuments theory, collective memory, and national identity issues. I began viewing the built environment as a record of human life, as well as a spatial frame that incorporates art as an integral part of intentional design ensembles. I taught as visiting faculty at Westmont, and William and Mary, and now find myself pleasantly occupied with grad students at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC, where I manage a cycle of multidisciplinary surveys (I call them ‘ampersand’ seminars) that view architecture through the lenses of interior design, decorative arts, marketing theory, sustainable design, and museum exhibition history. I remain deeply committed to providing design-oriented students with an appreciation, if not a fascination or even a love, for the historical dimensions of creativity.
I like the ampersand in general because it is graciously and reasonably inclusive in matters of knowledge. In spiritual matters, the ‘and’ amplifies the potential to locate balance in a lopsided world. To me, balance is a vestige of God’s original intention for us. I seek it actively. Living is continually tempered by the need to find a balanced appreciation for judgment and mercy, temporality and eternity, discipline and love–to name just a few active binaries that plump the texture and travels of life, which I have so enjoyed.
Current Projects
April 2011
Lately, perhaps in search of my intellectual tribe, I’ve been entertaining a string of acronymic associations. I’ve taken on editing work for the European Architectural History Network (EAHN), based in Delft. This coming year, I’ll assist the education taskforce of the American Glass Guild (AGG), review submissions on hermeneutics and architecture for ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture), and aid a relatively new venture called Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality (ACS). ACS recently introduced me to accomplished scholars and architects who have all addressed built expressions of the sacred from diverse religious perspectives for decades, despite the threat of professional marginalization this focus might have provoked. I’ll be speaking for the third time at the SCAD Biennial Conference on Architecture, which focuses in 2011 on ‘sacred spaces’—a dialog that is finally gaining broader academic credibility. I continue to collaborate with the Canadian ethno-religionist, David Goa, for the exhibit-in-planning about incarnation, currently titled “U: A Recovery of the Human Spirit.” All these efforts model a pronounced multidisciplinary bent, and have started up within the past five years; I feel as if I have been waiting for them all my intellectual life.
A consideration on transparency as a trope for national conscience in Germany’s postwar rehabilitation will come out in 2A:Art + Architecture (Dubai), and a related essay on postwar reconstruction will appear in Preservation Education and Research (Texas A&M). At the University of Alberta, a lecture series on public controversies for the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life will apply reverse logic to explore how the arts, while generally marginalized in the culture and the current economy, still provoke impassioned public opinions. While in British Columbia, I’ll speak at the opening of Betty Spackman’s multimedia installation, “Found Wanting,” which probes the troubling landscape of the food industry. “Vivisections,” my essay for the catalog, provided a long overdue contextual assessment of Spackman’s artistic acuity. Meanwhile, I’ve started collaborating with Guy Chase and Ken Steinbach on critical essays about their work, purely for the love of it.
Long-range, I’ve been considering the idea of launching a summer symposium for architects, theologians and historians, but of course, the economic situation makes this even more of a pipedream than usual at the moment.