Spirituality Through and In Art

The third session is this coming Monday May 10.  The videos of the previous sessions are available for viewing and will be provided to you if you purchase the series.  Sign up now!

Alex continues the fascinating and moving journey covering the importance of spirituality and art in many cultures and time periods.

This is a 6 week lecture series on Monday evenings on the Zoom platform. Each night's lecture is slated to last one hour but usually lasts about 1 1/2 hours from 7 PM.  Links are provided on the day of the lecture and the sessions are taped for re-watching at any time.

This is Alex Shundi's statement concerning this lecture series.

Ever since the ancient beginning of image making, comfortably 50,000 years ago and beyond, art has explored spirituality as the intangible yet existent phenomena that has conditioned our actions, beliefs, and attraction to the “great mystery”.

The artist as Shaman, has been the forecaster, the commentator-critic-and ritualistic revealer, the guide into the deepest recesses of our human thoughts and feelings.

The artist always served to make vivid our prayers and musings into that component of human philosophy, knowledge and psychology through the revelation of art. It has been an exploration into the purpose and meaning which transcends the individual human.

Within us all, there is a hunger and curiosity to understand spiritualism, often by embracing it in the creation of religions, myths, but always through art.

Spiritualism, on the other hand, is a belief in a God, or supernatural entities that we can somehow connect or communicate with, often through an “enlightened” medium. But Spirituality is a subjective choice in a life direction, perhaps in the discovery and acceptance of a general balance and harmony felt in nature and our very existence.

In the final analysis, SPIRIT is the root, in that it is the soul, the life force that allows for existence. Animation is putting our soul (anima) in everything. Artists have been practicing that forever.

From the caves of our distant ancestors to the most post-modern present art-making, and through all civilizations in time and geography, in all tribes and methods of exploration, art has addressed that fundamental curiosity: who are we? Is death final? Why are we, or what is anything, and principally, what is creation?

We will look and consider the great visual raconteurs of all this through the story of art as revelation, and as that great questioner of the “what -if”.

Kandinsky and Klee, Caravaggio and Bernini, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Turrell and Van Bingen, creators of architecture, carpets and tapestries, sacred objects present in all civilizations, Islamic miniatures and kaleidoscopic tile cupolas, Buddhist Stupas and Tankas, the Sistine Chapel and Tribal meso-American sacred craft-design and temples: the richness of reaching out to the Spirit, and much more will be considered and discussed while our eyes feast and wonder in these magnificent and stimulating prophetic visions."