The Arts

Art has always had a place in churches. The eye and imagination presenting and interpreting beauty is an act of devotion. From the early donation of rare tapestries to contemporary art exhibitions, the Cathedral celebrates creativity.

Giving Way to the Transcendent

Dancers and drummers from the Forces of Nature Dance Theatre perform with musicians at Paul Winter's Annual Winter Solstice Celebration. “In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.”

MADELEINE L’ENGLE

BISHOP MANNING God has planted in all of us the longing for beauty, for greatness, for perfection. Here in this great Temple speaking to us of our fellowship with God, we find that deep instinct of our souls visibly and gloriously expressed. The Cathedral speaks to us of the limitless possibilities of our human nature. It tells us that “nothing is too great, or too high, or too beautiful, to be true,” that all this world is God’s, and that everything in art, in music, in the theatre, in literature, in education, should lift us nearer to Him.

BILL BAKER Art makes us human, and art brings us closer to God. From the beginning, cathedrals were places where beautiful art was encouraged. When you come to a service or an event at the Cathedral, you feel the presence of God through the art. The presence of God, illuminated through all this beauty.

THE REV. CANON TOM MILLER In Morningside Heights, the architecture of the Cathedral is certainly key to how closely the arts and faith work together on a grand scale to bring creativity both human and divine—and perhaps there is not too much difference between the two—to the life of St. John the Divine. In the Episcopal tradition, incarnation is an important part of the doctrine. So it is part of tradition to think that everyone in the world, not just church people, are created with this creative impulse. Artists live to investigate and understand the world and sometimes advocate. As New York’s cathedral, we claim to be a house of prayer, broadly defined, for all people, which means we have a profile beyond our denominational identity or doctrinal focus. Our mission is to serve the enlightenment of all people in ways of justice and peace, and in that regard, to encourage respect for the dignity of all human beings. Art helps us to do that. DEAN MORTON From time immemorial, religion’s major partners in bringing people together in gratitude and thankfulness have been the arts: music, poetry, literature, dance, theater, architecture, sculpture, and the visual arts—all of which throughout history have deepened compassion leading to personal involvement in working for peace and justice.

BISHOP DIETSCHE The art that we are bringing here expresses the ways in which people are living out that attempt to give way to the transcendent. A lot of the work we bring is very secular. Every work doesn’t have to be a picture of Jesus. That doesn’t matter because it is the artistic enterprise in itself that is sacred and that flows from God through us. I started off in architecture school and I worked as a cartoonist for years before I was a priest. Even when I am drawing a cartoon, I feel that it is an expression of something which is speaking in and through me of God.

MARILYN NELSON The Cathedral uses contemporary art as a way of inviting people to that experience of awe. I don’t know another church that does anything quite like this. When you invite art and artists into a place like this, you’re inviting them to bring their own most ambitious works. And the ambition of most artists is to create awe.

“I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors —”

EMILY DICKINSON, INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN POETS CORNER, 1984

Divinity is Very Real

Top left Author Joan Didion and actor Vanessa Redgrave, who performed her one-woman shows of Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking in 2010 and Blue Nights in 2014.

"Bless all the people who have worked, worshiped and wondered and wandered here."

vanessa redgrave

Bottom left Organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and presented in collaboration with the Cathedral, Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) was the first major North American survey of tableaux, sculptures, and photomontages by important South African artist Jane Alexander. Infantry, 2013.

Top The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, attributed to Bagnacavallo (Bartolomeo Ramenghi the Elder). 16th century Italian. Installed in the Chapel of St. Ambrose. MICHAEL BIERUT The unrepeatable is hard to find in our world today. So to go to a very special place and experience something new that was created just for that space, or to experience a text or a voice that is transformed by being in a singular space, is a one and only thing. This is what happens when you experience art or music at the Cathedral.

“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.” ZORA NEALE HURSTON,

INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN POETS CORNER, 2015

MARY JANE BROCK Very often when I’m at the Cathedral, it’s not about a church service. I am there learning something, listening to Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion, or looking at art like Xu Bing's Phoenix.. That sense of divinity is very real, but it’s not necessarily a religious feeling.

M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE When I heard that Jane Alexander’s work would be shown in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I wondered how the work I always associated with South Africa would translate here. Alexander’s work arrived in the Cathedral during the same fortnight as excerpts from a new memoir by Guantanamo Bay detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, were released in Slate magazine. The towering Cathedral walls, the cornerstone that was laid in 1892, mirror the longings of the first great waves of European immigrants to the city; 1892 was the year that Ellis Island—the conduit to the hungry and the penniless of Europe—opened. There, strengthened by the walls enclosing the seven Chapels of the Tongues, commemorating the major immigrant groups pouring into and building the city, I sat and read an excerpt of Slahi’s memoirs, thinking of the hundred men on hunger strike, and the many who are being force-fed as I wrote. I thought about what it might mean, in a time of historical amnesia, for a church such as St. John the Divine to carve out spaces in which we can remember the body in pain: to invite the liturgies of other faiths, to share the pulpit with the other, to invite in difficult cargos. This, I understood, is not a church that aims to use its monumental structure or its gilded beauty for forgetting.

A Way of Bringing God to People

Top Dancers from the Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Cathedral Artists in Residence.

Middle left Fools Mass, a work of medieval hymns and chants, is performed by the Dzieci Theatre Company in the Cathedral.

Middle right Artist in residence Eiko Otake performing at the Cathedral as a part of the Dignity initiative.

Bottom left The Last Supper. Naoto Nakagawa. Acrylic on linen canvas. 54 x 84" inches. 2014. The Value of Food. LISA SCHUBERT In the 1970s, the Cathedral founded its Artist in Residence program, which has since woven living art and artists into the fabric of the Cathedral, providing time and space for artists to respond to the Cathedral as a powerful creative statement in stone, and opportunities for the public to access their work.

MARGARET DIEHL The Cathedral is full of art, from its towering nave, pillars, Pilgrims' Pavement and stained glass windows to the tapestries, paintings, and statues that adorn the bays and chapels. Art exhibited in a large public building, especially one with history and durability, devoted not to commerce or power but to the gifts of the spirit, reinforces the meanings we give our lives, our dreams, our sacrifices. This is where art soars beyond the artist’s vision and is shaped by the place it inhabits and the events that mark the consciousness of an era.

MARSHA RA Art is a way of bringing God to people.

ISADORA WILKENFELD Beginning with The Value of Water in 2011 and continuing through The Value of Food in 2015, The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies in 2016, and The Value of Sanctuary in 2019, the Cathedral has explored a number of overlapping themes relating to life, value, and human dignity. Through these interlinked exhibitions, we’ve worked to expand upon a vision that begins with the need people have for the understanding and respect of others, and the faith that all people have within them a divine spark.

ANDREW MROCZEK &

JUAN JOSE BARBOZA-GUBO The process of creating the Virgenes de la Puerta series began with in-depth conversations with several transgender women in Peru. To be a part of the Cathedral’s Sanctuary exhibition provided our work with a site and an audience that we didn’t imagine possible. The roster of artists in the Sanctuary exhibition is a list of artists we’ve loved and followed for years: Kiki Smith, Latoya Ruby-Frazier, Jenny Holzer, and Louise Bourgeois, just to name a few. What might not be apparent is just how special this is for the women we’ve worked with, who are generally not able to enter into spaces like these in the more urban areas of Peru. The majority of the women in our series were living in Lima at the time we collaborated with them. Unfortunately, there are members of the clergy who are very vocal in their ridicule of LGBTQ–identifying people within their sermons, their writings, and even on television and radio interviews. This creates a toxic environment for gay and trans Peruvians—it makes it permissible for people to hate, chastise, and discriminate against gender and sexual minorities. For the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to allow this work to be displayed within its walls sends a message of inclusivity to the women we’ve photographed. We like to think it also provides them some hope. LISA SCHUBERT Art matters to the future because it speaks directly to the individual; it is here now, directly in front of us. Unlike the effects of history, which are always with us, it is visible and set apart from us, inviting reflection.

MARION KAHAN And, worth mentioning, is that it is always a challenge to figure out how to hang something in a place where you can’t hang anything. We have to use holes that are already there. We cannot create new ones.

Extending the Meaning of Prayer and Personhood

DEAN KOWALSKI Art must clarify what is so that we can imagine what might be. If, by being under this roof, art and liturgy create a conversation to draw people into how they might be an agent for justice, then that work is a fit for the Cathedral.

ISADORA WILKENFELD Edwina Sandys’ Christa astounded its first viewers by reminding them that the Incarnation is a radically political concept, inseparable from the politics of the human body. Through the work of the artists brought together in The Christa Project, the vital importance of otherwise unseen and unmemorialized bodies became clear. Not only were Black, female, queer, poor, Latinx, transgender, maimed, scarred, oppressed, and triumphant bodies essential to the completion of the physical structure of this church—they are essential to its spiritual wholeness as well. By honoring the histories of these bodies, all bodies, the Cathedral added a new layer to its founding mission, extending the meaning of prayer and personhood to all the pilgrims at our doors.

"WHEREVER YOU LIE, YOU WILL FACE THAT PLACE’S PROBLEMS. IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS, THEN YOU HAVE ART." XU BING

Top Phoenix, Xu Bing. Mixed materials. Xu Bing at the Cathedral, curated by Judith Goldman. 2014-2015.

“Of all of the art, Phoenix takes the crown. In the western tradition, the phoenix is a symbol of resurrection. In the Chinese tradition, it’s a symbol of the life well lived according to Confucian virtues. You had these enormous, really over-the-top works of art within the enormous over the top architecture of the

Cathedral. The only other place for them might have been an airline terminal.”

tom fedorek

Bottom Christa. Edwina Sandys. Resin with bronze patina on a lucite cross. BISHOP DIETSCHE Christa had first been hung at the Cathedral over a third of a century ago. That occasion was met with substantial controversy, not only in the general public, but among bishops, clergy, and lay members of this church. The very idea of a female depiction of the suffering Jesus hanging in a church dedicated to the worship of God and the glory of Christ was more than many were ready for in the early 1980s. But in an evolving, growing, learning church, we may be ready to see Christa not only as a work of art but as an object of devotion, over our altar, with all of the challenges that may come with that for many visitors to the Cathedral, or indeed, for all of us. We welcome those challenges, for if any rendering of the cross of Christ or any depiction of the crucifixion does not trouble us in the most personal and intimate ways, we may not be truly seeing what is before us. Saint Paul wrote that the cross is both scandal and stumbling block, and it is so, and must be so, in every age. EDWINA SANDYS Christa was not a conscious feminist statement, although at the time, the United Nations had just announced the Decade for Women. One of the most important things for me has been naming the piece Christa. Giving a name to a work of art is a way of communicating with the viewer. After Christa had been named, she started to have a life of her own.

BISHOP DIETSCSHE In a world and church in which we can see representations of the Christ in every race and color and ethnicity, and in the maleness of the historical Jesus, we believe that it may be, it must be, that we will be all the more blessed to see the Christ who embraces the fullness of the female as well.

ALESSANDRA BELLONI When Christa came to the Cathedral, she was considered art. Now Christa is on the altar, she is considered sacred. The Cathedral understands that Christianity is also based on pre-Christian rituals and beliefs including the female aspect of God: that God is not necessarily male. St. John the Divine accepts the female God; it is part of their spiritual mission.

“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

JAMES BALDWIN, INDUCTED INTO THE AMERICAN POETS CORNER, 2011

XU BING The Phoenix traveled to many places in the world, but the best display was seeing the pieces floating in the monumental Nave of the Cathedral. I thought it would be meaningful for Phoenix to face the doors as if the birds were ready to journey to the world outside, but I worried that the Cathedral would want the Phoenix's to face the altar. I went to Dean Kowalski. He said he would support any idea I had, explaining: “Although there are thousands of interpretations of Christianity, the core concept is to be open-minded.”

LISA SCHUBERT At the Cathedral, we believe not only that art can do work in the world, but that it can’t help doing such work: that art, like every other human activity, has multiple causes and consequences. It is easy to understand how benefit performances help people. But how does a free performance promote peace? How does an art exhibition foster social justice or encourage reverence for the natural world? Growth is subtle, incremental—except when it’s not, when the sudden wave comes, and men and women stand up and say, “Enough!” Art is a first draft of change.