The Photograph as Sacred Space - Laura Wexler (USA)

Photography, invented in France in 1839, was immediately and widely adopted in the United States. Scholars have usually regarded this enthusiasm as a mark of technological modernity, not as a spiritual practice. But contemporary efforts to gain a broader view of the history of photography in the United States have expanded this conversation. In my paper I will examine the history of American “spirit” photography as a gendered practice, and the photograph itself as a kind of sacred space.

Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Film Studies Program, the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and the Public Humanities Program. In 1999 she founded, and she continues to direct, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. From 2007 to the present she has been a Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization Project. Wexler’s scholarship centers upon intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class with film and photography in the United States, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her book, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism, won an award for the best book in women’s history. She is co-author of Pregnant Pictures, and co-editor, of Interpretation and the Holocaust. Her most recent publication is: “No Doubt the Cubans!” in A New Literary History of America.

Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Belief - Sally Promey (USA)

                                          
In the United States, religion has a particular facility for materially locating itself on the public landscape, not to mention the public mindscape.  Religious display is a social performance, a kind of conversation or exchange concerning interactions of people, objects, places, convictions, and ideas.  Display engages audiences (plural) and the “public aesthetics” of American belief describe styles of encounter.  Firmly lodged between the establishment and free exercise clauses of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, the public display of religion is something many people do and see; it is also a constitutive, and frequently contested, aspect of American visual culture.  

Sally M. Promey is Professor of American Studies; Professor of Religion and Visual Culture; and Deputy Director, Institute of Sacred Music. She directs the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. In 2009-2010, she is chair of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Her scholarship explores the sensory and material cultures of religions in the United States from the early colonial period through the present. Her publications include Promey’s Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion”, “Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism”. She is also contributing author and co-editor of The Visual Culture of American Religions. She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio, the Council of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, and the Advisory Committee of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society

The Power of a Woman: Oprah Winfrey and Spiritual Capitalism in a Secular Age - Kathryn Lofton (USA)

                                            
“My show is really a ministry,” Oprah Winfrey tells us, “a ministry that doesn’t ask for money. I can’t tell you how many lives we’ve changed—or inspired to change.” By most definitions, Oprah—the product of Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia ventures—is not a religion. But there is a lot about what Oprah does that seems religious. Her religious aspects are literal (episodes of her shows addressing “everyday miracles,” her satellite radio “Soul Series,” her issuing of “Spirit Newsletters”) and iconic. She preaches a prosperity gospel, she advocates books as scripture, she offers exegesis, she conducts exculpatory rites, she supplies a bazaar of faithful practices, she propagates missions, both home and foreign. She postulates repeatedly on the meaning of existence, the seat of the soul, the purpose of your life, and the place of a higher calling. Oprah plays religious even as she is, most adamantly (by scholarly classification, and by her own) not a religion. This paper introduces the O that encircles modern American culture, framing and defining the secular plurality within.

Kathryn Lofton (A.B. University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies. She taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Indiana University, Bloomington, before arriving at Yale University in 2009 after a yearlong fellowship with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. As a scholar of religion and American culture, her research investigates the inseparability of religion and its cultural constructions and, likewise, the extent to which culture itself is embedded in religious histories.

She has published on a variety of subjects addressing documentary materials from the last two centuries of American history, including evangelicalism, modernism, African American religion, popular culture, and consumer rites. Her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, is forthcoming in 2010 from the University of California Press.

“God Moves My Hand”, Religious/Visionary Art in the United States - Kathryn Myers (USA)

In The United States, the terms folk, outsider, self taught and vernacular, are often used interchangeably.
However, where the term “folk” refers to work “originating among common people and reflecting traditional forms of a society”, by contrast, “outsider, self taught or visionary” art is more often created by those living in rural areas of the country, or an interior world of physic isolation. Most are self-taught artists, some of whose creations reflect a deeply religious, evangelistic or visionary sensibility that may be “directed” by inner visions or outside forces; the voice of god, angel or prophet. For instance, Sister Gertrude Morgan attests that “God moves my hand. Do you think I would ever know how to do a picture like this myself?,” Some works are intended to teach or instruct, although the audience it is directed at is not often appreciative, as Jesse Howard whose political/religious environments of “signs and wonders” suffered protest and destruction from neighbors, can attest. One of the most highly productive and celebrated outsider artists is the Reverend Howard Finster who went from being a bicycle repair man and preacher in rural Georgia to his calling as sacred artist after a angel in a vision appeared to him, instructing him to “Make sacred art”.
Elijah Pierce "Crucifixion

This paper will present the work of painters and sign makers Sister Gertrude Morgan and Jesse Howard, sculptors and carvers Elijah Pierce and Edgar Tolston as well as artists who created religious/visionary environments; The Reverend Howard Finster’s “Paradise Gardens”, Father Mathias Werner’s “Holy Ghost Park”, and Samuel Perry Dinsmoor’s “Garden of Eden.”

Kathryn Myers is a practicing painter and Professor of Art at the University of Connecticut. In 2002 she had a Fulbright Fellowship to India.
 

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