“Towards the Spiritual”
The second exhibit of the Marianne Oberg Foundation for Spiritual Art is virtual and shows the work of eight artists who received grants and awards from MOFSA this year. It is now open!
We asked artists to submit examples of their work that represents for them a calling towards expressing the spiritual as they understand it. We will show the work of the recipients of our 2022 Spiritual Art grants along with the work of five other invited artists. We asked the applicants to tell us something of their own story of art and spirituality:
- How has art changed you?
- What is the role of spirituality in your life?
- What is the role of art in transformation, both at the personal and at the global level?
- How do you plan to develop your art as it reflects in your ongoing spiritual journey?
We believe that there is in every person a spark of the divine, a yearning for the ineffable, a call to return home.
None born but it is born, conceal’d or unconceal’d, the seed is waiting.
We believe that this seed is latent in all that is.
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
This connection to the divine is sometimes felt in childhood. As we grow, the world can cover up this original goodness. And as humanity advances in science and technology, with a focus on the mind and the rational, the connection to spirit can be lost. Intelligent people can come to believe that in fact there is no spirit, that all is matter and energy, and we are shaped by blind forces.
How do we recover our original goodness? How do we nurture the seed of perfection? Poets have provided images in words. More universal than words are pictures. We are looking for visual artists to tell us about their spiritual journey through their artwork!
(Quoted poetry is by Walt Whitman and James Russell Lowell).