• Art Organization: Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Day With(out) Art at MOCRA - 12/1/09

December 1, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Day With(out) Art (DWA). Over those twenty years, this annual day of mourning and action has metamorphosed from emphasizing loss (signaled by removing artworks or draping them, or dimming the lights in galleries) to encouraging the creative energy and insight that art can bring to a devastating and demoralizing situation. As the Visual AIDS website notes:

… Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part.

Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) has participated in DWA regularly since 1994. In addition to highlighting particular works of art, three times we have hosted and helped organize observances involving members of the wider arts community.

Adrian Kellard, "The Promise," 1989. Courtesy of the Estate of Adrian Kellard.

This year, MOCRA observes DWA by exhibiting The Promise, by the late Adrian Kellard, a rising artist in 1980s New York. His large-scale carved wood block panels evoke both medieval shrines and the woodblock prints of 20th-century German Expressionists, but their bright colors and folk-art quality make them accessible to a wide range of audiences. The Promise riffs on images of St. Christopher, a legendary giant who unwittingly carried the Christ child across a river. The image expresses endurance and perseverance in the midst of suffering. Its enigmatic text, “I will never leave you,” seems to assert love, hope, compassion, and loyalty. It is an especially poignant message when we consider that Kellard’s own life was cut short by AIDS. He died in the fall of 1991 at the age of 32.

The Promise was included in the 1992-93 international traveling exhibition From Media to Metaphor: Art about AIDS, and in the 1994 exhibition Art’s Lament: Creativity in the Face of Death (organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

MOCRA is pleased to be able to share The Promise with St. Louis audiences for this year’s Day With(out) Art. MOCRA will have the work on display beginning Tuesday, December 1 through December 13. Find more information here.

MOCRA’s current exhibition, Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears, also continues through December 13. Although not directly connected to HIV/AIDS, this exhibition does engage the ambiguity of suffering and the challenge it poses to us as a fact of our human existence. I suspect that Byron’s works speak to many of our visitors of the ways in which we can creatively elicit meaning out of all of life’s experiences, both the joys and the tears.

In whatever fashion makes sense to you, we hope you will join MOCRA in observing World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art.

• Art Organization: Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Michael Byron Opens at MOCRA

Cosmic Tears, an exhibition of paintings by internationally recognized artist Michael Byron, opens at Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) on Sunday, September 13, 2009 with a free public reception from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. The exhibition continues through December 13, 2009. (Unfortunately, Mr. Byron cannot attend the opening, but he will be giving a talk about his work on Sunday, November 15, 2009, at 2:00 p.m., followed by a reception).

Michael Byron, Cosmic Tears 12, 2003.

The earliest work in the Cosmic Tears series dates from 2003. While works from the series have been shown in other exhibitions, this is the first time they have been displayed as a body of work. In these evocative paintings, Mr. Byron explores the relationship of the individual to the universal. The works are based on a text by the artist that meditates on the inevitable mix of emotions that accompanies the act of creation; pain and joy together elicit a “cosmic tear” that is the “womb of our psyche.” Yet the paintings themselves attest to the potential of art to “shape that tear into Meaning.” The abstract works simultaneously suggest both microcosmic and macrocosmic perspectives, and evince a quiet, reflective quality.

Mr. Byron is Professor of Painting at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. In his distinguished career he has exhibited throughout the United States, as well as the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. He was selected for the 1989 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in many public collections including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam), and the Tamayo Museum (Mexico City).

MOCRA thanks the artist and Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, for their assistance in assembling this exhibition.

Regular museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Exhibition admission is free, though there is a suggested donation of $5, or $1 for students and children. More information is available by calling 314-977-7170 or visiting MOCRA’s website.

• Art Organization: David Brinker, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Am I just imagining it, or is this religious?

One of the most frequently asked (and unasked) questions visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art have is, “What makes this religious art?” Others are, “What’s the difference between religious and spiritual?” and, “Can’t anything be spiritual for someone?”

MOCRA has spent the past fifteen years exploring these questions, not with theoretical conjectures, but by way of concrete example. From Australian Aboriginal art and Alvin Ailey to contemporary Chinese and Latin American photography, from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and contemporary illuminated manuscripts to Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds” – with each new exhibition we consider another way in which contemporary artists are in dialogue with the spiritual dimensions of life, using the full vocabulary of contemporary artistic production.

Now we invite you to a free public conference that will explore some of these questions. “Art and the Religious Imagination” will feature a panel of distinguished museum directors and theologians discussing the roles that secular and religious art museums can play in the presentation of art with spiritual and religious content. A panel discussion and audience Q/A will follow the individual presentations, so if you have an interest in this topic – or even if you’re skeptical about the whole idea of contemporary religious art – please come and add your voice.

The talk takes place in Xavier Hall Theatre on the SLU campus, and we’ll have a brief reception afterward next door at MOCRA, so you’ll have a chance to see our current exhibition, “Good Friday.” You can find a list of the panelists and the titles of their talks on MOCRA’s website. Please join us on Sunday, March 29, from 1:30 to 4:00 p.m. and add your voice to the proceedings.