Spirituality and Religion
PAR44 tackles public art's complex contemporary relationship with spirituality. Guest editor Jon Spayde explains, "In juxtaposing God, religion, spirit, public spirit, art-making, truth-seeking, belief, practice, and prayer in these pages, we come to no conclusion. Instead, we celebrate the variety of shapes, verbal and visual, that reflection on the ultimate questions can take, and we pay homage to the inextinguishable human urge to image a Greatness beyond all images."
In this issue:
Arlene Goldbard talks with four prominent contemporary public artists whose spiritual lives-in-art span a spectrum from Buddhism to unconventional Christianity to passionate belief in community and in the order of the universe.
Eleanor Heartney looks into the core issues at stake when public art arouses religion-centered controversy and discovers that genuinely antireligious artists are quite rare, but art-inspired struggles over the Establishment of Religion clause in the Constitution are not.
