RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

Large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including our own. For instance, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Educational attainment is the single best predictor of religious knowledge, and also the biggest predictor for artistic appreciation. This week, we invite you to join the A&O board in taking an abbreviated version of the Religious Knowledge Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, and afterwards to go visit a local museum. It is this link between art, education, and religious knowledge that makes "Lost Kingdoms" (above) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art my NEWS OF WEEK.

In other religious art news from across the USA, and around the world:

• Buddhist Art of Week: Hiroshi Sugimoto is the INSPIRE ME! Artist for May. [More News]
• Christian Art of Week: Gehard Demetz brings his wooden children to NYC [More News]
• Hindu Art of Week: Samira Akbari is fascinated with the temple erotica of India [More News]
• Islamic Art of Week: Tareq Sayed Rajab de Montfort is both avant-garde & gay [More News]
• Judaic Art of Week: Jewish/Hasidic artists open art gallery in Crown Heights [More News]

Join the journey. We are all members of one spiritual family united in the search for human meaning through art from the religious imagination. For us, it's more than Art. It's Religion. We follow artists who explore religious ideas with their creativity. When you follow religious artists, you join others who do the same. Some of us join as "Collectors" and make policy decisions; others join as "Friends" who gather for the dialogues; and most of us join as "Subscribers" to this "free" weekly newsletter; (or follow on: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, or Soundcloud).

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Religious Woodcarver Gehard Demetz Returns to NYC With His Children

THE ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB

The Italian artist's wooden sculptures of children carry objects inspired by war and religion

NEW YORK---The haunting wooden sculptures of children by Gehard Demetz are again on display in "The Invocation" at the Jack Shainman Gallery. Trained as a religious sculptor in Italy, his sculptures use children to investigate contemporary culture and our loss of that innocence through the larger forces of war, religion, and politics. In a 2012 interview in Dazed Digitali, Demetz explained: “My sculptures transmit the awareness of becoming adults and thus losing, as Rudolf Steiner says, their ability to be able to “hear” their unconscious." [More]

GEHARD DEMETZ: The Invocation, May 1 – 31, 2014

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