TRAVELING TABERNACLES
The Studio for Art, Faith & History promotes the value of placing works of art in the places where the work of the people is housed. But the relation between art and place is circular. An artwork needs a place, but the arts also play an important role in making a place.
An artwork can enrich a place whose purpose is clear, but it can also grant significance to a space that lacks clear purpose. Artworks can set up temporary houses—tents, or tabernacles—that serve as provisional gathering places for collective action, or as temporary shelters along the pilgrims’ or refugees’ way. The traveling tabernacle can create sacred places for dis-placed people. A portable altar set up in a desecrated place marks the possibility of holiness and healing. The tent of meeting can mark the unrecognized sanctity of a place.
The creation and installation of art that makes place is precisely the mission of TRAVELING TABERNACLES: themed collections of large-scale paintings by artist Gay Cox designed for site-specific temporary installations.
As Cox writes:
Traveling Tabernacles aims to recover the church’s identity as being on pilgrimage. It reminds Christian believers that they must be prepared to move at a moment’s notice into the deserts, wildernesses, and confused places of the world, sheltering those who need comfort and hope for a new life. It reminds us that we are to be spiritually solid but entirely portable, like living stones, so that we can bring good news to peoples whose only constants are migration, fragility, and upheaval. Traveling Tabernacles also offers welcoming temporary shelters for modern people who are resistant to or suspicious of institutionalized Christianity.
The Via Crucis, station #14
We are habituated to viewing art in climate-controlled, artificially-lit galleries or museums where permissible actions are limited. But these sets of portable installations can go where people actually congregate—in vacant lots or parks, shopping malls or downtown spaces, in multi-purpose buildings or in buildings without purpose, in places of beauty or in those in need of beauty. A traveling tabernacle takes the artwork to places where it can give solace, prompt individual meditation, frame a shared liturgy, or mark off a place for joyous celebration. These tabernacles invite embodied participation rather than abstracted aesthetic gaze alone. They can introduce new resonances into dead spaces or places that harbor the ghosts of abuse or unbearable sorrow. A traveling tabernacle can bring a powerful visual narrative to a community’s mission, history, and cultural identity.
The paintings that comprise the Tabernacles are typically large scale (as much as 6’ by 8’). They don’t so much hang on a wall as they mark an enclosure. Most are un-stretched canvases designed to hang on portable structures readily transported and quickly erected.
A couple making their way through the Stations of the Cross at SoulFest music festival
Cox’s Stations of the Cross, condensing each stage of Christ’s Via Crucis in painted tapestries depicting the Face of Jesus, have been displayed in many places, inside and out of doors, in churches and in fields, often during Lent. Several years ago in collaboration with Cox, musician Mark Retallack composed pieces scored for 14 strings for each of the Stations, first performed at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Beverly (MA), conducted by Mark Dirksen. Click here for the video recording.
Studio director Skillen has served on the advisory board of Traveling Tabernacles.
