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About the Body of Christ Exhibition
 

In the last twenty-five years, art that explicitly engages Christian faith has become increasingly visible both in the church and in the secular world. During that same period, many institutions of theological education have come to recognize that art is both a record of what earlier generations have believed about the nature of human life and its relationship to the divine, and a means of accessing our own understandings and emotions. Experiences with and conversation about the arts can deepen our liturgical and devotional life, and perhaps even help us to bridge denominational divides.

Even before its opening, the exhibition entitled "Body of Christ" has become one way to foster such experiences and conversations. This nationally juried exhibition features works in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and other media which engage the literal and metaphoric meanings inherent in that phrase which is so familiar to all who share the Bread and Cup of new life. Rather than being confined to a single venue, works are being exhibited simultaneously in galleries or other appropriate spaces at the Washington Theological Union, the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg, the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, Virginia Theological Seminary, the Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral, and Union Theological Seminary/Presbyterian School of Christian Education, as well as Wesley Theological Seminary.

Like many complicated projects, this multi-venue exhibition began as a small idea. In the summer of 2006, my friend and colleague, Patrick Ellis, the Coordinator of Arts for Theology at the Washington Theological Union, and I were talking about how the art programs at our two institutions might work cooperatively. Soon, what had started as a small collaborative effort between our own two institutions became a project of the Washington Theological Consortium Art Group. What had originally been conceived as an exhibition on the subject of the Body of Christ became an entire Semester of the Arts, including worship services, lectures, performances, and other events at seven different participating institutions, as well as the Consortium Faculty Convocation. In order to see all the works and every event, one would have to travel not only around the greater Washington area, but from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Richmond, Virginia. Information about these events may be found at www.washtheocon.org/bodyofchrist. On online gallery of all the images may be seen by clicking here.

The Dadian Gallery is pleased to be showing 29 of the approximately 100 works that Juror Theodore Prescott chose from the over 400 entries. Installation views of this portion of the show may be seen on this page. In addition, you may see the individual works, along with statements by the artists, by clicking here.

As Ted points out in his Juror’s Statement, there is great diversity in intention, as well as medium, approach to representation or abstraction, and connection to different streams in the history of art in even this one venue of the show.  In order to do justice to each work of art, it is necessary to see it on its own terms; to try to see how it uses color, form, movement and other elements to convey an idea or a feeling; and to attend to the many ways that artists – and all of us – understand what it means to be the Body of Christ.

Deborah Sokolove
Curator, Dadian Gallery
 

Juror’s Statement
 

It is common to point out that the art world today is characterized by diversity, which is usually explained in light of our culture’s emphasis on the individual. Thus each artist is celebrated for the unique aspects of their vision, and what is common between artists is secondary to that uniqueness.
 

The exhibition, The Body of Christ, certainly has diversity. In it are diverse media, diverse artistic sources, and diverse assumptions about the way images represent or carry their subject. But there is a more profound difference found here too. This difference is not primarily about how something looks, but about intended ends. It seems clear to me that there is work in this show that is made for the body of Christ, and work that is made about the body of Christ, or the experiences of being in the body of Christ. These different ends are not always clear. But some work appears to have a church setting in mind, while other work appears more suited to a gallery. Those two contexts require different means of engaging the visual arts. However, the body of Christ is not constrained by a context, and one of the strengths of this exhibit is to suggest that the presence of Christ is not limited by place.

Theodore L. Prescott

Theodore L. Prescott teaches sculpture at Messiah College. He is former president and founder of CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) and editor of A Broken Beauty, a group of essays on art and the notion of human beauty. His works are found in numerous private and public collections, including the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, and the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art.