CALL FOR ENTRIES
Under Abraham's Tent
Online Art Exhibtion
Are you an artist?
Do you know artists?
Read the "call" and spread the word!
Bowie Snodgrass is the guest curator for the next Episcopal Church and Visual Arts (ECVA) exhibition called "Under Abraham's Tent." People of all faiths are invited to submit art by July 17, 2011. Call for Entries
By Ben Schnell
I heard about Faith House from the book Its Really All About God by Samir Selmanovic. I had to check it out. There was only two problems. The first was that its a bit of a commute from Portland Maine, where I live, to New York City, just for one evening. The second problem is that I had just sold my car and was getting around on a small Honda Scooter.
But then it hit me, driving on a scooter that only goes 35 miles an hour from Portland Maine to New York city, just for one event that would only last for a couple hours... what an adventure! So I put on long johns, 2 pairs of pants, 3 coats, and set off. I could only go half way in one day, so I couchsurfed in Amherst Massachusetts on the way down, and made it to New York on the second day.
The ride was very cold but the event was very warm. It was a holiday craft event. I met Samir, and many others from different faith backgrounds. Several people shared about the different kinds of crafts their families would do together around the holidays. I learned about Hanukkah, Islamic prayer beads, and Eastern Orthodox Icons. It was informative, but more than that, it was warm and social.
With so much religiously motivated violence in the world today, people getting together in a living room setting to celebrate each other's faith, now thats worth seeing, even if it means a long, chilly commute!
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
6 pm Doors, 7 pm Program
Intersections, 274 5th Ave
Btwn 29th and 30th Sts
With Andy Padre, the Metrocard Man
This Faith House gathering is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Lora Padre by Andy Padre, Russell Chin and friends
During the busy holiday season, come to a light evening with fun, music, food and crafts led by Andy Padre, the Metrocard Man. Hear stories from people of different faiths about the beautiful sacred objects they are crafting. And of course, enjoy the hands-on craft you can hang in your window to capture the beauty of light in these short, dark days. With wax paper, crayons, and some heat we will make representations of various sacred objects that act much like stained-glass ornaments.
Andy Padre was raised in Seattle, WA and attended the Advertising Art program at Seattle Central Community College. In 1996 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League where he took classes in portraiture and still life and worked in a variety of mediums. In the summer of 2006 Andy was unemployed and nearing the end of a stressful co-op purchase when he discovered Metrocards, a bright, cheerful and cheap medium. He first covered his bike in Metrocards which was well received by the public and frequently commented on and photographed. Andy now regularly participates in the Halloween, Easter and Mermaid Day Parades in New York and recently completed his 10th parade, the 2010 Halloween Parade. Metrocard parade costume themes include: a 22 person Metrocard Wedding, the Wizard of Oz, and the Village People's Y.M.T.A. Andy's creations have been featured in the New York Times, New York Post, AM New York, NY Daily News, and the Huffington Post.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
6 pm Doors, 7 pm Program
Intersections, 274 5th Ave
Btwn 29th and 30th Sts
With Amichai Lau-Lavie, Founder and Executive Director of Storahtelling
2,500 years ago, in front of Jerusalem's Water Gate, the Bible was first presented as a publicly performed sacred narrative. Amichai Lau-Lavie, Judaic scholar, performance artist and the founder and director of the NY based Storahtelling Company, leads an exploration of this historic moment through text study and conversation, examining the radical implications of this ancient ritual for today's global search for meaningful ways of making our sacred legacies relevant, accessible, engaging and transformational.
Amichai is an Israeli-born teacher of Judaic Literature, described as 'one of the most interesting thinkers in the Jewish world' by the NY Jewish Week. Amichai studied at various yeshivot, including the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Elul Center in Jerusalem. Between 1992 and 1996 he directed the summer programs at Melitz: the Jewish Zionist Centers in Jerusalem, focusing on the integration of Jewish education via the arts. His theatrical experience as a writer and performer includes the Theatre Company Jerusalem, The Acco Theatre Group in Israel and the Avodah Dance Ensemble in the U.S. Between 1997-2000 he served as Artist-in-Residence at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in New York City.
Amichai was a Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Israel (2008-2009) and is a consultant to the Reboot Network, a member of the Synagogue 3000 Leadership Network, serves on the Advisory Council for the Six Points Fellowship, the Advisory Board for Faithhouse Manhattan, and the Board of Directors of Nehirim.
TREE OF LIFE (triptych)
~ by Linda Witte HenkeThis work employs the stylized image of a tree to envision the breadth of God’s love for humankind. It was fashioned from commercial and artist-dyed cotton, linen, silk, and synthetic fabrics and embellished with machine appliqué.
ARTIST’S STATEMENTThis work images the Spirit's ongoing activity in gifting and empowering God's people. It was fashioned from hand-dyed silk habotai and silk organza, then embellished with hand-stitching and hand-crafted polymer clay tiles that were coated in metallic leaf.
Inspired by the geography of her own faith journey, Linda Witte Henke creates work that gives visual expression to spiritual themes and sacred texts. She is gratified when viewers experience her work as an invitation to reflect more deeply on their own beliefs or to embrace more nuanced understandings of the beliefs of others.
Drawn to the textile medium by its vibrant palette, tactile richness, and endless versatility, Henke especially enjoys bringing blank fabrics to life through layered introduction of dye, paint, paper, foil, stitch, and embellishment.Henke’s work is displayed in juried solo, group, and invitational exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and North America and resides in a variety of corporate and private collections. She also maintains an active commission schedule, primarily for projects purposed for liturgical use.
ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Please email [email protected] if you would like to share your faith art with the Faith House community.
WAVES AND VIBRATIONS
My relationship with my Physicist father includes regular discussions about the sly behavior of matter on the quantum level and the inability to fundamentally know everything about waves and particles. I find myself thinking of healthy spirituality as an effort to align one’s thoughts, relationships and actions more harmoniously with the squirrelly wave patterns which are the wind and shadows of the way things ought to be. Sometimes I imagine us as sound waves containing unlimited opportunity to be glorious in volume, timbre, color, key and rhythm. Because we coexist on this planet, our lives’ melodies interact, generating harmonies of creativity and power, silence or (often) dissonance.Usually when I paint I strive for an active, positive vibration of color — color being by a hundred miles my favorite 2-dimensional tool. When the colors of a painting begin to talk to each other, to sing, purr and hum with the blossoming pleasure of existing, I get a whiff of something truly fine, like one breath of honeysuckle as you drive down the road, or catching a few notes of a melody so beautiful it stops your breath. Samir Selmanovic taught me the Irish call this sensation finding a thin place.
A newer effort on my part is to combine the perpetual search for resonating color harmonies with an additional challenge. I want the subject matter itself to describe the effort towards interior alignment and growth. So far I have two paintings in this series, the first of which is Make a Wish: Serenity. My model, a violinist at a fork in her career and still wounded from the death of her mother from cancer, was willing to help me compose an image which expressed her most intimate hope. She wanted peace of mind. Calm waters. Towards this concept we set the primary color as blue, the color of ease. To keep her late mother near, we painted in notes from a piece of music, which she performed at her mother’s memorial. We posed her with her most precious possession, her instrument, but we rotated it’s face away from the viewer, as an indication of safe boundaries and privacy necessary for good thinking. I am pleased with the push and pull in this painting. Blues and oranges want to repel one another, and yet if massaged they can compliment. The lines in the painting are all off balance, yet in relationship to each other they hold the painting upright. Being different can still be a strength.
Lastly is a confection very dear to my heart. When the dissonance levels in my head and heart reduce, I occasionally have the unbounded pleasure of flying in my dreams. Farmflight is a 6 x 6 foot oil painting about freedom, individuality, possibility and joy. The model was my friend, Joanna Petticord, the countryside vaguely Southern and the boots my own. Farmflight is a little funny to me, partially because of the boisterous goofiness, and partially because of the festive phallic silo on the horizon line which nobody seems to notice. Thank goodness for author and Rabbi Ed Freidman who wrote in Friedman’s Fables, “It is a fallacy that seriousness is deeper than playfulness.”
BIO
At age twenty, Melissa Hefferlin was the only American during the Soviet Period to study at the Russian Academy of Fine Art (the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where she completed the third-year curriculum. She also trained at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and Otis Parsons Art Institute, Los Angeles. For twenty years since she has been a successful professional painter and scholar of Russian Impressionism. In 1998 Hefferlin co-authored Traditions Rediscovered: The Finley Collection of Russian Art, a richly illustrated work on contemporary Russian Impressionism. The Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN) presented a solo show entitled Farm Dreams of Hefferlin’s work in 2001. The Robert M. MacNamara Foundation (Westport Island, ME) selected Hefferlin as an Artist in Residence for six weeks in 2003. In 2006 the City of Chattanooga selected Hefferlin in a Tennessee state-wide competition to paint the official commemorative mural, Waterfront Celebration. Hefferlin won the Salmagundi Award of Excellence at the National Pastel Society of America's juried NYC exhibition in 2007. Recently Hefferlin completed a commission for three 12 foot x 9 foot murals for a large Tennessee protestant congregation, and opened Melissa Hefferlin, a mid-career retrospective of over 40 paintings at Southern Adventist University's McKee Library. Her paintings are held in over 40 private and institutional collections in the United States and abroad, including the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Museum Fund at the Russian Academy of Fine Art, Unum, Memorial Hospital Systems and Seimens, to name a few.
Hefferlin exhibits regularly at Gallery 1401 in Chattanooga, at Miller Gallery in Cincinnati and the Paul Scott Gallery in Scottsdale. She recently served as painting professor at Southern Adventist University and has guest lectured at the University of Tennessee, as well as teaching privately. She speaks English and Russian, and rides horses every chance she gets.
ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Please email [email protected] if you would like to share your faith art with the Faith House community.
A SPIRITUAL HOUSE diptych
~ by Deborah Risa Mrantz
ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Please email [email protected] if you would like to share your faith art with the Faith House community.ARTISTS' STATEMENT
A SPIRITUAL HOUSE diptych realizes moments of quintessential journey–reiterated in palette and set by typographic repetition and insistence. These move us beyond linear language into kairos, becoming of spiritual construction, contemplation, completion. We enter and connect to our faith in all its physicality. Divine work of stone; and work of human hands. God's covenantal meeting places in the spiritual masonry of building as living stones, our houses and dwelling-places of lived faith.
Stone, religious construction's first material–used to build Abraham's altar of living stones as the spiritual house of God. A SPIRITUAL HOUSE (diptych) attends to echoing typologies and shared structures between Old and New Testaments. From Jacob’s journey to our present travels we're built into holy habitats–nomadic, Abrahamic essences calling us back through rough building-blocks and excavations of rock. First, best substance in forming individual and communal spiritual histories in tabernacles hewn of our earliest dwellings and devotion to God.
DESCRIPTION
Layered, dimensional typographic design allows Scripture and language to move, setting the stone pillars in the digital laminate to aluminum diptych A SPIRITUAL HOUSE. Typology and typography seamlessly merge while maintaining their covenantal character. Architectural landscapes interiorly engage with intertextual reciprocal, foundational material and motion of living stones–God's house. In this engagement, twin-like pieces inform each other as stanchions of constancy, architecturally solid and in concord. Through scratchy subway quiddities of urban typography, deconstructed visceral and visual landscapes and the brick-laying of language and letterforms, a spiritual house is built. Whether in homeless communities of underground metro or in rarified ethers of wealth, we're invited into this spiritual house of living stones, to enter in devotion.
PROVENANCE
A SPIRITUAL HOUSE (v1). edition (1690) digitally signed, numbered prints; digital laminate to black aluminum. Created in LOGOS DIVINITY™ LLC design studio, Santa Fe New Mexico, DECEMBER 2009. Printed at FIREDRAGON COLOR, Santa Fe New Mexico. Certificate of Authenticity provided with source/origination information on artwork.
GRAIN LIFE IN ABUNDANCE
~ by Deborah Risa Mrantz
DESCRIPTION
Among the most remarkable qualities of GRAIN LIFE IN ABUNDANCE is its palette— Morrocan mustard, curry and saffron yellows, muted cerise and bedouin browns, olive greens of Meditteranean places of belonging. These hues interact with each other in actual color vibration and in opacity and transparency, creating deeper layers of language and cognitive textures in the Scripture. They also firmly locate us, on the road where Joseph’s brothers sell him into Egypt, and in the wheat fields, or other ‘storing up’ places of creating a good foundation for the future– for ourselves within the Godliness of life in Christ, and of utilitarianism with a granular specificity Saint Paul exemplified. Hierarchies of words and phrases constantly move in interplay, fluidly carrying us through symbol and common-sensibilities, and the sensate warmth of sun-drenched grain, olives, berries and peeling ripeness of cinnamon bark.PROVENANCE
GRAIN LIFE IN ABUNDANCE (v1). edition (1690) digitally signed, numbered prints; digital laminate to black aluminum. Created in LOGOS DIVINITY™ LLC design studio, Santa Fe New Mexico, MARCH 2010. Printed at FIREDRAGON COLOR, Santa Fe New Mexico. Certificate of Authenticity provided with source/origination information on artwork.ARTIST
Deborah Risa Mrantz, seminarian and artist, recently contacted Faith House to share her devotional art. LOGOS DIVINITY™ LLC | AND THE WORD WAS GOD is a religious, liturgical arts endeavour forged from epiphany and created through profound movement of modernist, contemporary design into a new form of service to God. As an advertising-marketing principal, executive creative and creative director, I continue to evolve a professional life of design, publishing, printing, and multi-sensory digital design into my journey to Seminary–where for the last several years I've discerned a clear calling, through rediscovery of long-held vocation into the life of God's Word and Pastoral Ministry.
ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Please email [email protected] if you would like to share your faith art with the Faith House community.
Learning to love well.
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