Religion and Arts News and Events

A Community Art Expression Workshop

In this workshop, we will trace the suffering and pain we see in our individual and common lives.

To help transmute trauma into art.

To let our lives speak.

To transform the jagged edges into a tool of self and other discovery.

Artists behind bars show us how they, like us, suffer. They, like us, have harmed people they loved, and they, like us, yearn for reconciliation. And, yet, they persist. The practice of art is one of the ways they do so. They turn agony and regret into beauty. They turn scars into symbols, harm into healing.

In this workshop we will mold these themes of loss, hurt and yearning and regret into expressions of fierce love and a gentler justice.

Art It Out Workshop Facilitator Mel Philips

Mel Phillips is a lifelong activist, artist and writer whose recent pivot to a more compassion-centered perspective continues to inform, reframe, and redirect his social justice advocacy.

Mel’s creative locus was informed, inspired, and eternally motivated by the early graffiti-tagged Hip-Hop Youth Movement of the late 20th century. An intuitive art worker, Mel immersed his entire imagination in that fertile, radical, unapologetic, interactive, underage, underground countercultural revolution. His art ethos is highly influenced by African American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, African American folk artist Ronald Lockett, American modernist painter Stuart Davis and mobile sculptor Alexander Calder. The imprints of these groundbreaking geniuses are evident in the essence of Mel Anthony Phillips’ unmistakable creations. Melding expressionism with reclaimed materials, Mel engages a keen justice lens to examine universal human conditions. His bright, distinctive paintings and sculptures often embody themes of nature, compassion, perseverance, transcendence, love and acceptance. He describes his raw, energetic, freestyle, socially conscious modality as Primitive Expressionism.

Mel Anthony Phillips is also a writer whose endless curiosity, poetic lens and gift for storytelling helps shape and color his unique perspectives of the world. In 2017, Mel delivered a keynote address to incarcerated citizens at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for their inaugural “Day of Compassion.” That speech, “The Compassion Imperative,” was later published in the LAMBDA Award-winning anthology Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sex Abuse.

As a peace activist, freedom fighter and survivor of childhood traumas, Mel believes we are all obligated to each other to speak out against every form of harm and inhumanity because our silence can be tantamount to harm. With justice as his calling card and compassion as his master key, Mel’s singular artworks and warm, authentic presence become spacious vehicles for navigating complex discourse, accessing our essential humanness, and speaking hard truths with a fierce yet graceful power. Mel Anthony Phillips is co-director of OAASIS, Oregon Abuse Advocates and Survivors in Service, in Portland, Oregon.

In commemoration of Black History Month

Donna Woodley Gallery Talk

Tuesday, February 1st, 2022 at 6pm on Zoom

Donna Woodley is a visual artist whose works primarily discuss the relationship between Black culture and American culture. The figure in her paintings is confrontational towards the visibility and value of black people within American society, both historically and contemporarily. The exploration of the human condition and the importance of every individual's story is what primarily represents the themes of Donna's work. A significant part of her process involves the enlistment of men and women that she knows, including herself. This allows her to evaluate the complexity of human emotions and relationships and to render the figure accordingly. Informed by stereotypes, cultural similarities and differences, perceptions of beauty, mental health, and esteem, Donna's work often uses a touch of humor to potentially open the door for healthy dialogue.

Donna was named Nashville's Best New Artist in 2016 by the Nashville Scene publication and has continued down a path of success. Some of her most recent works are housed at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee at Martin, TN.  As a professor of art at currently at Tennessee State University in Nashville, TN, she has served integrally helping to develop students technically and introducing them to understanding how to critically think about the work they make. She resides in Nashville, TN, and is ecstatic about her future as a maker. Learn more on the artist's website.

Artist's Statement

Enter Exit Enter

Enter Exit Enter is an exploration of faith and the human condition.  We are born, welive, we die, and our spirits travel.  Although very small in its physical appearance, the dash in between one's birthdate and date of death is arguably the most significant symbol on a tombstone representing the life of the departed.  This exhibition presents a display of work that discusses the journey of life, death, and faith.  

In commemoration of Black History Month

In commemoration of Black History Month

Michael McBride Gallery Talk

Vanderbilt Divinity School G-20 (Arts Room)

Artist's Statement

I make paintings of the figure as a way to understand desire, which functions in my work in part as a fantasy about being both subject and maker. For several years when I was growing up, my family lived in a small intentional community in rural New Hampshire with no TVs and with limited access to experiences of mainstream American culture in the 70's. I became fascinated with fairies and fairy tales, along with the meadows, stone walls and woods around me. During that time, I was a frequent subject of my father's paintings- usually depicted playing in fields of flowers in sun-drenched afternoon landscapes. 

Ten years ago I quite literally stumbled into Lacanian psychoanalysis. It's a practice of speaking freely and in a very nonlinear way, which parallels studio processes of sorting through fragments, pieces of images and ideas, to make something new that remembers (re-members).  I create staged photographs and videos and supplement those with screenshots, art historical references, and collage. I am specifically interested in figures or elements in landscapes and spaces, and in the implication of a kind of storyboard, a before-to-after. Because the process of painting itself feels necessarily perfomative and vulnerable, I try to communicate this through both content and approach. I have embraced traditional, old master forms of construction, with a method in place for the breakdown of those processes to occur, so that the paintings themselves are like landscapes and bodies- a physical manifestation of interruptions, scars, layers, and time. 

Mira Gerard's creative practice spans painting, performance, and video. She received her BFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and her MFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.  Her work has been exhibited at a wide range of venues.  Her work was selected for  New American Paintings #118  (Southeast Edition, 2015) and has been published in journals including Poets & Artists, The Cortland Review, and Manifest Painting International.  She has presented papers and performance & video works on the intersection of art and psychoanalysis at conferences including the International Zizek Studies Conference, LACK, Psychology and the Other, and the Southeastern College Art Conference.  She has been awarded fellowships for residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Cill Rialaig Project, The Hambidge Center, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Mira Gerard is Chair and Professor in the Department of Art & Design at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee where she has lived since 2001.