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2005 Artists-in-Residence
Rod Jellema
in the Board Room List of Works Rod Jellema Sarah Demas Shirah Rachel Apple Heidi Christensen
Rod Jellema Rod Jellema is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught for thirty-five years. His recent book, A Slender Grace won the Book of the Year Award for 2004, as conferred by the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the 2004 Towson Prize for Literature. Previous collections of poetry include Something Tugging the Line, The Lost Faces, and The Eighth Day. Among his current projects is a critical history of early jazz, Really Hot: A New Hearing for Old New Orleans Jazz. Sarah Demas Sarah Demas is a talented artist specializing in portraiture and the human form. She earned her MFA in Painting, graduating cum laude from the New York Academy of Art. She also studied at the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, and the Lacoste School of Art in Lacoste, France. She has exhibited widely and been the recipient of many awards, including the Mele Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Art from Drew University, where she completed her undergraduate studies. Shirah Rachel Apple Shirah Apple creates visual midrash—commentary—on the American Jewish experience. Using spices, thread, and other familiar materials, she transforms them with a sensibility of the work of the hand into beautiful yet intimate objects which celebrate both rites of passage and the gift of living every day. Ms. Apple received the Roberta Polovoy scholarship to attend the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a graduate of MICA’s Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program and of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a B.S. in Business Administration. She has had solo exhibitions in Washington, DC; Jerusalem, Israel; Richmond, Virginia; and Simsbury, Connecticut. She has also shown her work at the Makor Gallery in New York City, the DC Arts Center in Washington, DC, the Rockville Civic Center in Rockville, Maryland, and other venues. Her work is in the collection of the Embassy of Israel and in private collections in the U.S., Israel, and South Africa. She has also participated in artist residencies at the Center for Arts and Religion at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and at the Arad Arts Project in Arad, Israel. An artist with a strong community focus, Ms. Apple has conducted art programs and collaborations with adults and children at the Franciscan Youth Center in Baltimore, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and several synagogues in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area. She also worked with Jewish and Arab children at a summer camp in Israel. Shirah Rachel Apple was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has lived in nine states as well as Japan and England. She resided in Washington, DC, for eleven years and Israel for two years before coming to Baltimore. Her parents, six siblings, and their eleven children live all over the United States and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Heidi Christensen As my Christian journey deepens, the integration of my faith and artistic explorations seem to meld and unfold. I’ve experienced my particular method of painting and rendering form, an almost hyper-observant style, as a contemplative, meditative encounter. My painting process is a layering and building of form over time. And in that time spent, looking for the organic, internal rhythm of the objects’ structure, the lines that define its mass and the light that shapes its volume and form, it seems possible to see beneath the surface, to the heart of the object- the very thing that makes it this form and no other. A beauty deeply hidden and yet a glimpse revealed by engagement. A moment when an understanding that God’s hand is in all things and that when all things are profoundly observed, they will offer up the key to their fundamental distinctiveness- their divine particularity- that which is at the very core of its relationship to its Creator. And it is also my experience that the more realistic a subject is to be rendered, greater is the need to pull myself and my “knowing” out of my seeing. I have found that it is a developed practice to see un-presumptively-- to see the world around us before binding vision with knowledge. A practice, perhaps, that may prepare a place for encountering divine presence. And it is this experience that resonates within my prayer life. As I grow in my faith and knowledge of scripture, my “knowing/doing” often overshadows the nimbleness of my time in prayer as well as my intention of opening myself to divine presence. To be in God’s presence rather than my own. So it is with this idea: that the artistic process and the religious, spiritual journey, both require a continual movement between the intuited and the actions we take upon the intuited, that I hope to engage seminary students and people of faith, in a studio setting. To explore a process together that begins with an immediate visual experience that yields to a contemplative practice or on-going discipline perpetuating the possibility of discovering and rediscovering the divine hand that created the world we live in. Thomas Merton had said once, “Seeing involves a relaxation of one’s own natural effort to supply meaning, a willingness to experience with our whole selves on an existential level, an acceptance of and openness to mystery.” [i] Let it be our endeavor. [i] (Thomas Merton in a letter to Mark Van Doren, Merton’s literature teacher at Columbia University and life-long friend as cited in Thomas Del Prete, Thomas Merton and the Education of the Whole Person, Alabama, Religious Education Press, 1990, 6 send comments or questions about the gallery to
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