From the Executive Director:

It’s Monday morning on my first day back from maternity leave.  I’m sitting at my desk reflecting about this newsletter, while my phone glows nearby with a picture of my sweet son, whom I’ve left for the first full day in the three little and massive months of his life outside of me. It’s, of course, bittersweet. I love this work of investing in the beauty and creativity of this generation at Intersect, and I love the work of nurturing the beauty and creativity of the next generation at home.  I keep a small journal for each of my two children; I scribble down some thoughts for them every few months when precious time and energy allow. Today I was musing to Zebedee about this artwork by Susan Aldworth in our current show, Interstitium.

Aldworth had the remarkable opportunity to work with a doctor in London that invited her to make etchings directly from a brain that had been donated to research. The resulting images, though beautiful and intriguing, feel like a ghostly, unknowable kind of object. It’s confounding to think that this tissue was a person who thought and remembered and forgot and laughed and cried and believed and loved.  Interstitium has a number of artists exploring imagery directly inspired by the brain; it’s almost ironic that the most literal representation, a direct impression of a real brain, provides the least intimate insight. 

Looking at this artwork feels a little like meeting my son for the first time. I held all of his little physical body in my hands. 7lbs 13 ounces of “himness” was there for me to see in totality, but I didn't know him yet. This artwork makes me eager to spend a lifetime getting to know him. I am eager to intimately understand who he is, who he will become. I am eager to discover how he thinks and feels, and to gently, collaboratively, shape what he believes and loves. 

I am eager to observe how he knows himself, and how he will come to know himself also through my eyes. 

I am eager to look at art with him, that we may better know ourselves, each other, and our world by this looking.  

As I look at these prints by Aldworth, I find that I would have liked to know this person whose brain shape has been immortalized on our walls.  I would like to meet the people that knew him and loved him. This art is an invitation to me to get to know those around me with more depth and intention, and to invite my son into that kind of investment as well.

Another artist in the show, Leslie Holt, has created a series of paintings that are at once both quiet and intense. This work became a way of better knowing her own mother after she passed away. Vibrant stains sink onto subdued raw canvas, drizzling and soaking slowly into the cotton fibers, the way our life experiences soak into our being, permanently shaping and coloring who we are.  Printed text across the bottom in impersonal type font records a dramatic mental health episode in matter-of-fact bullet points.  A window. By contrast, in the upper right of the composition, notes written by Holt’s mother while under care for her mental health offer a profound palette of beauty and pain.  Whether asking herself, or repeating the phrase of a doctor, she jots, “What’s wrong with you?” In response, “It’s a matter of definition.”  How we come to know ourselves is of course not just who we perceive our “true self” to be, but is a definition intricately entangled with others. Defined by our culture, our doctors, our families, and adversaries. The definition of oneself is inextricably linked to the community that surrounds us. The banner, like a halo over these hand embroidered musings is the text, “Love makes the world go around. Love.”  There is perhaps no more cliché line than this, but I can think of no better sentence to have stained and soaked and sewn into the soul of how we define ourselves. I pray that this love is the defining characteristic by which my son will know me, and I him, and the world each of us. 

The work of Dylan Mortimer intimately explores a unique yet universal kind of knowing as he chronicles his personal health journey. Papery layers of cut out shapes curl at the edges with fragility and flatness, smothered in serious sparkle, leaving no inch unadorned.

Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as an infant, Mortimer was not expected to live through his teens. He has defied all odds surviving not one, but two double lung transplants, countless surgeries and hospitalizations, and is currently battling skin cancer at age 41. Through all of it he fell in love. He got married. He is raising and loving two teen boys. In that mix of beauty and pain he continues hoping.  He spent a chapter at seminary and loving a congregation as a pastor. Then an MFA and now he loves his community as an artist.   With infectious, sparkling joy, his work refracts the iconography of chronic illness: IV bags, a forest of pills, phlegm laden brachial tubes, and whirring ambulances. Laser-like beams in Colliding Halos and Scar Comparison (pictured above) burst and intersect, creating connections of knowing that Mortimer has experienced in the close-knit community of those who live with chronic illness. 

Writer Wendell Berry in his essay “Health is Membership” describes health as a kind of wholeness, saying “I believe that community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

Few of us will ever know the kind of experiences Dylan has gone through. Yet he creates through simple materials we understand—paper, glitter, glue—offering us a type of knowing. He offers us a child-like invitation to know the God that he knows, one of mystery, grace, and hope. He offers us an invitation to know what it means to be humbled by the limitations of our health and healed by the help of strangers. He offers us a kind of encouragement, a sparkling branch of love that says we belong in the membership of a community and that we can keep going, keep hoping, keep getting to know, despite the odds. 

We need to know one another to be healthy. Art helps us know. It helps us share our stories so we may better know one another.  Art helps us wonder and muse so we better know ourselves. Art helps us process and remember and grieve and forgive. Art helps us create a new future for Zebedee, and for all our children that we may know a world going around with hope, and beauty, and love, together.

In the Gallery:

Interstitium Dovetail Recap:

On February 9 we gathered for a Dovetail Concert + Conversation event. This series intentionally creates dialog between the visual and performing arts to deepen our relationship with each form and with one another. Resilience Dance Company was commissioned to create a new piece in response to Dylan Mortimer’s work. They stunned in shimmery colors and undulations with both macro and micro movements that felt like we could be inside the body or looking down at the whole of humanity as we thought about our interconnectedness. Pacia Anderson, St. Louis Poet Laureate and Intersect’s first poet-in-residence crafted three spoken word pieces that explored the Interstitium exhibition, dinner menu, and dance performances. Conversation flowed around a plant based charcuterie meal crafted by chef Caryn Dugan. Thanks to all who attended!

In the Artrooms:

From Aida Hasanovic, our Education Director:

Winter has a way of deepening things in our program. The rush of fall fades. The novelty wears off. What settles in is something quieter and more honest. 

This season can make everything feel heavier. School stress piles up. Family stress doesn’t pause. Kids arrive more tired, more sensitive, carrying things they don’t always have words for. And that’s often when we start to really see what this program means, not just as a place to make art, but as a place where kids can exhale. Where they can walk in feeling heavy and slowly soften. Where they don’t have to hold it all together. Where they can be messy, quiet, loud, stuck, unsure.

This is what art asks of us, too. It asks us to show up. It asks for honesty and presence. It asks us to slow down long enough to notice what we’re carrying and to shape it with our hands instead of holding it all. It makes room for uncertainty, for revision, for trying again. It reminds us that something meaningful can be made from even the most tangled or tender places. In that way, the studio becomes more than a classroom. It becomes a steady shelter, a place where we can practice being fully human, together.

You can see it in the artmaking, too. There’s more patience, more layering, more attention to texture and detail. Students build worlds out of cardboard and fabric scraps, shape clay slowly, and create pieces that feel like shelter.

Winter reminds me that we all need small shelters, places where we can soften. Sometimes that’s simply showing up to art class, even when it’s hard and cold and its icy out again, and being met with warmth.

In the Studios:

“What is it like having studio space at Intersect Arts Center? Has it changed you in some way?

Yes, having space at Intersect has been career changing! If I wasn't here, I'm not sure I'd be able to be as productive or have as much room to experiment. I also enjoy being in this community space; it feels alive with all of the events, the kids, the other artists, and I love hearing music from the floor below while I'm working in my studio.”

This quote comes from an interview the Sudbury School did with Jessie Donnovan, one of our third floor studio artists. Our community and private studio spaces serve so many local artists, and we are thrilled to announce that Jessie is our new print-making studio manager and is helping us get our community print-making studio up and running! 

You can read the full interview with Jessie here, and stay tuned for info about our printmaking studio as it comes to life.

In Collaboration with Holy Cross:

Mezzo Gallery has a call for art out! Rend, Turn, Follow seeks to use art to describe the act of true repentance. Particular themes to explore are gestures of repentance, what it looks like to truly repent and not just apologize, performativity, meekness, humility, empathy/suffering with, grieving over sin/brokenness, imitation of Christ, and what forgiveness and reconciliation might look like. It is free to apply, and Mezzo is accepting submissions through February 18th. 

To learn more about the call and submission requirements, use this link.

Feast Service Schedule: 

Ash Wednesday - February 18th | Maundy Thursday - April 2nd   |   Good Friday - April 3rd   |   Easter Sunday - April 5th | Trinity Sunday - May 31st

Join Holy Cross on Wednesday, February 18th for an arts-enriched Ash Wednesday service. Featuring artwork by Meena Matocha, and a performance of David Maslanka’s beautiful and ephemeral Sonata for Horn and Piano, this service will invite you to reflect and engage with the season of Lent in all its complexity. The service begins at 5:30pm, and begins a regular pattern of Wednesday night services for the season of Lent.

You can learn more about this service at holycrossstl.org/feast