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DONNA MINTZ BIO Donna Mintz is a visual artist whose painting and installation is a meditation on memory and place. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Mobile Museum of Art, where her painting hangs in the ongoing exhibition American Art: 1945 to the Present. Exhibited widely throughout the country, she has held solo exhibitions at such nearby venues as the Georgia College Museum, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the Lamar Dodd Art Center at LaGrange College. Mintz writes on visual art for such arts journals as ArtsATL, BurnAway and Sculpture magazine, and is at work on a collection of essays about the life and influence of the writer James Agee, one of which, 'The Immediate World,' was published in the Summer 2016 issue of the Sewanee Review. She holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South. ARTIST STATEMENT Beginning this work, I returned to my abiding exploration of time, place, and memory with the idea of the reliquary, a term in Christian Catholicism given to a receptacle, historically gold and jeweled, for something holy or revered, a concept that crosses all major religions. It matters not that the reliquary may or may not hold the object it claims – a Relic of the True Cross, or a bone fragment of Saint Paul; what matters is our perception that it does. The reliquary is significant because we have exalted it with attention, beauty and mystery. Forged in the stars, gold has been employed in works of art over the millennia to inspire and to evoke a sense of grandeur and awe. That which we most care about we make beautiful. The divine figures of ancient Egyptians, the illuminated medieval manuscripts, Byzantine mosaics, the heavenly light in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the golden joinery of Japanese kintsugi, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. I have used gold leaf in much the same manner, but with mundane materials of found and personal papers, journal and diaristic writing in collage, the increments of a life. Only as I reached the very end of making it did I come to understand that this body of work was born from the ideas of a book I have been writing for several years. Stars at Noon (its working title) is a prose poem to two creations that have profoundly influenced me – the extraordinary and unclassifiable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the writer James Agee’s collaboration with photographer Walker Evans and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), an installation of 400 stainless steel poles in the High Plains desert of western New Mexico. Separated by medium and time, these two disparate works are united by the capacity to evoke awe and to approximate human prayer in those willing to surrender to deep experience. From silence, each work