Sanctuaries

Installation view, "Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art," at MOCRA, 1993.

MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition opened Sunday, February 14, 1993. Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art featured more than 100 works from an wide-ranging roster of artists, including

Seyed Alavi	Steven Heilmer	Jim Morphesis
Lita Albuquerque	Tobi Kahn	Daniel Ramirez
Craig Antrim	Paul Kos	James Rosen
Nick Boskovich	Frank LaPeña	Susan Schwalb
Frederick Brown	Charlotte Lichtblau	Thomas Skomski
Michael David	Stephen Luecking	Kazuaki Tanahashi
Stephen De Staebler	Bernard Maisner	Michael Tracy
Eleanor Dickinson	Ann McCoy	Brian Tripp
Donald Grant

MOCRA’s Founding Director, Terrence Dempsey, S.J., noted at the time that

Sanctuaries offers an overview of a movement that gained momentum in the 1980s and has grown in strength in the early 1990s. A generation of artists have begun to renew their interest in the religious and spiritual dimensions of art, and within the last dozen years or so they have achieved recognition in the mainstream art world for the spiritual concerns which form the substance of their work.

Fr. Dempsey had assembled an extensive list of such artists in the course of writing his doctoral dissertation. These artists were generally in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They tended to be disillusioned with the celebrity mentality of the 1980s and in response were seeking the “spiritual.” Their faith or religious practices were not always particularly orthodox, and in fact many would draw from various beliefs and philosophies.

Fr. Dempsey had concluded from his research that this artistic concern with the religious and spiritual dimensions was pervasive and yet not an organized movement, having no group manifesto. For the artists, this pursuit was risky. One artist, warned that his work would not sell, replied that the ideas were too important to ignore, whether or not the art was salable. Fr. Dempsey reflected,

For some of them, having faith is tough. They have to struggle. These are not commissioned works-they are the work of an artist pursuing personal vision or questions. … These artists have often been met with indifference and sometimes suspicion by religious and cultural institutions. Yet they have pursed this exploration even when it was financially unwise. They have done so because they perceived something was in danger of being lost: a sense of mystery, ritual, tradition-a sense that a major dimension of being human was being ignored.

The title Recovering the Holy in part alludes to the rediscovery by many contemporary artists of the power of art with a spiritual dimension to engage the viewer affectively. Indeed, said Fr. Dempsey, their art is compelling precisely because of the struggle.

Installation view, "Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy In Contemporary Art," at MOCRA, 1993. From left: Steven Heilmer, "Nativity Stone: Mother's Milk"; Don Grant, "Rope and Candle"; Craig Antrim, "Icon Wall."

And so, for this inaugural exhibition of what was believed to be the first museum of its kind in the world, Fr. Dempsey assembled 100 works by 25 contemporary American artists reflecting the country’s religious and ethnic diversity. Artists came from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and Native American backgrounds, and their styles ranged from traditional Western figuration to minimalist and geometric abstraction.

The Artist and Sacred Space

Yesterday we looked briefly at how MOCRA came to be. Today we continue the story with some of the surprises that come with renovating an older building, and the encouraging response to a pre-opening conference.

Several months prior to MOCRA’s official opening in February 1993, St. Louis Post-Dispatch cultural news editor Robert W. Duffy reported on the “race to finish” the gallery prior to a November 7, 1992 meeting of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture (ARC) to be hosted in the new museum.

Asbestos! MOCRA gets a new ceiling.

Construction had begun in the spring of 1992, and with the target of a completion date of early September 1992, everything seemed on track for the November 7 opening conference with plenty of time to install the art. Then, in late August, asbestos was discovered in much of the museum’s ceiling, and all construction stopped until it was removed and a new ceiling installed. To describe the abatement process as messy would be a severe understatement. By the time the project was completed the museum had a new ceiling and new drywall around its whole circumference.

Just days before the conference, Fr. Dempsey and the installation crew consider a work by Michael David.

Undaunted, Fr. Dempsey and the small MOCRA staff turned their energies to the ARC conference. The last of the scaffolding was removed on November 4, and the entire inaugural exhibition (which was to be previewed at the conference) had to be installed in two days. On top of that, there was an overlap between the installation completion and the arrival of the artists, speakers, and guests for the conference. Adrenaline and frayed nerves were in evidence—but it happened, and the museum was ready for the conference.

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The program, titled The Artist and Sacred Space, featured lectures and reflections from a number of distinguished speakers (titles and institutions are given as at the time of the conference):

Dr. Jane Daggett Dillenberger	(Professor of Art History, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA)
Dr. John Renard	(Professor of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)
Rev. Terrence E. Dempsey, S.J.	(Founding Director of MOCRA and Assistant Professor of Art History, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)
Doug Adams	(Professor of Art History, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA)
David Miller	(Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY)
Rev. Maurice B. McNamee, S.J.	(Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of Samuel Cupples House, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)

These presentations were followed by a panel of 12 artists participating in MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition:

Seyed Alavi (Oakland, CA)	Charlotte Lichtblau (New York, NY)
Lita Albuquerque (Los Angeles, CA)	Stephen Luecking (Chicago, IL)
Craig Antrim (Los Angeles, CA)	Bernard Maisner (New York, NY)
Frederick J. Brown (New York, NY)	James Rosen (Augusta, GA)
Eleanor Dickinson (San Francisco, CA)	Thomas Skomski (Chicago, IL)
Tobi Kahn (New York, NY)	Daniel Ramirez (Madison, WI)

The artists and the audience engaged in an animated conversation on why many of today’s artists were addressing the religious and spiritual dimensions in their work.

The conference and its discussions reflected the excitement among the participants about the imminent launching of MOCRA. Artist Eleanor Dickinson remarked, “Art of the spirit and the soul is not very saleable. This museum is something we’ve needed for a long time to counter the excessive commercialization of art.” Over 120 people from across the country—St. Louis, New York, Washington, Chicago, Syracuse, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston—attended the conference, including about 30 members of ARC.

After the excitement of the conference had subsided, it was now time to attend to the final preparations for MOCRA’s grand opening.

–David Brinker, Assistant Director

• Tomorrow: A new sanctuary opens

Genesis

The prospectus for what would come to be MOCRA cites the Mission Statement of the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture (ARC)-authored by a group including theologian Paul Tillich and Alfred Barr, the founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art:

Religion in isolation from the arts is starved of concrete insights into the fullness of human life. Art gives religion the eyes to see man [sic] in all his dimensions, the ears to hear the voice of his inner life, and the instruments with which to communicate with man in his actual condition. At the same time, our knowledge of the past suggests that the arts excel when realized within that transcendent, unifying vision which is the heart of religion.

The prospectus also recognizes that the actual situation was more of “an uneasy relationship between organized religion and the visual arts,” “often characterized by suspicion and misunderstanding,” with the result that “one of our most important avenues to religious experience, the imagination, has been deprived of contemporary, evocative images that point to God.”

The prospectus offers an alternative vision. It takes note of “a growing number of artists” who have “created art that reflects faith expressions of, or explorations into, the religious dimension. … As diverse as these expressions are, they all are marked by a sense of profound respect and genuine awe.”

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This vision was explored concretely in the doctoral dissertation of Jesuit priest Terrence E. Dempsey, S.J. Fr. Dempsey studied at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, with such noted art historians and theologians as Peter Selz, Jane Daggett Dillenberger, John Dillenberger, and Doug Adams-all pioneers in the study of art and religion. Fr. Dempsey’s focus was the re-emergence of sacred content in American art of the 1980s.

His research brought him into contact with hundreds of artists throughout the U.S. as well as gallery and museum personnel who assisted him in his quest. The word of mouth spreads quickly in the visual arts community, and soon artists who had spoken with Dempsey were letting other like-minded artists know about Dempsey’s research, and they, in turn, began contacting him.

Terrence Dempsey, S.J., and Maurice McNamee, S.J. at MOCRA in Nov. 1992, during the installation of the inaugural exhibition.

In 1990 Dempsey was hired as an assistant professor of art history at Saint Louis University (SLU), and as the assistant to Maurice B. McNamee, S.J., founding Director of Samuel Cupples House on the SLU campus. Though Dempsey curated small-scale shows in the Cupples House basement gallery, he was uncertain of where to go with his ideas and his research.

Then an opportunity presented itself: the chapel of Fusz Memorial Hall, a building that for 35 years had functioned as a house of philosophical studies for Jesuits in training to be priests or brothers, was vacant. Fr. McNamee suggested that the spacious chapel would be an ideal space for Fr. Dempsey to present large-scale exhibitions. Dempsey’s proposal to use the space as a museum was accepted by SLU President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., and on March 20, 1991, Fr. Biondi formally announced the development of a new interfaith museum of contemporary art.

As with all such projects, there were some hitches and surprises along the way (as we’ll see tomorrow), but on February 14, 1993, MOCRA officially opened to the public with an exhibition titled, Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art.

–David Brinker, Assistant Director

• Tomorrow: “The Artist and Sacred Space”: setting the stage for a new museum

Beginning with a look back

The February 1993 issue of Art News included a notice penned by art historian Peter Selz announcing the opening on February 14, 1993 of “what may well be the first interfaith museum of contemporary religious art…”

It’s been over 15 years now since Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) opened its doors to the public. The numbers are impressive enough for a small non-profit arts entity: 35 exhibitions, over 160 artists exhibited. But this is a museum rendered unique both by its space and its mission: a former chapel that is now the world’s first interfaith museum of contemporary art that engages religious and spiritual themes. MOCRA is dedicated to furthering the dialogue between contemporary artists and the world’s faith traditions, and to serving as a forum for interfaith understanding.

MOCRA is celebrating this anniversary year with two exhibitions–Pursuit of the Spirit in Fall 2008 and Good Friday in Spring 2009–that draw mainly on the museum’s collection and aim to showcase both the breadth and the depth of the work that has been shown since 1993. Since we hope that this new blog will introduce many readers to MOCRA, we thought that our readers might appreciate a survey of MOCRA’s previous exhibitions. So in addition to posts about current activities at the museum, each week we will feature a previous exhibition, giving a summary of what the exhibition was about, the artist or artists included, any special programs that accompanied the exhibition, and a sampling of images from the show.

This week we will start, as a very sensible nanny once counseled, “at the very beginning.”

• Tomorrow, we’ll explore in brief how MOCRA came to be.
• On Thursday, we’ll eavesdrop on a major conference that took place even before the museum opened.
• Finally, on Friday we’ll look back at MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition, Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art.

–David Brinker, Assistant Director