Seeking Parish Hall ArtistsArt provides another medium through which human beings experience gifts of the spirit. Response to a work of art may be on intense, profound levels. As with poetry or literature, theatre, dance or music, the visual arts provide meditative and emotional opportunities and appreciation of life's process, our cultures and society.
Unity Church has gallery space for the showing of works of visual art. It is anticipated that these exhibitions provide spiritual enrichment and liveliness for those attending the church and its functions. At the same time the gallery provides an opportunity for artists to show, share and sell their work. Are you an artist? Submit your work for consideration! The Unity Church Art Team accepts applications each year during the months prior to May 1st of each year. The Art Team considers these applications in May and selects artists for monthly shows that will start in the following fall months. If you would like to submit work for consideration, please read: Policies Parish Hall Artists 2019. If you have questions, please contact the Unity Art Team at artteam@unityunitarian.org
Click the image to read our 2019 Call for Art.
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June Parish Hall ArtistsLife, Loss and Legacy
An Interfaith Exhibit of the he Jewish Women Artists’ Circle The Jewish Women Artists’ Circle, which was launched in 2005, has become an interfaith group of artists. Our group selects spiritual themes, studies with scholars in the community, and creates artworks inspired by our studies. The theme of “mortality” is intriguing for an interfaith group. Death and mourning are human and universal, but the rituals and theologies vary across religions. What we had not anticipated was how deeply personal this theme would become. Over the year or so that we studied together and created our art, all of us experienced the deaths of people we loved. The art that we have created on the theme of “Life, Loss and Legacy” comes from these experiences: life in the face of death, loss and its bitterness, and the legacies that we want to pass on. www.jewishwomenartistscircle.com May Parish Hall ArtistMaura Williams
Maura Williams has been a member of Unity Church since 1981, and has enjoyed opportunities to share her artwork within this community over the years. The May exhibit features oil pastel drawings and giclee prints from her series entitled Seeing Nature, which has fascinated her as an artist for the last eight years. She says about this series: I try to highlight the extraordinary nature of ordinary outdoor scenes. We travel through some version of the natural environment every time we exit a human-made structure. We are probably aware of the seasonal variations, but how often do we look attentively at the specific expressions of natural life around us, which literally change continually? No matter the scale or season, all of nature always holds beauty — sometimes with delicate patterns or exuberant color, sometimes with fierce drama, sometimes in an almost colorless, subtle quietude. At times, we might need to seek out the beauty. I want to zero-in on these moments, to recreate an intimately defined field of vision that suggests the intricacy, diversity, and brilliance inherent in each fleeting manifestation of the natural world. Maura‘s work has been shown in a variety of public venues including galleries, juried and invitational shows, restaurants and night clubs, universities and churches. Her work is represented in corporate and private collections. In addition to making art, her passions include the lives and activities of family and friends, restorative justice peacemaking circles, spiritual growth through energy work, her lake cabin in the woods, biking, cooking, and reading. April Parish Hall ArtistJoan G. Cox
Joan G. Cox, the April Parish Hall artist, was born in Connecticut and grew up in Chicago, but has called the Twin Cities home since her graduation from the University of Minnesota, where she majored in French and Art History. She later took studio arts courses at the University and at Hamline University over a period of five years. She has maintained a studio in the Dow Building in Saint Paul for three decades. At first, figures and landscapes accounted for much of her work, fed by sabbaticals in England, France, and Italy. Several commissions to design stained glass windows led her into abstraction and non-representational work. She likes to experiment with a variety of materials. Joan has shown at galleries in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Florida, Santa Fe, and Denver, as well as at The Plains Museum in Fargo, the Duluth Art Museum, the DeVos Museum in Michigan, and abroad in France, Ireland, and Italy. In 2016, she received the First Place Prize for Painting at the Minnesota State Fair. Here's what Joan says about her art: Rarely do I start a piece with a visual goal. Painting, for me, is an intuitive process involving emotion, imagination, judgment, and serendipitous chance, each playing a role on a journey of discovery. The pieces in the Parish Hall represent several series done over the last several years. Informed by the natural world, they are fed by the experience of working out-of-doors for nearly half the year: summers in a tent near a lake in the north woods of Minnesota, winters under a shelter on a barrier island in southwest Florida. March Parish Hall Artist
Ed Caldie
Caldie is a perpetual apprentice to the arts and to the beauty of life. Born is St. Paul,Minnesota, he began drawing and painting in his teens and enjoyed an early career as a self-taught musician. His captivation with nature prompted frequent canoe expeditions into the Canadian wilderness and his creative curiosity led him to design, own, and operate several upscale restaurants in the Midwest before engaging in a rewarding career as an architectural designer. In 1999, Caldie was involved in a serious traffic accident that prompted him to re-evaluate his life’s purpose. After undergoing eight surgeries to restore a substantial loss of his vision, he sold his design practice, moved to Arizona, and dedicated himself to the mastery of his life-long passion for the fine arts. Family and friends enticed this artist to return to Minnesota after nearly 20 years of residency in the Southwest, where his painting talents began to flourish. It was patience, keen focus and sheer determination that eventually distinguished this mostly self-taught artist as a master, and his art can now be found in collections all over the world. Traditional painting disciplines are sometimes combined with three-dimensional elements to express a more tantalizing and creative concept, always with a vigorous commitment toward composition. Adjusting to the change in climate, this artist offers several of his artistic expressions, during the month of March, as a way to introduce himself to the Unity Church community he now gratefully calls his own. Artist Statement It seems that the preferred human experience is that of beauty and order. In my paintings, I attempt to employ these elements to lure the spectator away from the turbulence of their daily circumstance and offer them relief in a subtle narrative that can only be experienced in the hush of their emotional response. February Parish Hall ArtistSteveboyyi Makubuya
Steveboyyi Makubuya lives in Uganda. He doesn't know when he was born. Brought to a children's home at the age of around nine months, he grew up without the knowledge of his name, his parents, birthday, or even the presence of a family. When the orphanage closed its doors, Steven was 17, and he continued his life back on the streets, relying on his creativity and courage to survive daily obstacles. His artistic themes reflect a longing for family integrity, the constant struggle for survival, and evoke the raw essence of street life common throughout Africa. The spare spatial composition of his work allows the viewer to imagine the social milieu surrounding the central characters and provides an opportunity to thoughtfully walk along with them as they go about the common tasks of daily living. Steven is a child of Africa who has a strong desire to reach out to the world through his art, to help relieve suffering wherever possible, to remind us of the day-to-day struggle faced by countless people around the world, and also to provide us with the opportunity to see the possibility of finding hope, joy, peace, and true happiness despite our circumstances. Steveboyyi was given the opportunity to visit the U.S. in 2017 and participate in his first ever solo exhibition. His stay was cut short due to unforeseen circumstances, and upon returning to Uganda, Steveboyyi lost the use of his eye. The work in this exhibit was created following his eye accident and passed through many hands to get to the U.S., given the lack of a formal mail system in Uganda. His exhibit is being handled by friend Moira Villiard from Duluth, MN. January Parish Hall Artists
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