Bible Society Gallery Showcases
Exhibition Of Post-9/11 Images

Beginning Friday, May 7, the Gallery at the American Bible Society will showcase a creative dialogue initiated as a response to the events of September 11, 2001, by two metropolitan area mothers - one a leading glass artist, the other a lay church leader. On view through July 3, Images in Reflection: A Collaboration of Art and Prayer is designed to provide, amid the bustle of Broadway and 61st Street, an environment of quiet meditation where visitors may reflect on the wisdom of the scriptures.

"Many Americans have drawn strength from their religious faith since 9/11. With this exhibition, the Gallery shares one particular conversation that raises timely questions about the role of the spiritual life in time of crisis," says Dr. Ena Heller, director, Gallery at the American Bible Society.

The exhibition pairs glass panels and prints by Ellen Miret, one of the nation’s leading stained-glass artists, with meditations on those works written by Hondi Duncan Brasco, director of the Center for Spiritual Growth at Christ Church in Bronxville, New York. The pair began this exchange of image and word at a time when both were working separately as individuals: Miret, on bringing new methods to her artmaking, and Brasco, on building a women’s prayer group and other post-9/11 ministry at Christ Church. Their collaboration grew in part from Brasco’s appreciation of Miret’s Revelation Windows, an iconographically complex series of nine lancets commissioned by Christ Church and installed in 1996 to honor its former choirmaster Robert G. Owen.

In January 2002, Miret gave Brasco a large hand-bound portfolio of her most recent prints, many of which she had created by combining traditional glass making and Photoshop techniques. To arrive at the abstract, patterned and representational forms, Miret fused color-saturated tiles of glass, scanned the resulting panels into a computer, and then altered color and scale to achieve works of graphic and symbolic complexity. In the book she gave to her friend, she inserted blank pages across from the prints, inviting Brasco to complete the book with her own meditations.

This pairing of picture and word has been given an architectural equivalent in the exhibition at the Gallery at the American Bible Society by designer Lou Storey. Arched passageways and chambers radiate from a central seating area, where visitors will find hand-bound books and glass works. In the chamber-like spaces will be images by Miret and, in a range of scales and pictorial treatments, Brasco’s meditations on everyday living - from her thoughts about the need to see beyond one’s own turf, "Waking Up to the World," to the power of self-knowledge, "Discernment," to "The Inter-secting Lines of Redemption."

Key images reoccur as visitors proceed through the exhibition. There is a blue Medicine Buddha, rendered as through a rough-hewn scrim, which Miret created in response to Septem-ber 11; the Bodhisattva, created after the Taliban’s destruction of the monumental Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghan-istan, in March 2001; and the abstract prints that inspired Brasco to reflect on the ways in which women from the past, such as Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century visionary and Catholic Abbess, and Julian of Norwich, an anchoress in 14th century England, can show the way to spiritual strength today. "Finding women’s voices has been one of the sources of inspiration in this process of collaboration," says Miret.

"This dialogue reminds us all that art can heal, not only in its power within the lives of individuals, but in its ability to heal society as well," says Dr. Patricia Pongracz, Curator, Gallery at the American Bible Society, and organizer of the exhibition.

In the words of Brasco: "One thing that we cannot do, I believe, is heal on our own."

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