SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: August 2026 (Art & Theology)
+++
POEM: “Last Words (Death Row, Texas)” by Eileen Talone: This poem from Image journal’s Winter 2020 issue made me cry. “Formally, it is a villanelle composed of found language from the transcripts of executions in Texas,” writes James K. A. Smith. “It is a poem of last words that the poet has braided together as an elegy, a song of both lament and yearning.”
+++
PODCAST EPISODE: “Pádraig Ó Tuama: Poetry, and Making Peace, Bearing Witness and Being Human – Poetry Against the Dark,” No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, November 3, 2025: “‘Legitimate target has sixteen letters—and one long abominable space between two dehumanizing words.’ In this episode, poet and peacebuilder Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a sobering yet luminous reflection on language, theology, and the long road of reconciliation. From exorcisms and conversion therapy to moments of silence, soup, and starlight, his stories remind us that even in a burning world, there is still room for awe, for courage, and for a better kind of human flourishing.”
+++
EXHIBITION (+ BOOK + VIDEO TOUR): Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family, American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, February 23, 2019–December 2030: I recently saw this affecting exhibition at AVAM (the same museum that’s currently showing Mary Proctor), spending a whole afternoon taking in the visual and textual testimony of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001) regarding her survival of the Holocaust. Krinitz was twelve when the Nazis occupied the Polish hamlet of Mniszek, where she lived on a farm with her family. She was able to flee three years later, in 1942, with one of her younger sisters, but she never saw her parents, brother, or other sister again. She emigrated to the United States in 1949, working as a seamstress in Brooklyn and then in Frederick, Maryland, where she spent the remainder of her life.
In 1977, at age fifty, Krinitz embroidered an approximately four-by-four-foot panel of her childhood home, her carrying pails of water up the footpath. She wanted to share her memories with her two daughters, Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade. This became the first piece in a series of thirty-six, covering her bucolic childhood—tending geese, swimming in the river, walking through wheat fields on stilts, watching her mom make Passover matzos—and then its sudden disruption by German forces during the war. Her embroidered pictures show such cruelties as a soldier ripping off her father’s prayer shawl and cutting off her grandfather’s beard, and her whole family being pulled out of their beds at dawn and taunted with guns. They show children forced to dig trenches, a family friend’s betrayal, Krinitz hiding out in the woods, death marches, shootings, cabbages growing on human ashes at Maidanek concentration camp, and Nazi corpses hanging from trees after the liberation. Krinitz didn’t finish embroidering her whole life story, but the final image she completed shows her arriving, after living for several years in a refugee camp in Germany, in New York Harbor with her husband and newborn.
To view all the images, visit the Art and Remembrance website, which includes image files as well as a video tour narrated by Steinhardt. I also heartily recommend the beautifully produced book Memories of Survival, which reproduces the full series and provides an introduction, transcriptions of Krinitz’s hand-stitched descriptions, and commentary by Steinhardt.
Krinitz’s art is the primary component and anchor point of the current exhibition in Baltimore—but the exhibition also includes a dozen or so works by other artists that lament atrocities and advocate for an end to violence. “The show pays tribute to humanity’s unjust persecution of innocents and the dream of a world at peace.”
+++
TED TALK: “How Art Transforms Brokenness into Beauty” by Lily Yeh, April 19, 2024: Chinese American artist Lily Yeh travels the world, building community through the arts and bringing beauty to public spaces often seen as “broken.” In this TED Talk, she describes three of her collaborative projects: establishing an art park in North Philadelphia, which involved the making of murals, sculptures, and mosaics with neighborhood children and adults (a project that evolved into the nonprofit The Village of Arts and Humanities); working with survivors of the Rwandan genocide to create a memorial in Rugerero atop a mass grave (“Where there’s beauty, we see hope,” one survivor told her); and “turning dilapidation into color and abundance” at a middle school for migrant children in rural China.
Yeh is the subject of the 2014 documentary The Barefoot Artist: Healing Communities Through Art, streaming for free on Kanopy and available for rental through other platforms.
I learned about her through the Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family exhibition at AVAM (see previous roundup item), where three of her paintings—Village Life in Rwanda Before the 1994 Genocide, Escaping into the Forest, and The 1994 Rwandan Genocide—are on display.
+++
SONGS:
>> “The Law of God Is Love” by Kester Limner: Kester Limner wrote this song in June 2020 for a virtual contemplative worship service at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, influenced by the simple, slow, repetitive style of Taizé chant. She shares it under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build on the material in any medium or format, even commercially, as long as attribution is given to the creator.
Love, love, the law of God is love
And to break every chain of oppression
So we work, and we pray, O God, Your kingdom come
May we see the dawn of Your justice
>> “Prayers for Freedom” by MaMuse: “Wholeheartedly fed by the folk and gospel traditions, MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker) create uplifting music to inspire the world into thriving.” “This video,” they write, “was inspired by our love and reverence for water, for friendship cherished and laughter forever praised.” I’ve previously featured the duo here and here.
Art & Theology 