Let the Art Speak - On Hope

At the heart of the 5th annual Let the Art Speak conference — held at Upper House, a Christian study center near the University of Wisconsin–Madison — visual artist Tim Lowly and United Methodist minister and writer Rev. Sherrie Lowly delivered the Saturday plenary session: "Trying to Get a Sense of Scale."

Their talk began not with art theory, but with a life: their daughter Temma, now 40, who has lived with profound cognitive and physical disabilities since a cardiac arrest in the first days of her life. For Tim, Temma has been the center of his artistic practice for decades. For Sherrie, she has been the subject of a memoir and a guide into mystery. Together, they asked the question every artist must eventually face — Who, or what, is truly at the center of your work?

Rooted in resurrection theology and the writings of N.T. Wright, this session reframes artistic vocation as participation in God's ongoing work of new creation. No sketch, no song, no poem made in the Spirit is "mere." Every act of beauty and care, Wright argues, finds its way into the world God is making.

Tim Lowly — who spent nearly three decades as gallery director and artist-in-residence at North Park University in Chicago — walked through his paintings, collaborative works, and a current drawing series, each one a meditation on human dignity, presence, and scale. Sherrie read from her memoir-in-progress, offering a rare and unflinching portrait of what it means to raise a child the world would rather set aside, and to find God precisely there.

The session also engaged Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, exploring how history-changing movements often grow unseen — like mushrooms underground — until the right moment. A message for artists who wonder whether their work matters.

This recording is an invitation to artists, makers, writers, musicians, clergy, and communities of faith who are wrestling with hope in a divided and often discouraging world.

ABOUT Let the Art Speak: is an annual conference for artists, writers, musicians, makers, and all who believe that creative expression is essential to hope and human flourishing. Hosted by the SL Brown Foundation at Upper House — a Christian study center near the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

🌐 Learn more: https://slbf.org/ltas 📍 Upper House | Madison, Wisconsin

Upper House Commons gathers the university community for spiritual, intellectual, and vocational formation.

We explore big ideas and engage in conversations that matter within arts and humanities, justice and society, leadership and vocation, science and technology, spiritual formation, and theology. Whether you are a student or faculty member at UW–Madison or beyond, working in the marketplace, or serving in the church, we see you as part of our university community. Gather with us for one of our programs —our “commons”— each a pasture for shared spiritual, intellectual, and vocational formation.

Head over to our events page to see what's coming soon, or mark your calendar for these upcoming programs.

Find out more slbf.org/upperhousecommons 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

So we want to talk about hope today. When we um this is our fifth annual Let the Art Speak conference. And um each year we think about, well, what should we talk about at the conference this year? And um back in 2025 when we began meeting, we said we should talk about hope. Um, and as the months have gone by, um, it's become more and more clear to me why we need to talk about hope right now, because I'm pretty sure that um if I was sitting and having coffee with one of you, if I as I have done with many of you, um one of the things that would come up as we would start talking about whether we're still feeling hopeful these days or how we're feeling about what's happening in our world and our life and our culture. And we would say, I'm having a hard time finding hope. So that's what we're talking about together as friends and in communities, and in our public discourse, it seems like hope is becoming a harder and harder thing to hang on to. So we thought we would talk about hope today. In his um brilliant career, marked by many ups and downs, the famous artist Rembrandt Van Ren was often drawn to depict scenes from the life of Christ, paintings, etchings, pen and ink drawings. And he was especially taken with the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. So this is a painting on 1638, a picture of Mary Magdalene being the first person to witness Jesus having been resurrected and leaving the tomb. Some people call her the first apostle, the first one to see the resurrected Christ. You have to use your imagination here a little bit, but presumably when Jesus was resurrected and stepped out from the tomb, he was unclothed. All his grave clothes were left in the tomb. So he was naked. And the the idea here is that he found these clothes belonging to a gardener, put them on, and then entered into the world in this manner. And this is how Mary Magdalene saw him. Here's a pen and ink drawing. Um, a number of years later, circa 1645, the master of Rembrandt um showing the resurrected Christ as a gardener and Mary Magdalene witnessing him. In um 1960, at age twenty-eight, John Updike, who would go on to become one of America's most important post-war writers, penned this poem. Again, he was twenty-eight. And here's just two stanzas from this poem called Seven Stanzas at Easter. This is verses four and five. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages. Let us walk through the door. The stone is rolled back, not paper mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. So John Updike believed in the resurrection of Christ. Little side note, he wrote this poem at age 28, as I said. He entered it into a regional writing contest, won first place, and got a whole a check for $100 for it. Hard to imagine, you know, after his whole life of writing and literature that would follow after that. But Updike believed in the resurrection. So the object of Christian hope is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We're six days away from Easter Sunday, and on Easter Sunday we declare that Jesus was risen from the dead, and in that declaration we say that he conquered sin and death forever. So what's the object of our hope today as Christian community gathered? Whether you belong to that community yet or not, it's the resurrection of Jesus. Well, how do we live in this post-resurrection time? A lengthy quote here is going to take three slides from N. T. Wright. And I thank Trisha Smith, who worships with me at Geneva Campus Church, for having read this on Easter Sunday. And I thought, that's so good. I want to use it next Saturday. Trisha, where did we find this? But N. T. Wright loves writing about the resurrection and the post-resurrection period and how we are to live now in light of Resurrection Sunday. So this is what N. T. Wright, the theologian, says every act of love, gratitude, and kindness, every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation, every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk, every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support for one's fellow human beings, and for that matter, one's fellow non human creatures. And of course, every prayer, all spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world. All of this will find its way through the resurrecting power of God into the new creation that God will one day make. This is the logic of the mission of God. God's recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God's people, live in the risen Christ and in the power of his spirit. Means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God's new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

SPEAKER_03 7:11

So a message for us today.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

As artists, I know you're not all artists, but those who love the arts and those who are, I know we're all creative people involved in all kinds of fascinating things. Our post-resurrection work is to participate in God's new creation. Our post-resurrection work is to participate in God's creation. And for us today. And in the economy of this new creation work, there are no mere people, things, ideas, or gestures. So we're not seated next to any mere people today. So in our conversations today, our conversations today with each other, getting to know each other around the table, they matter. And the doodling you're going to do in your sketchbooks today, and the notes you're going to take, and the new thoughts you're going to think about, and the new songs that are going to come to mind, and the new pieces of poetry you want to write, and the new piece of art that you can't wait to get home and start on later today. None of these things are mere in the economy of this new creation. This is the work that God has for us to do. So I hope today, as we gather, you're going to be encouraged to think about the work of new creation, all because of Resurrection Sunday. I believe God's going to give us a good day together to help us to meditate and kind of prepare on this day.

SPEAKER_04 8:56

Thank you. Good morning.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

I'd like to lead us in a short prayer of gathering. And it's a responsive prayer. I'm going to say words that are not bold, and you all will say words that are very bold. So let's practice that. Not bold, bold.

SPEAKER_04 9:21

We could catch out. I'm going to move one thing here. Let's look up there. Let the word form us.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Let us be found with true stories on our lips. A good word like honey. Let the light teach us. Let us be found with more than meets the eye. Let sound surround us. Let us be found as a key unlocks a cord with three strands unbroken. Let music tune us.

SPEAKER_04 10:13

Let us be found. Let colours paint us. Let us be found.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Let the spirit move us. Let us be found embodied, hands, feet, float, touch, full circle in time. Let these vessels hold us. Let us be found with a comfort, a whisper in the room and at the table. Let mystery entreat us. Let us be found when a word becomes an image, let wisdom come, will be done. Let change embrace us, and let us be found transformed by love and by grace conformed. Let kindness know us. Let us be found in essence a fragrance in a savored, flavored breath. Let hope enfold us. Let us be found in faith now seeing and behold the word unfold.

SPEAKER_04 11:45

Let there be new creation and let us make let the art speak about hope. Let us be found in Christ's faithful on earth as it is. Give us this day. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

I've known Tim for a few decades, not just a few years. I'm not even sure when we first met, but probably at an arts conference someplace put on by an organization called Siva, Christians in the Visual Arts, that is no longer in business, but we've known each other for a long time. He's a visual artist, an exceptional one, primarily a painter. And he spent most of his professional life working as the gallery director and an art instructor at North Park University in Chicago. He completed his BFA at Calvin College and has, over the years, had a remarkable art career. Dozens, maybe hundreds of exhibits, a visiting artist and lecturer in many places, leading lots of workshops, raising up lots of students and followers, and his work is widely collected. Tim's also a composer and a musician. And later at the end of this morning, um we're going to do a lot of r really great music, and Tim's going to be a part of that too. Get to hear him uh perform as a musician as well. I first met Sherry, Tim's wife, a lot lot later than that, maybe like about eight or nine years ago, when Tim and I were working on a lecture and book project called God in the Modern Wing, Viewing Art with Eyes of Faith. And we did a number of lectures at the invitation of Walter and Darlene Hansen at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. And after one of those lectures, probably one that Tim gave, um, we all went out for lunch together, and I sat by Sherry. And so I I knew Sherry only by name, um, but discovered she was a retired United Methodist minister. She did her graduate training at Garrett Theological Seminary. She's a writer, a spiritual director, really, Sherry, just my kind of person. Um, and her website is Writing from the Margins if you want to see more about what she's writing and thinking about. So together, uh Tim and Sherry are gonna uh come and speak to us about trying to get a sense of scale, and uh then I'll have a little brief interaction with them afterwards before we go to break. So welcome Tim and Sherry Lowly, please.

SPEAKER_06 14:47

I should say this mischievous looking human being on the screen here is our daughter Tema. Tema's now 40 years old. Mentally and physically, she's like a newborn and has been all of her life. She's at the heart of my work, and I'll talk more about that, but just to give you an idea why that picture's up there.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

We're so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us, Cam, and your companions. Uh I want to begin uh just uh quoting a little bit from Rebecca Solnett, her book Hope in the Dark, Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. And this is a book full of uh little remembered, little talked about stories of um big changes in our world by one or two or five or maybe a hundred people. One story she tells in here of a woman who stood in front of the White House in the rain day after day, um with uh anti-nuclear arms uh protest, often by herself. And uh Rebecca writes, um it's always too soon to go home. It's always too soon to give up. It's always too soon to go home. And this woman stood there, how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain. Years later, she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock, who had become one of the most high profile activists on the issue, say that the turning point for him was spotting a small group of women standing in the rain protesting at the White House. In the shadows, in the margins, in the forgotten stories of history, like mushrooms growing underground when washed with rain sprout, but they've been growing underground for a long time, and that metaphor helps us think about our hope coming from many forgotten stories, one of which Tim and I want to present to you today in the person of our daughter, Tema Day Lowley, helping us try to get a sense of scale in making meaning and hope from one life, hopefully from all of our lives together. I want to just begin by uh sharing a little story about Tim and I and uh when we um first were married, well, even before we were married, we were thinking about, as some of you may remember if you're married and think back to that time of first uh talking about the name change uh that we as women go through often, and uh giving up one name, one family name for another. And uh Tim in his um craziness said uh well there was a there was a a model for this.

SPEAKER_06 19:28

There's a guy named Vincent Ir Irene.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 19:31

He and his wife had chosen the name Irene, which is Greek for peace, I think. When they got married, they took a new last name.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

So we thought about the possibility of doing that. Untold history, wild possibilities. Could we change our name? Tim's family name Grubbs and my family name Rubing. Uh Dutch Rube is a peasant person, Grubbs is underground, yeah, from the earth. So we uh thought and uh came up with the name Lowly. And little did we know who is going to come along five years into our marriage and teach us all about being lowly. So Tim is going to uh show a few slides of his work and talk about his um growing up in South Korea. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 20:48

So the the title of the talk is Trying to Get a Sense of Scale, which is something I used uh for a title of an exhibition. And there is uh we're always uh confronted with how big is this thing, right? What's this next month going to hold? How um you know what's the what's the scale of of this person's life? And when you have uh in our situation, everyone has their particular situation. Our particular situation was what is the meaning and what is the scale of the life of a person like Tema, who is perpetually at week one, perpetually. Um and that that that uh I think outside of definitely outside of Christian faith, and in a capitalist society, that kind of a human has no meaning. Within the Christian faith, we're talking about the people that Jesus says the least. Where what does Jesus say about the least? They're the ones in the front, right? Um so that's that's part of what led us to thinking about um. How to approach our life. How to approach um how do you approach life, whether it's doing whatever work you do in a way that has that forefronted. And believe me, uh, we live in a society where that's not considered important. What's important is acquisition of wealth, acquisition of fame, acquisition of things. And the teachings of Jesus are quite contrary to that, right? It's unless you give up everything, you're lost. Um, uh, I'm I'm gonna show you things that are kind of leading into a practice. Um, this is one of the first paintings I made um after college. On the left is what it was initially, and then I started working on it further. And uh this strange thing happened when I was in my studio, having finished this painting, I had the sense someone else was in the studio with me. That is the painting, this I mean, when I look at now, this doesn't strike me as particularly realistic, but at that point in my life, something like this appeared in my studio was like, what's going on here? And that's always been compelling to me, going to museums. What kind of art, what what does art do with us, right? How do you engage art? And sometimes when you engage a work of art, it tells you something about yourself, right? And it might not tell you the thing you want to hear, but it tells you something about what is your goal, what is your mission, what is your vocation. This is part of what I like about art, is it's not like uh a mathematical equation, one plus one equals 16. Uh it's it's actually more like that. Life is more like one and one equals 16 as opposed to two. Um anyway. So I I grew up in South Korea. My parents were missionaries for the Southern Presbyterian Church. And uh there's a Korean writer, a poet named Kim Chi ha. If you're interested in knowing about sort of social political philosophy, that's a name I would definitely encourage you to check out. Kim Chi-ha was a Catholic poet. Uh, he was a political dissident in South Korea. Korea was a military dictatorship at that point. So anybody to do anybody sort of proposing the kind of things that Kim Chiha was proposing was very dangerous. And he spent a fair amount of time in prison for that. Um that that model um became really relevant for me as I sort of as I came into my college years and and afterwards, in terms of um who's going to be the principal subject of your work? And this would be a challenge I give to all of you. Of your work, and when I say your work, I don't mean your employment. It may be your employment, but of the thing that you're devoting your life to, who is at the center of that? Who's at the center of it? Uh we can say God, and that's that's a fine answer, but I'm also thinking in terms of what part of society do we privilege? By what we watch, what we what entertainment we consume? What's what what do we consider as as sort of the center, right? Uh Hollywood has told us it's the beautiful ones, right? Capitalism has told us it's the wealthy ones, right? What does Jesus say? Who are the people who are at the center? And I I believe strongly that um it's those in the margins. Those are ironically, those who are the ones who are at the center. And some of you may be part of that wonderful group. Um that's yeah. You want to talk about this?

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna read a little piece that I wrote. I have retired from preaching. Um uh you wouldn't believe it this morning, but um I have been writing and uh hopefully will well maybe be published, maybe not. Um but I've been writing about my relationship with Tema. And I wanted to just read this piece as uh a sort of uh letting you know her story and my story as it began forty forty years ago. I can't tell you your daughter's life expectancy, said the doctor. She may die in her sleep tonight from a seizure, or she may outlive the two of you. It was the final day of my baby's three-week hospital stay, making her just thirty days old. From the nighttime of her birth at a first hospital, bringing her home through day number three of her life, returning to this second hospital without breath and a cardiac arrest, shocked back from death to life with a constant seizure, put into a coma with a large dose of anti-seizure medication, on life support, slowly weaned off of life support, breathing on her own again, through more seizures and more medications, through test after test after test, up to this day. And this statement from the doctor, as we prepared to take her home once again. The nurses piled on the equipment to take with us, the heart monitor with its wires and dials, the small pink hospital plastic tubs, the diapers, the knit beanie cap and booties, the small warming blankets, the formula, a ream of discharge papers, tests results, medications, information and phone numbers from the social worker. I sat in the wheelchair, hospital wheelchair clutching my baby. Tim stood beside me carrying the multiple plastic bags, the doctor's statement piled on last. My mouth hung slack at his words. My body shook, not quite as badly as when I first arrived three weeks earlier, following the screaming ambulance in my friend's car. Nothing the many doctors told me in those weeks had registered very deeply, except for that doctor's closing statement. I looked down at my baby with a strange name, handed down from ancestor and heroine Tema Day. She opened her eyes and stared at me, this little being come back from death to life. Her eyes saying Mama, Mama, here I am. Are you ready? I did not know her. These things I did know. I knew that she came from me, I knew that the CT scan showed brain damage, I knew that she carried scars on her body from the trauma, I knew that none of the papers we carried home gave cause for her cardiac rest. I knew fear. Everything was heavy as the young aide wheeled me down the hallway and out the door. Tim followed. That hospital smell clean to us, that smell of cleaning chemicals, rules and tests and expectations demanding something of me that I could not give. I rolled out of the hospital with my baby into a world that measures development and success by what you can do, a world where the weak and the differently abled are left behind, a world of doctors, clinics, schools, church, and God ready to judge. What had I done? I wanted to run away or put her away.

SPEAKER_04 31:00

Mamma, mama, look at me. Turn around, turn around, look at me.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

I wheeled out into the world carrying the religious and political stories of false fear and false hope. False fear that we are in trouble under attack, in decline, that God is ready to judge, that there is a scarcity of love, of wealth, and of power. I must cling to what I have, blame the other for what I don't have. I need to be separate, independent, a soldier in the army of God, following the hope of a hero, small G God, come to save me. The scales of meaning did not include a baby who did not live up to any of that.

SPEAKER_04 32:07

Mama Mama, look at me. Turn around, turn around, look at me.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Why continue to love and care for someone that cannot give you anything in return? Why paint or draw? Why write a poem or a story that will bring in no money? Why sing and make music? Why arrange flowers? Why advocate for a safer world when it will most likely be destroyed? Why when all of the medications and tests will be rendered meaningless with one more seizure? All of your work and caring for peace will be destroyed by a new war. A beloved institution will end. The lies will be believed, the climate change denounced.

SPEAKER_04 33:16

Mama, look at me. Turn around. Look at me.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

My life with Tema is a story of turning around with the help of so many others. A matter of washing the mud from my eyes so I could see her. A dear spiritual director prayed with me, and every time we finished, she said, Go with God. At age five of Tima's life came seven words from a therapist that I could finally hear.

SPEAKER_04 34:06

You did the best that you could. Mama Mama Look at me. Turn around. Turn around. Look at me. I turned and turned again and again.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

At first, like Mary, I did not recognize her. But then I heard her sighs too deep for words, her simple presence, always living in the moment, and her vulnerability and her need teaching me how to build community in our vulnerability, in our need for each other. One of the persons who Tema is named after is Dorothy Day. That is her middle name, Dorothy Day, the Catholic worker, the activist, the writer. She writes, Because we have seen his hands and his feet in the poor around us, he has shown himself to us in them. We start by loving them for him, and we soon love them for themselves.

SPEAKER_04 35:54

Each one a unique person, most special mama, mama turn around. Look at me. Wow. I married her.

SPEAKER_06 36:20

Um so let me talk about this piece that's on the screen. This is the first painting I met of Tema. I started, she was lying in the bed, and I just started drawing around the panel, and she ended up being in the desert with this Greek crater with Nakao, the goddess of victory in the base, has been smashed. The background is a Korean woman mourning. I grew up in South Korea in the rice hall stacks. So this painting was was really sort of an expression of grief and loss. But then as I looked at it later, it I didn't do this intentionally, but Tema looks like I'll tell you, sorry, my my my father told me about when he was in college, there was this running back that when he ran, it was like he was falling forward perpetually. It's kind of what Tema's doing. The sense Tema Tema has virtually no agency, but you have this sense of a pervasive presence that's really powerful. Um this image is of a nurse who is a friend of it. We we were actually part of an intentional Christian community in uh in Grand Rapids. Are you familiar with Sojourners? Any of you familiar with Sojourners? So there's a circle of communities like this around the United States, and um uh uh what's her name? Marsha Marcia was uh a member of the community as well. She was a nurse, and she was actually there when Tima stopped breathing. Had she not been there, Tima would not have lived because she immediately started doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Um so the painting is of her, and the reference within it is uh Jesus being baptized in the desert, and she's holding thorns and a rock. Uh almost all of my work is representation of a person, most frequently Tema, in this case, um Marsha. Uh this is another early painting. Uh, what's may not be clear is I'm holding Tema up like this. And um, the thing on her stomach is a G-tube, this for how she's fed. Um again, this was at a time really of trying to figure out um you don't have to look at the gospels too hard to realize that the poor take on priority in Jesus' calculation, right? And so there was this way in which we felt like someone had an entered in our life that was going to totally shake up our lives and those around us, and she did, and it was for the better, I think. Um This is another early painting, the Sherry in the foreground, Tema seemingly crawling. She can't crawl, but um some of my paintings go in this kind of cryptic mystical direction. That's just fine with me. I like what I really like is when someone engages one of my pieces or any other artwork in a way that has like, where does your mind go with this, right? You might want me to tell you what it means. I'd rather have you tell me what it means. Um that that to me is what good art does, is it causes the viewer to think and to engage. Um another painting, another early painting of Sherry. This one's called Walk Through the Valley. Thinking of the Valley of Death. Um a lot of my work is of other people. Uh this is we we um for a number of years attended Reba Place Fellowship. Anybody you know, have you ever heard of Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston? Yeah. For a number of years we attended that church, and this woman, Jean Howe, was a member of that church, and I made a painting of her with this sort of mysterious figure coming towards her in the background outside. This painting takes a little bit longer to explain, but the man on the top who's lying on the board is a missionary. My parents were missionaries in South Korea. My father was a hospital administrator, and my mother taught in a women's college. She taught piano and puppetry and other things. Um this fellow was uh an evangelist, and he, you know, he was one of the missionaries that would go out and help plant churches or raise up congregations. And one day, when Sherry and uh a couple of years after we got married, we went to Korea and spent a year there teaching English. And we actually one day we went with John Folta, the guy on the on the line in the plank, went with him to go to one of his churches. And when we were at the church, at the end of the service, all the young people all sort of lined up. I took this photograph of them. And then years later, I'm looking at that photograph and I took the people away in the back and put the board on the head of the people, the girls who are kneeling, had John Fulta line on it. And this painting has the card for this painting that I sent out, it all the people read this really radically different ways. And I I actually really liked that. I liked how I like it when art doesn't tell you what it means, but actually causes you to make the meaning happen, right? Um I'll go a little bit farther with this painting was stolen from the gallery. These guys came in pr pretending to be like you know, people, potential buyers, and later the person attending to the gallery realized the painting was gone. It was gone. Twenty-five years later, these guys show up at my door with this painting. Um very strange history. Uh this piece is titled Strange Progeny. Uh Progeny are one's offspring. And here it appears as if this tree is growing, this leafless tree is growing from Tema. Um it's a reference to Korea where there's like a shamanistic character in South Korea where he's leading a burial procession or something of to that effect. How big would you say this painting is? It says big three by three inches. The title of this painting is if If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? You know, that phil philosophy 101, that's one of the questions. If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear? Well, it seemed like an ap statement in relation to Tema. She's actually listening to the tree. Um but I think this painting for me was kind of a turning point. Um the scale of this painting, this is actually twelve feet, eight by twelve feet. And it was a point where I was making paintings of Tema on occasion. Um, and then this painting came along and it was like, this is a really, really important subject subject. Why? When you read the teachings of Jesus, he prioritizes who? He he prioritizes those who are the least. And people like Tema, who are profoundly disabled, have no agency. They have our culture, capitalism, has no place other than a nursing facility. Um that was not our experience with Tema. I mean, not that she does things, but her just by her presence, her very pacific presence, there was. Meaning there. So anyway, one day I went out in the countryside with Tama and did something. I've never done this before or since. Put a blanket on the ground, laid I found some property that had nothing, it wasn't a yard or anything, just sort of wild terrain. Laid a blanket on the ground, put them on it, and I would take a photograph, take a photograph, take a photograph. So what you're seeing is a composition of about 40 photographs. Everything is being seen from straight in front. We cannot see that way. We see from one place at one time. What you're seeing here is from all of these different places at the same time. Does that make sense? And it leads to this sort of like the viewer engaging with this piece in part because it's so large, it's pretty disconcerting because it implies that you're actually floating up in the air. That's your sort of position relation to the image. So why am I saying all this? Part of what my hope for art is how can you cause the viewer to shift a little bit, to think a little differently, right? Um and the title, Tema on Earth as it is in heaven, right? Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Um so I'm gonna show you uh this is a series that um you want to talk a little bit about this?

SPEAKER_00 45:33

Yeah, the title of this is I thought it was shift, but it this is Zoom.

SPEAKER_06 45:39

Yeah, there's several of them. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Yeah. Uh I um as Cam introduced me, I I went to seminary a little later in life and um became a pastor in the United Methodist Church. And my very first appointment um was a church in Galena, uh, Illinois. Some of you may know Galena, uh, which was uh a place I had never heard of before. And a three-hour drive from where we lived in Chicago at the time, um felt like I was going off the end of the earth. And um I moved out there uh by myself uh at first because uh we weren't sure of the school arrangements for Tema, of the help that we might receive caring for her. So Tim and Tema stayed in Chicago and I uh moved out to Galena. Um it was when a uh a very uh perceptible shift happened in my relationship with Tema. I think partly because I had my own voice then, uh my own agency as a preacher, a pastor, um, apart from Tim and apart from Tema. So that when uh after a year they moved out to be there with me, uh I began to see Tema in a different way. Uh there was a shift in in how I saw her as less um something that I need to make up for in some way, uh need to sacrifice myself for to make right uh something that I did. To here's a person who needs companionship and care. And uh so that's kind of behind this shift painting.

SPEAKER_06 47:59

It's a series of paintings. And it was really notable for me from my perspective that the Sherry's it wasn't like Sherry was ever a bad mother at all, but this this sort of sense of if you're a parent, you experience this, at some point your child becomes something other than just your child. They have they begin to have agency and purposefulness that uh moves away from you at the same time, there's this powerful connection with Tema. There has never been any moving away. She's always been right there. And um, yeah. Um what is this piece titled?

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Inextstasis.

SPEAKER_06 48:38

Inextasis. There are times where Tema seems to be like, okay, what are you looking at? What is it that you're mesmerized by? Um she does have a she has a seizure disorder, um, but I don't think that's really what it's about. Um imagine that you could not and had never had the ability to learn. Everything was always new. Try living a day that way, thinking consciously about huh, what's a plastic cup? Uh unless you become like a child somebody said something about that, right? Um as a professor, uh one thing that I was really interested in is how to engage, it sounds really self-serving, yet it is how to engage students in the process of making art. So this is a large drawing. You can get a sense of its size, um, where these six, I had these six students in a drawing class, and I said, Would you be interested in making a drawing of yourselves holding Tema? So I photographed them and they actually worked with me in making this large-scale drawing. Um it's that called Carry Me, I think. Yeah. Um this is another class-oriented uh drawing. It's really hard to see. I'm sorry, it's it's a dark painting, but this was a classroom where all these students were drawing Tema. I'm on the platform behind her and taking the photographs in this sort of panoramically way. Um, and the title is Culture of Adoration. Um how did I come to that title? Well, the Magi, you know, the the the the the Renaissance paintings of the Magi coming to adore the child of Jesus. I like this idea of culture of adoration as it kind of critiques our culture and its tendency to adore things and people that don't really deserve being adored, um, including ourselves. Um this is another piece that's quite unusual. Um this painting was made by 25 different artists. You can see it's actually a puzzle block. And this is the front of the painting. So, and then the back of the painting is gold. So I gave each of the artists participating, they didn't see the full image. All they got was this little piece that was the size of the block they were going to be painting on. And I said, for the back and the sides, make it gold. So this is what the back side looks like. And in this case, I said, whatever you want, it just has to be gold. Um again, this was a piece that's fundamentally about how we as people are drawn together in community. And often the people who draw us together in community are the people we would never expect to have that potential to bring us together. Um how many of you have experienced some sort of community in that way? I'm guessing people here at Upper House probably have had experiences where they they've been drawn together around something that's about loss or suffering or pain or beauty, right? Um this is another collaborative painting that was made for a church in Oxford, England. Um I had through Flickr, I had uh communication with this woman who is a vicar in Oxford. How many of you have ever been to Oxford? Goodness gracious, Oxford is a crazy place. Like there's how many colleges are there? There's a dozen colleges, and each one has its own cathedral. It's crazy, crazy. This little church is on the edge of Oxford, and you could tell this is where the poor folk go. This preacher is preaching to the poor. And is in his it it was very moving to have this group of students go. But that so that I don't know if you can tell this, but there's this is like 30 pieces of wood that interlocked together, and each one was painted by a different person or two. Um Does that make sense? Okay, I'll I'll try to not stop making sense. Well, it lives in the church there, and it's kind of cool to see this little and that church again. If I just went to that church, I would have no idea it was in Oxford, England. It is so radically different in terms of the culture of care. Um this is another large-scale piece called Radiator. It's about 10 feet wide. I was standing by Tima's bed at one point after washing it up road in the sense she radiates. And I was like, that's an interesting concept of a person as one who radiates, i.e., a radiator. Um, and it's about the same size, maybe bigger than most radiators. Um, this was actually a commission uh for the guy who collects drawings of self-portraits. I've done self-portraits, but I'm not really very interested in self-portraits. But I really like this idea of a self-portrait with Tema behind me, and on the wall is this really crazy quilt my sister made. Um, there's enough about that. A lot of my work is of other people. I've only I've mainly been focused on Tema in our life, but I wanted to show you some of these. How many of you ever heard of the book Gollum Girl? Get it. Read it. Uh Gollum Girl was written by the artist Reva Lehrer. Reva is ten days younger than me. She stands about this tall. She has spinobifida. It's a miracle that she's alive. She is a phenomenal artist. And she, like me, is taken up with how does one give agency to this person, to this subject. So at some point I asked Riva if I could draw her as part of this project I'm doing, a drawing series. And she came to school to North Park, where I was still teaching at that point. And in my office, I had a bell jar. Do you all know what a bell jar is? You're looking at a bell jar. Um you know what they know what they used bell jars for? Are you familiar with this? There's this experiment. There's actually a very famous 19th-century painting that shows a scientist demonstrating to a group of people this experiment where he puts a canary in the bell jar and he shuts off the top, and you watch the canary die. Right? So this idea that proved that we need air to survive. Why did you have to kill a canary to do that? Well, Riva has been the, you know, she has spina bifida. She has been under numerous surgeries. She has essentially been like a scientific experiment her entire life. This woman is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend the book Gollum Girl. Write it down. She writes about her own life. She writes about other artists with disabilities. Uh, it's a phenomenal, deeply meaningful book. Um, anyway, she came to my studio and this bell jar was in my studio, and we just started, well, let's see what we can do with this. And so she wraps her arms around the bell jar, and I take this picture, and I just, again, you know, think about this scientific experiment with the bell jar. Um it anyway, that's where that came from. How many of you are familiar with John Mark's? Is it John Mark? John Swanson. Cam, you know John Swanson, right? Uh you have probably seen John Swanson posters. They're everywhere in the Christian world, right? Um phenomenal artist and a really dear friend. John Swanson, when I met him probably in the 80s, he told me about Tarkovsky. Does the name Tarkovsky ring any bells? Perhaps the greatest filmmaker of our time. Look him up and watch Andrei Rublev, Sacrifice. You're gonna be like, what kind of movie is this? Because it's not Hollywood movies. They're very long and they're powerful films. Anyway, John, who I don't want to offend you by what I'm gonna say now, but John makes made these beautiful silk screens with biblical texts. They were collected broadly. Most people didn't know that John was gay. I I found that kind of amusing that this guy whose work shows up in more evangelical Christian contexts than any other artist is gay. And such a sweet man. He is the one who introduced me to Tarkovsky's films, and um, I could go on and on about that. But I need how much more time do we have? Five minutes, two minutes, minus seven minutes. We're getting okay, a couple of minutes. So these are a few other people. This is a photographer friend. This is a drawing series I've been working on. These drawings take me forever. Like this is probably somewhere between a month and six weeks to make. Um, this is a woman named Katie Schofield, a former student. I love this image. Of course, she's holding a leaf of lettuce, looking at it through the light. This is at an artist's residency up in Wisconsin called Worm Farm. This is one of my former colleagues at North Park University, Tony Zamble Zambley. He's a pastor. And we walked around, I took a whole bunch of photographs. At some point, we were down by a river where there's this dying dead tree. And he got up and he put his hand into it. Does that make you think about something? Hand in the side. Oh man. That was such a powerful moment. Um that's Tony. He's a wonderful character. And then this is, I'll say a little bit about these paintings over here. This is one of those paintings. Uh, this is a group of paintings that ultimately there will be 33 of these paintings, all the same size, all black and white, all Tana. And um, this is the beginning of this series. It's inspired somewhat by the books of Lewis, what's what's what's his name? Chris Van Albert. Chris Van Albert. How you know Chris Van Alzberg's books? You gotta know Chris Van Alzberg's book. If you want to give something to your kid for Christmas, Chris Van Alzberg. They're magical, wonderful books. Anyway, I'm ripping off his idea in terms of this sort of vertical format, and I think that's all we got. Thank you, Tema, for showing up here.