- August 18, 2011
- 9:23 am
- Steve Christensen
New exhibits come to LUMA on Saturday
(detail) Janet McKenzie, Jesus of the People, 1999, Oil on canvas
Holiness and the Feminine Spirit: The Art of Janet McKenzie and Inscribing the Divine: The Saint John’s Bible, two brand new, thought-provoking exhibitions at the Loyola University Museum of Art, will be unveiled to the public this Saturday, August 20.
About the Exhibitions
Holiness and the Feminine Spirit: The Art of Janet McKenzie exhibits 21 paintings depicting Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The artist creates masterful paintings that celebrate all people, particularly women and people of color. In 1999, her painting Jesus of the People won the National Catholic Reporter’s competition for a new image of Jesus, and she subsequently received worldwide attention for her unusual interpretation of the image of Jesus. McKenzie has uniquely focused on the Holy Family and the Catholic saints, depicting them as people from many ethnicities and cultures, including Native American, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian.
In Inscribing the Divine: The Saint John’s Bible, LUMA displays 13 bifolia (pair of pages) from The Saint John’s Bible, considered by many as a modern masterpiece of sacred art executed according to the traditional arts of calligraphy and hand illumination. This is the only public exhibition of its pages in Chicago.
On Friday, September 9, the museum will hold an opening reception to officially welcome the new exhibits. The event, which begins at 5:30 p.m. and runs until 7:30 p.m., is free for museum members and all Loyolans, and the general public will pay $15. Both of these exhibits will remain on display through October 23, 2011.
A third exhibit, Pathways to Stable Housing, also debuts this weekend. A separate opening reception is scheduled for this show on Tuesday, September 13, at 5:30 p.m. We’ll have more details on this exhibition in the coming weeks.
To RSVP for either opening reception, please send an e-mail to luma@luc.edu or call 312.915.7608. To learn more about the exhibitions, stop by LUMA or visit LUC.edu/luma.
