Artists in Church: An Untapped Resource

Dan Siedell
3 Mar 2015
one comments

Let’s face it. The creative response to creation that we call art doesn’t play a prominent role in the church. As pastors and Christian leaders, we’re just not quite sure what to make of it. But taking art and the artist seriously can be more than organizing art museum visits, hanging paintings in the sanctuary, hosting an artist in residence or talking about beauty. Through my twenty-year career as an art historian, museum curator and art critic, I am convinced that the artist is an untapped resource. One of the most important needs of the artist is in the conversation […]

-Read More

Beautifully Broken

Dan Siedell
4 Apr 2013
no comments

As an art museum curator, what I enjoy most about my work are the artists—watching them work in their studios, talking to them about the creative process and writing about the effect that their work has on me. The gratuity of devoting hours, weeks, months and years to make something so insignificant and weak as a painting, which has no explicit purpose in this efficient and practical world, continues to surprise me. And yet, it is in this gratuitous, insignificant and impractical space that you can experience God’s grace in unexpected ways. Paul Affanato’s small but powerful project, Beautifully Broken, […]

-Read More

Free to Receive

Dan Siedell
7 Mar 2013
no comments

Daniel A. Siedell Good News Let’s face it. Evangelicals are a pretty grumpy lot when it comes to art and culture. We’re perpetually on the lookout for artistic evidence to prove that this is the most evil of generations. In fact, it seems as if many of us even delight in being offended so that we can crow about the good old days when the church was the patron of the arts and collectively bemoan the consequences of Modernism and Postmodernism. We want art and culture that is obvious to interpret and easy to use; we want to use it […]

-Read More

Art Museums and Ashcans

Dan Siedell
14 Feb 2013
no comments

Each art museum houses strange, wonderful and utterly unique collections. Art moves from creator to multiple owners, until it somehow finds its way into a museum collection where it becomes public. This progression is often as interesting as the works of art themselves. The Return to the Ashcan exhibit at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale (MOAFL), features 40 works of the first modern art movement in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. This movement was called the Ashcan School by dismissive critics because of the artists’ interest in the gritty underbelly and banalities of urban […]

-Read More

Andy Warhol and Us

Dan Siedell
4 Jan 2013
no comments

We have something in common with Andy Warhol (1928-87). I know it’s hard to believe. Yes, he’s the one who claimed that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. Yes, many believe that he is to blame for the debasement of our culture. Yes, he’s the one whose strange appearance was outdone only by his even stranger behavior. The Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, however, presents an exhibition that reveals a more accessible Warhol, one with which we can identify, who reminds us of something we too easily forget. Organized by the Montclair Museum in […]

-Read More