Living life most fully involves responding to God’s creative acts with an echoing creativity of our own. As part of a Christian liberal arts and sciences university, the Redeemer Art Gallery foregrounds this creativity, contributing to learning and discovery through the integration of rational propositional thinking and intuitive, holistic and embodied practices. Visual art helps us to bring our whole selves to God.
The art gallery is a place of discourse and encounter. Sometimes the work moves us with beauty and wholeness; sometimes the work is prophetically challenging, unsettling our habits and encouraging us to look at the world afresh. A variety of voices are featured in the gallery, helping us to attend to the experiences and views of others while engaging these differences from within a Christian worldview. The visual languages present in the gallery are often not our mother tongue, pushing against the conformity of mass-produced culture in order to deepen our sense of visual meaning-making.
The gallery regularly showcases artists who express themselves artistically from a distinctly Christian perspective. In this way, Christian artists are encouraged and resourced to continue building their creative practices, and networks of creators are deepened. Rooted in the Reformed Christian tradition – with its confidence that by God’s grace, the true, good and beautiful can be found in cultural productions by both Christians and non-Christians seeking common good – the gallery also presents projects by artists from other perspectives. These projects offer much to enrich us, and provide opportunities to facilitate and model dialogue between Christianity and other worldviews. All of the exhibitions create links and ties into the wider culture beyond Redeemer, aiming for redemptive cultural acts that point to how God reconciles and makes new.
In a public and open space on campus, the art gallery may form the most regular encounter with art in the lives of many students, faculty and staff. For students in the art program, the gallery provides them the opportunity to learn from professionals and to become early professionals themselves in presenting their work to the community. Exhibitions help students encounter and explore a variety of art forms, media and ideas as part of their own formation as artists, including growth in confidence about how the Christian worldview undergirds artistic discernment and practice.
The entire Redeemer community, and general public, are encouraged to experience the exhibitions. To equip people with interpretive tools, exhibitions are designed with curatorial texts, artists’ statements, or other contextual information.
Each year, the gallery hosts three professional exhibitions plus the senior exhibition of graduating art students. All exhibitions, which are free and advertised on this website, open with a reception that includes a short talk by the featured artist(s).
