Art Theology is a method of making art to make new knowledge and understanding of theological ideas that discursive reasoning alone cannot provide. This interactive and collaborative workshop will engage participants in making theology. Participants will be invited to gather their own experience, knowledge, and wisdom through various materials (pastels, paints, colored pencils, markers, crayons, fabrics, and colored paper will all be supplied). We will make theology on the question: What is divine love in the margins? and/or What is non-violence? We will then discuss the emerging ideas of art historians and cognitive scientists, which explain how Art Theology arrives at different knowledge than discursive reasoning. Art Theology is an interdisciplinary method that centers on indigenous wisdom like the Matauranga Maori of Aotearoa, New Zealand, which has always included a variety of ways of accessing knowledge, including making art.
Art Theology is a method that engages in making art in order to make new knowledge and understanding about theological ideas that discursive reasoning alone cannot provide. Art Theology includes seeing art (with intention), but it is even more importantly about making art. Art Theology is an interdisciplinary method grounded in the scholarship of art historians, Susanna Berger and Eyelet Evens-Ezra who have demonstrated that we have not fully understood theologians and philosophers before the 18th century because we overlooked their visual thinking. The method is also grounded in the emerging cognitive science of The Extended Mind Theory. Art Theology centers indigenous wisdom like matauranga Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand, that has never overlooked making in knowing. This paper provides the research behind the workshop offered by the Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit: Art Theology, Non-Violence, and Wisdom from the Margins.
I have explored practices of improvisation not only as spiritual practices, but as enacted and embodied theology. For example, art and improvisation can be understood through theologies of co-creating with God, of responding to God, and of understanding creation as both human and divine. I focused on musical and dance improvisation and would welcome this opportunity to delve into the visual arts as theology. My current work centers practices of deep listening in community-engaged scholarship. This work continues to attend to dynamics of improvisation in order to pay attention to “wisdom from the margins” through listening and responding, co-creating, and engaging in practices that center belonging, compassion, and attunement over extractive methods of gathering information. This work takes time, space, and slowing down, all practices offered through Art Theology that could also serve to guide academic and ethnographic work in kinder and more attuned ways.
Here is the link to my CV: 1 Page CV_Grant Showalter Swanson.docx