quilts – Art & Theology

February is Black History Month, and while I endeavor to showcase Black art year-round, today’s post gives it dedicated attention.

VIDEO: “Kerry James Marshall, Now and Forever; Elizabeth Alexander, ‘American Song,’ Washington National Cathedral,” Smarthistory, January 22, 2024: Art historian Beth Harris and Kevin Eckstrom, former chief public affairs officer of Washington National Cathedral, explore the latest artwork to be permanently installed in the US capital’s “house of prayer for all people”: two Now and Forever stained glass windows by Kerry James Marshall, depicting a march for racial justice. Unveiled on September 23, 2023, these replace windows that memorialized Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1953. (For my international readers: The Confederacy was a group of eleven Southern US states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to preserve the institution of race-based chattel slavery on which their plantation economies relied; its government was dissolved in 1865 following the end of the Civil War, but its legacy continued.)

In 2015, when a white supremacist, who touted the Confederate flag as symbolic of his ideology, murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington National Cathedral’s dean at the time, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, called for the removal of the Lee-Jackson windows, which initiated a two-year discernment process involving ample community discussions. The cathedral finally took down the windows in 2017 following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed yet another life. The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, then the dean, said the windows “were a barrier to our mission, and an impediment to worship in this place.” Their removal and the installation of the Now and Forever windows in their place were funded by private foundations.

Marshall, Kerry James_Now and Forever — Kerry James Marshall (American, 1955–), *Now and Forever*, 2023. Fabricated by Andrew Goldkuhle. Stained glass windows, south outer aisle, bay 7, Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photo: Steven Zucker.

“American Song” by Elizabeth Alexander, commissioned by Washington National Cathedral and inscribed below Kerry James Marshall’s Now and Forever windows in bay 7. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

In addition to commissioning Marshall to design new windows, the cathedral commissioned the Pulitzer-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and read “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, to write a poem for this occasion. Titled “American Song,” it is inscribed on two limestone tablets beneath Marshall’s windows. The Windows Replacement Committee gave both artists this assignment:

We seek to tell a story of resilience, endurance, and courage that gives meaning and expression to the long and arduous plight of the African American, from slavery to freedom, from alienation to the hope of reconciliation, through physical and spiritual regeneration, as we move from the past to present day. The artist will capture both darkness and light, both the pain of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow, as well as the quiet and exemplary dignity of the African American struggle for justice and equality and the indelible and progressive impact it has had on American society. Each artist should respond in his or her own creative way to these ideals and aspirations, framing both the earthly and the divine, within the sacred space of the Washington National Cathedral.

When I was there last year, I asked the guide why the signs the figures hold don’t bear any of the more familiar slogans of our historical moment, such as “Black Lives Matter.” She said the artist deliberately did not want to tether the protest to a particular time period, in order to emphasize that the struggle for racial equality is ongoing. “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” “No,” “Not”—these are expressions of demand and defiance that could apply to a number of justice-related issues and that encompass people of all races.

Learn more at https://cathedral.org/college/windows/.

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DANCE: “Still I Rise,” choreographed by Sean Cheesman: I really miss the TV show So You Think You Can Dance, which had aspiring dancers train across genres—contemporary, hip-hop, ballroom, jazz, etc.—with renowned choreographers, performing to compete for the title of “America’s favorite dancer.” It was entertaining, impressive (the athleticism!), and often moving. Here’s a contemporary routine choreographed by Sean Cheesman to spoken word artist Alexis Henry’s reading of a classic poem by Maya Angelou about Black strength and defiance. It’s danced by Koine “Koko” Iwasaki, Kiki Nyemchek, Taylor Sieve, and Mark Villaver. It’s from season 14, episode 12, which aired September 4, 2017.

(Another memorable Cheesman-choreographed dance from season 14 is an African jazz duet to Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II,” which unfortunately, I cannot find online.)

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ARTICLE: “Stephen Towns’ Quilted Works Emphasize Black Joy as Resistance in ‘Safer Waters’” by Kate Mothes: Through June 14, the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas is hosting the exhibition Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury, featuring eleven quilts and six paintings by the Baltimore-based artist Stephen Towns [previously]. Black history has always been an important aspect of Towns’s work, and in this series he was inspired by historic photographs (by Bruce Mozert) of Paradise Park, a segregated attraction in Silver Springs, Florida, that operated from 1949 to 1969 and that was popular among Black vacationers, providing a space for leisure and togetherness away from Jim Crow.

Towns, Stephen_All We Knew Was Joy — Stephen Towns (American, 1980–), *All We Knew Was Joy*, 2025. Natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, cubic zirconia, glass beads, and shell, 55 × 65 1/2 in.

Towns began his Paradise Park series in 2022 after reading Remembering Paradise Park by Cynthia Wilson-Graham and Lu Vickers, and this show is a continuation of it, for which he made seven new quilts (pictured in Mothes’s article). His art is displayed alongside some of Mozert’s photographs and related objects from Florida archives and collectors. See an exhibition walk-through on the artist’s Instagram page; see also photos from the opening on January 16–17.

Here is a short 2024 interview with Towns about this body of work, as presented at the earlier exhibition Private Paradise: A Figurative Exploration of Black Rest and Recreation at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York:

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SONGS:

Gospel music is one of the many gifts the Black church has given the world. Here are two songs from that distinctive choral tradition.

>> “Perfect Praise (How Excellent)” by Brenda Joyce Moore, performed by the Sunday Service Choir: Written in 1989 based on Psalm 8, this song gained recognition through its performance on the 1990 album This Is the Day by Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago, featuring Lecresia Campbell. It has since become a gospel choir standard, though often with the lead vocals eliminated (and that part taken by the full choir). It’s performed in this video by Sunday Service at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris on March 1, 2020.

>> “He’s a Wonder” by Jamel Garner, performed by the Chicago Mass Choir, feat. Cornelius Owens: This song about Jesus’s miracles is from the Chicago Mass Choir’s 2024 album Greater Is Coming.

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PODCAST EPISODES:

>> “Artist Archetypes with Jakari Sherman,” Be. Make. Do., January 21, 2025: I really enjoyed this conversation with Jakari Sherman on the soul|makers podcast hosted by Rev. Lisa Cole Smith, where he describes his journey as an artist and a believer. Sherman is a choreographer within the tradition of stepping, a percussive dance practice in which dancers use primarily their hands and feet to create music. Stepping comes from the African American Greek letter organizations and has roots, Sherman explains, in the antebellum South, where enslaved people had their drums taken away and thus had to find ways to express the rhythms they felt using just the floor and their own bodies. (Tap evolved largely for the same reason.)

Sherman is the creative director of [Jk]creativ, a multidisciplinary company developing purpose-driven and truth-seeking cultural works. From 2007 to 2014 he served as the artistic director of Step Afrika! and has continued to develop and direct works for them, such as Drumfolk and The Migration (which I saw in 2024 and was excellent). To establish a foundation for his scholarly research on the history of stepping, he completed a master of arts program in ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in 2015. Below is a trailer for one of Sherman’s latest works, Our Road Home, an interactive rhythmic production that meditates “on what is means to find freedom—and to live it fully in body, soul, and spirit”; it premiered last June as part of a year-long collaboration with the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.

>> “Cole Arthur Riley – Black Liturgies,” Nomad, February 9, 2024: Tim Nash interviews Cole Arthur Riley, the best-selling author of Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human (which grew out of her popular Instagram account @blackliturgies) and This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. She is a wise, feeling, richly spiritual and embodied writer and speaker whose work I’ve appreciated. In this conversation she discusses her hang-ups with the Book of Common Prayer; battling chronic illness; balancing the active and contemplative lives; the revival of lament; self-sacrifice versus self-care; her experience of white people engaging with her work (“I like to think that there’s something mysterious that’s healed in us when we encounter each other’s interior worlds; when we hear words written by a Black woman toward God, that that could somehow move someone in some way, and move us closer to each other”); and what hope means to her and where she sees signs of it.

Even though I, as a white person, am not the intended audience for the book Black Liturgies, in reading it, I found it meaningful to listen to the cries of Riley’s heart. While many of the prayers are particular to the experience of being Black, still many others are general enough that they could be prayed by anyone. Part 1, organized thematically, consists of chapters such as “Dignity,” “Wonder,” “Doubt,” “Lament,” “Rage,” and “Rest,” whereas part 2 contains prayers for dawn, day, and dusk as well as for the liturgical year, secular holidays, and life occasions. I like the names for God with which she opens each prayer—e.g., “God of the shadows,” “God who expands,” “Divine Labyrinth,” “God aware,” “God of locked doors,” “God who reclaims,” “God our home,” “God of delight,” “God of the art that will never be seen,” “God who whispers”; it has prompted me to consider the names and descriptions I use for God and how they influence how I pray.

To give you a flavor of Black Liturgies, here are two prayers from the book (and note that prayers are only one component; also included are letters, quotes, questions for contemplation, confessions and assurances of pardon, and benedictions):

For Marveling at Your Own Face

God of the flesh,
When we consider what is worthy of our wonder, it is easy to forget our own faces, our bodies. The world is relentless in indoctrinating us into self-hatred—into anti-Blackness, into transphobia, into misogyny in all forms. We are slowly and steadily brainwashed to despise our own faces from the time we’re tall enough to stare up at ourselves in the mirror. How can we resist this? Let the tyranny of the mirror be no more. May it instead become a portal—to delight, to pleasure, and to love. These noses, these hips, the way our hair rises and falls. The memories etched into our hands and faces. Remind us of the miracle of flesh that grows back, of blood that pulses warm beneath the skin that holds us. Of bodies, these holy beautiful bodies, that are working a thousand unseen miracles just so that we can read these lines, breathe this air, cry or not cry. As we peer into the face before us, remind us that we are something to behold. We believe; forgive our unbelief. Ase.

For Those Who Doomscroll

Still God,
We confess that we are addicted to pessimism. Although we rarely name it as such, so much of our attention is devoted to negativity. Show us how we use technology to soothe and stir the aches in us. Keep us from turning control over to our anxiety, that it would no longer feed itself with news of tragedy and impending disaster. It is easy to become lost, buried in the quicksand of digital catastrophe. Draw our attention upward. Guide us to look away habitually; and not just away, but up at the sky, the grass, the table. Guide us inward as well. Acquaint us with goodness again. In the world, and in ourselves. Let us follow the children, freed from the grip of seriousness. Renew our playfulness. Lead us into wise rhythms of engagement, retreating to rest and breathe. Remind us that there is much the world needs, including our attention to atrocity—but if we watch the world burn for long enough, the fire will become our only reality. Amen.

This is part two of a three-part series based on some of my art encounters at the Christians in the Visual Arts conference held June 13–16, 2019, at Bethel University. This post covers a handful of notable artworks I was introduced to through slides; part three will cover art I experienced in person through the conference’s exhibitions and auction. Read part one, about the Sacred Spaces tour of Minneapolis, here.

In his introductory remarks to the 2019 CIVA conference, Chris Larson cited Lauren Bon’s Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, the eponymous work of the Brooklyn Rail–curated exhibition running through November 24 at the church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti in Venice, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale. It’s a great rallying quote, one that I hadn’t heard before but that I can really get behind.

Bon, Lauren_Artists Need to Create — Lauren Bon (American, 1962–), *Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy*, 2006. Neon, edition 1 of 12. Photo: Joshua White, courtesy of the Metabolic Studio, Los Angeles.

The theme of the conference was “Are We There Yet,” a deliberately broad question which I took as referring to the conversation between serious art and serious faith, which CIVA has been heavily engaged in over its forty-year history. We talked about where “there” is and unpacked other aspects of the conference title, but I’m sidestepping those discussions to focus on the visual.

Wayne Roosa oriented our gathering by introducing us to two conceptual art projects by Simon Starling that offer opposing archetypes of the journey. The first, more aspirational one is Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2), which involved the movement of a wooden shed from one Swiss riverside location to another. “This journey of 8 km downstream from Schweizerhalle to the centre of Basel was undertaken through the temporary mutation of the shed into a boat. This boat, a copy of a traditional Weidling, was made only with wood from the shed and was subsequently used as a transport system for the remaining parts of the structure. The shed already included an oar of the type used on Weidlings nailed to its facade as decoration. In its new location, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the boat was then dismantled and once again re-configured into its original form, but for a few scars left over from its life as a boat, it stands just as it once did several kilometres up-stream” [source].

Starling, Simon_Shedboatshed — Simon Starling (British, 1967–), *Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2* (production still), 2005. Wooden shed, 390 × 600 × 340 cm.

“What I’m doing in a gallery situation,” says the artist, “is presenting a journey that I’ve been on, a process I’ve undertaken, and I’m asking for people to look at that in reverse. The circularity of many of the projects is a device to tell a story and it means that if you’re making a work about process, if you start and end in the same place, then somehow the journey becomes the important thing.” I think of lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from”—and further down, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

The second Starling work we considered was Autoxylopyrocycloboros, “a four-hour entropic voyage made across Loch Long [in Scotland] on a small wooden steamboat fuelled by wood cut piece-by-piece from its own hull.” This theatre of destruction ends with the boat’s debris floating—or sinking, as it were—in the water, Starling and his crewmate bobbing in their life vests somewhere out of frame. (The journey is presented in gallery settings as a series of thirty-eight color transparencies.) The title is an extrapolation of “ouroboros,” the mythical serpent who eats his own tail.

Starling, Simon_Autoxylopyrocycloboros — Simon Starling (British, 1967–), *Autoxylopyrocycloboros*, 2006. 38 color transparencies, 6 × 7 cm each.

Roosa suggested that as we navigate the waters, we can either self-destruct, eating ourselves alive, or we can deconstruct and then reconstruct. As an organization, we ought to be committed to the latter—taking apart the structure we started with and putting it back together.

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Over two and a half days of conference, there were several artists’ panels that brought to the fore some truly exciting work. I especially enjoyed hearing artists Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, a married couple, discuss their different artistic media, styles, content choices, and creative processes, and the way their work interacts with the other’s. Both explore themes of family, faith, and African American heritage.

Sedrick Huckaby is a painter, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor known for his portraits. His earliest body of work is a series of impasto paintings of his maternal grandmother, Hallie Beatrice Welcome Carpenter (“Big Momma”), inside her old wood-framed house in Fort Worth, Texas. These are so tender—they show her resting, drinking coffee, reading her Bible, getting ready for church, talking with family. After Big Momma died, he continued making in absentia portraits of her by depicting accessories she wore or household spaces that bear her imprint—The Shoes She Wore, The Altar Dresser. Sedrick is now renovating Big Momma’s house to serve as a creative project space for the neighborhood.

Huckaby, Sedrick_Sitting in Her Room — Sedrick Huckaby (American, 1975–), *Sitting in Her Room*, 2008. Oil on canvas in rustic wood framework, 48 × 36 in.

Family has long been the primary subject of Sedrick’s art. I love the 2006 portrait he painted of his wife seated at the foot of their bed and holding their firstborn son, Rising Sun. Mother and child are surrounded by family quilts, made by aunts and grandmothers. The opening between the two wall-hanging quilts forms a square halo around Letitia’s head.