Unique AVAM exhibit displays predictable message
Issue date: 10/11/07
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All Faiths Beautiful: From Atheism to Zoroastrianism is not the first American Visionary Art Museum showcase in recent memory that, so it would seem, lays down an ideological direction from the outset.
After the fashion of Race, Class, Gender ? Character two years ago - though not last year's oddball offering, Home and Beast - the newly-opened exhibition bears a title that would fit a lecture series on multiculturalism.
According to the Museum itself, this is "The exhibition for folks weary of the appropriation - the supersessionism - of any religion utilized as a reason for making war upon those who do not subscribe to the same faith."
Themes along this line, though laudable, do not necessarily promote discussion. All Faiths Beautiful exists in constant danger of obscuring its artists' unique, occasionally obsessive projects with talking points that encourage a single and rather predictable, window of interpretation.
That said, the themes that the new exhibition raises are a great excuse to present more of the outlandish outsider art that is the gallery's forte.
In the hands of curator and AVAM founder Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the intellectual underpinnings of All Faiths Beautiful never quite translate into solemnity.
The Museum's 13th mega-exhibition may not succeed as an incisive intellectual statement, while its number of poignant and morbid offerings don't register against the more adventurous and spectacular creations.
Ironically - and pleasantly - the worth of diversity and individualism finds a cogent embodiment not in the show's disquisitions on religion, but in its reassuringly eclectic array of assemblages, installations and traditional media.
Disproportionately large sculptures account for some of the most memorable entries in the Visionary Art Museum's permanent collection. Likewise All Faiths Beautiful boasts life-sized papier-mâché figures by sculptor Pamela Smith, not to mention a shell-encrusted female nude by Timmerman Daugherty. These attentively-crafted works seem like overgrown dolls, and are perfectly at home in a museum that keeps an overgrown whirligig right behind its primary gallery.
After the fashion of Race, Class, Gender ? Character two years ago - though not last year's oddball offering, Home and Beast - the newly-opened exhibition bears a title that would fit a lecture series on multiculturalism.
According to the Museum itself, this is "The exhibition for folks weary of the appropriation - the supersessionism - of any religion utilized as a reason for making war upon those who do not subscribe to the same faith."
Themes along this line, though laudable, do not necessarily promote discussion. All Faiths Beautiful exists in constant danger of obscuring its artists' unique, occasionally obsessive projects with talking points that encourage a single and rather predictable, window of interpretation.
That said, the themes that the new exhibition raises are a great excuse to present more of the outlandish outsider art that is the gallery's forte.
In the hands of curator and AVAM founder Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the intellectual underpinnings of All Faiths Beautiful never quite translate into solemnity.
The Museum's 13th mega-exhibition may not succeed as an incisive intellectual statement, while its number of poignant and morbid offerings don't register against the more adventurous and spectacular creations.
Ironically - and pleasantly - the worth of diversity and individualism finds a cogent embodiment not in the show's disquisitions on religion, but in its reassuringly eclectic array of assemblages, installations and traditional media.
Disproportionately large sculptures account for some of the most memorable entries in the Visionary Art Museum's permanent collection. Likewise All Faiths Beautiful boasts life-sized papier-mâché figures by sculptor Pamela Smith, not to mention a shell-encrusted female nude by Timmerman Daugherty. These attentively-crafted works seem like overgrown dolls, and are perfectly at home in a museum that keeps an overgrown whirligig right behind its primary gallery.
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