Upcoming is the opening of a curatorial project I've been working on for over a year, an exhibit of contemporary art that explores the complex legacy of the activist Dorothy Day. I'm excited about the work that is going to be on display, including one piece of mine. I hope to see some of you there.
December
16, 2017 - January 12, 2018
Opening Reception December 16, 5-7PM
The Gallery at the Sheen Center
18 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012
(gallery entrance on Elizabeth St.)
A New World: Contemporary Art Exploring Dorothy Day's Vision of
Social Justice
The Sheen
Center for Thought and Culture and the Dorothy Day Guild are pleased to
announce the opening of the exhibit A New
World: Contemporary Art Exploring
Dorothy Day's Vision of Social Justice. This visually striking assembly of
work, including photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, brings
together mainstream and marginalized artists inspired by Day's legacy of faith
in action. Conceived and curated by
sculptor and painter, Anthony Santella, the exhibition will open on Saturday,
December 16, 2017 at The Gallery at the Sheen Center, corner of Bleecker and
Elizabeth Streets, in New York City. One
and all are warmly invited to the opening reception, 5 to 7 pm, December
16. The exhibition will run through
January 12, 2018.
Dorothy Day
(1897-1980), a journalist, activist, and convert to Catholicism who is on her
way to being formally recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church, founded the
Catholic Worker to serve the homeless and hungry during the Depression. But her witness was not confined to charity;
she challenged the unjust structures making charity necessary. Today, her synthesis of deep, dogmatically
orthodox religious faith and radical social action continues to pose a profound
challenge to the liberal/conservative dichotomy of our age. Santella, who first learned of Day as a
college student, reflects that "For me, Day is a figure who unified a lot
of the fragmented contradictions in life through a radical act of faith, one
that is open to all of us to emulate."
The exhibit
juxtaposes excerpts from Day's prolific writings with artwork addressing the
ideals she devoted her life to: social justice, voluntary poverty, resistance
to racial prejudice, nonviolence, Christian anarchism, and agrarian utopianism.
The roster of artists includes those
whose work appears in The Catholic Worker
newspaper as well as the formerly homeless and imprisoned. Some work is overtly political; much addresses
the show’s themes more obliquely. Yet each artist is driven to communicate a
message of hope and warning as urgent in its own way as Day’s.
A centerpiece of the
exhibit is a wooden shrine, built from driftwood collected on the beach in
Staten Island, NYC, where Day had a cabin, demolished in 2000. Artists and the public at large are invited
to contribute small artifacts to the shrine, ex voto offerings that speak to
their understanding of Day’s legacy of faith in pursuit of justice.
"I hope that everyone
who sees the show can take away something that challenges their assumptions,"
Santella explains. "Either about
how the values of the gospel and those of our society coexist or about how art can interact with faith and the
challenge of justice -- hopefully in a way that can motivate change without
becoming political in a partisan or tribal sense."
Artists:
Arte Fogata, Robert
Aitchison, Jackie Allen, Michal Behar, Patricia Bellucci, Geoffrey Gneuhs,
GRIB, Alice Hendrickson, June Hildebrand, Imo Nse Imeh, Brian Kavanagh, Matt
Kirby, Julie Lonneman, Lori Merhige, Milt Ohring, Frank Sabatté, Anthony
Santella, Dennis Santella
About the Dorothy Day Guild:
Founded in
2005 in the Archdiocese of New York, the Dorothy Day Guild promotes the
recognition of her cause for sainthood. To
learn more, see www.dorothydayguild.org
