Art + Religion in the 21st Century


Book Description

Blaspheming artists get all the press. Some exploit the shock potential of religious imagery - but many also reflect deeply on spiritual matters and are, in fact, some of the most profound and sensitive commentators on religion today. Here, Aaron Rosen shows how religious themes and images permeate the work of contemporary artists from across the globe. Contrary to the expectations of twentieth-century rationalists, religion has not faded away in the 21st century, but roared back onto the scene with renewed vitality. This survey shows how religious themes and images continue to permeate the work of contemporary artists from across the globe. Some exploit the shock potential of religious imagery, but many also reflect deeply on spiritual matters. The introduction outlines the debates and controversies that the art-religion connection has precipitated throughout history. Each of the book's chapters opens by introducing a theme - ideas about creation, the sublime, wonder, diaspora and exile, religious and political conflict, ritual practice, mourning and monumentalizing, environmental art and sacred space - followed by a selection of works of art that develop that theme. The book encompasses a wide range of media and genres, from sculpture to street art, and considers faith in its broadest sense - from Islam and Christianity to Aboriginal mythology and meditation. Artists discussed include Ai Weiwei, Francis Alÿs, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Cristo and Jeanne-Claude, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, David LaChapelle, Richard Long, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Grayson Perry, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Viola, Mark Wallinger and more.




Art and Faith


Book Description

From a world-renowned painter, an exploration of creativity’s quintessential—and often overlooked—role in the spiritual life “Makoto Fujimura’s art and writings have been a true inspiration to me. In this luminous book, he addresses the question of art and faith and their reconciliation with a quiet and moving eloquence.”—Martin Scorsese “[An] elegant treatise . . . Fujimura’s sensitive, evocative theology will appeal to believers interested in the role religion can play in the creation of art.”—Publishers Weekly Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Makoto Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of “making.” What he does in the studio is theological work as much as it is aesthetic work. In between pouring precious, pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create the prismatic, refractive surfaces of his art, he comes into the quiet space in the studio, in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise. Ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, and from Mark Rothko to Japanese Kintsugi technique, he shows how unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives. This poignant and beautiful book offers the perspective of, in Christian Wiman’s words, “an accidental theologian,” one who comes to spiritual questions always through the prism of art.




Philosophy, Art, and Religion


Book Description

Systematically explores the affinity and the rivalry between art and religion, focusing at length on music, visual art, literature, and architecture in turn.




Art Through Faith


Book Description




God in the Modern Wing


Book Description

Should Christians even bother with modern art? This STA volume gathers the reflections of artists, art historians, and theologians who collectively offer a more complicated narrative of the history of modern art and its place in the Christian life. Readers will find insights on the work and faith of artists like Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and more.




The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso


Book Description

This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs spiritual themesÑand, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley address Picasso's cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist's early life in the Catholic church; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso's later, fraught relationship with the church, which commissioned him in the 1950s to paint murals for the Temple of Peace chapel in France; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfighting, the subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.




Peyote Religious Art


Book Description

An examination of the vibrant traditional and folk arts inspired by the sacramental use of peyote by members of the Native American Church




The Religious Art of Andy Warhol


Book Description

Two images of Andy Warhol exist in the popular press: the Pope of Pop of the Sixties, and the partying, fright-wigged Andy of the Seventies. In the two years before he died, however, Warhol made over 100 paintings, drawings, and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. The dramatic story of these works is told in this book for the first time. Revealed here is the part of Andy Warhol that he kept very secret: his lifelong church attendance and his personal piety. Art historian and curator Jane Daggett Dillenberger explores the sources and manifestations of Warhol's spiritual side, the manifestations of which are to be found in the celebrated paintings of the last decade of Warhol's life: his Skull paintings, the prints based on Renaissance religious artwork, the Cross paintings, and the large series based on The Last Supper.>




When Art Disrupts Religion


Book Description

When Art Disrupts Religion lays bare the power of encounters with the arts to unsettle and overturn deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. Grounded in the accounts of more than 80 Evangelicals who experienced such a sea-change of religious identity, the book bridges the gap between aesthetic theory and lived religion, while exploring the interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West.




An Ethology of Religion and Art


Book Description

Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion this book proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more than false belief or the product of scholarly invention. The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and anthropology of art, particularly the identification of "the special" by Ellen Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from, among others, Ann Taves, who similarly identified "specialness" as characteristic of religion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the development and maintenance of religions. The innovative combination of art, science, and religion in this book makes it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology.