Religion and Contemporary Art A Curious Accord

Introduction

1. The New Visibility of Religion in Contemporary Art: Four Interpretive Horizons

2. Exploring Theological Dimensions of the Work of Art

3. Translating Religion: Contemporary Art Through a Postsecular Lens

4. The Question of Criticism: What to Do with Our Revelations?

5. Curating Faith: Art, Religion, and the Curatorial

6. A Loving Regard: Contemporary Art and Expanding the Archive

7. Exhibition as Pilgrimage: Visual Strategies for Interfaith Dialogue

8. Iconic: Contemporary Portraiture and Sacred Personhood

9. Relic-ing Now: Reliquary Strategies of Materiality and Memory in Contemporary Art

10. Contemporary Art as Pilgrimage Site: Ambrosio’s As Far as the Eye Can Travel Zine

11. Rogue Priests: Ritual, Sacrament, and Witness in Contemporary Art

12. Walking Naked and Barefoot: When Ancient Jewish Prophets Meet Avant-Garde Performance Artists

13. Revisiting "Art in the Dark": Thomas McEvilley, Performance Art, and the End(s) of Shamanism

14. Infused with Light: Christian Traces in Multimedia Installation Art

15. Bill Viola, the Icon, and the Apophatic Sublime

16. The Lived Religion of Andy Warhol

17. "A King Aesthetic?": Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and the Ethos of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

18. From the Wounds Grace: John August Swanson and the Theological Aesth/Ethics of Liberation

19. Cities of Light: Phillip K. Smith III and the Light & Space Movement

20. Performativity and the Flesh: The Economy of the Icon in Lia Chavez’s Light Body

21. Theaster Gates and the Good Use of Forgotten Things

22. On Preaching, Performance Art, and Television: Christian Jankowski’s The Holy Artwork

23. Tools of the Apocalypse: Eschatology in Contemporary Jewish and Catholic Art

24. Back to the Garden – Utopia and Paradise in the work of Jim Shaw, Liza Lou, Shirin Neshat, and Shoja Azari

25. Deep Waters: Art and the Revival of Religion in Contemporary China

26. Salvation in the Fallen World: On Meng Yan’s Recent Monumental Works

27. Chrysanne Stathacos and Charwei Tsai: The Mandala

28. Performing Memory and Mourning: Diane Victor’s Martyred Women

29. Weaving Land and Water: On the Poetics of Diasporic and Indigenous Resistance

30. Al Buraq: Explorations of Liminality in Contemporary Islamic Art

Afterword: A Colloquy with Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, James Elkins, Ben Quash, and S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate.

Biography

Ronald R. Bernier is Professor of Humanities at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His books include The Unspeakable Art of Bill Viola (2014), Beyond Belief (2010), and Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (2007). His research interests are modern and contemporary art and religious studies.

Rachel Hostetter Smith is Gilkison Distinguished Professor of Art History at Taylor University. She publishes widely on aspects of religion and the arts, including two edited volumes of Religion and the Arts and several exhibition catalogues, and has developed numerous international, intercultural art projects and traveling exhibitions, most recently Matter + Spirit: A Chinese/American Exhibition.

"This remarkable volume invites into conversation an impressive assembly of interlocutors and an impressively diverse set of approaches to a still-mystifyingly understudied subject. Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord　represents a signal contribution that brings into creative relation its two key terms to demonstrate how they are not simply manifest in adjacency but often also inextricably fused. Highly recommended to scholars in art and/or religion as to artists in all media!"

Sally M. Promey, Yale University, USA