Doug Adams' Legacy: The Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education
by Lily Manderville
Lily Manderville is programs manager at the Center for the Arts, Religion and Education in Berkeley, California.
Although not currently on view in the Doug Adams Gallery, the CARE Art Collection is available on loan as an educational resource and is available online at care-gtu.org. It represents twenty-four works including Chagall, Rembrandt, and De Staebler. For more information about CARE, see http://www.care-gtu.org.
It was the year 1987, and the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) was brimming with energy as a center of meaningful interreligious dialogue. One man in particular, Doug Adams, an international scholar in religion and the arts, had a desire to create a center dedicated to supporting the arts in every aspect of religious life at the GTU. A professor in worship and the arts at the Pacific School of Religion (a member school of the GTU), and one of the core doctoral faculty of the GTU, Adams founded the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education (CARE) in 1987. Located in Berkeley, California, at the heart of a rich and diverse creative community, CARE, thanks to Adams’ fierce commitment to the arts and spiritual practice, began to offer graduate courses in drama, poetry, and the visual arts. Fundamental to Adams’ vision was that the arts should become part of the required curriculum at the GTU, where everyone, including faculty, students, and practicing artists, could engage in meaningful dialogue. As CARE gained momentum, it became recognized as a place where students could become aware of the integration of arts and religion.
Doug Adams
1945-2007
Adams was committed to introducing the GTU community to how religious practice could become enriched through art. In 1988, he introduced the artist Christo at the opening of the art exhibition entitled, Christo and Peter Selz, The Running Fence Project Revisited, featuring Christo’s plans for the Umbrella Project. Adams stressed the importance of Christo’s visual art as a metaphor for lifting. “[U]mbrellas in both California and Japan help us see our affinities with one another.” Adams’ implementation of Christo’s exhibition in the GTU’s Flora Lamson Hewlett Library exemplified not only how religious sentiment could be expressed artistically, but also how art could function religiously to create relationships between people.
After 31 years as a professor and minister, Adams passed away on July 24, 2007. His generous spiritual and personal dedication toward young people, religion, and the arts, made Adams a memorable and profoundly influential figure in the emerging field of theology, worship, and the arts. CARE continues to carry forth Adams’ vision of promoting the impact of the arts and religion at the GTU.
Affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union
As an independent affiliated center of the GTU, CARE is in a unique position to provide resources for students, faculty, and staff of all affiliated member schools. While promoting scholarship, reflection, and practice in the arts and religion, CARE strives to serve the GTU and benefit the broader community. As an independent non-profit organization, CARE’s goal is to facilitate the integration of the arts and religion across the GTU by presenting exhibitions and programming in the Doug Adams Gallery, offering courses in the arts and religion, and awarding grants and prizes. CARE sponsors or co-sponsors lectures, special events, and performances.
Doug Adams Gallery
Following Doug Adams’ untimely death in 2008, Carin Jacobs was announced as the Executive Director of CARE. A museum educator and scholar of museum studies, Jacobs, whose previous experience included the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, directed CARE in developing the Doug Adams Gallery as an academic art gallery, purposefully integrating a gallery into a seminary environment. As a celebration of Doug Adams’ legacy, CARE’s Doug Adams Gallery presents exhibitions that examine themes of religion and spirituality, broadly defined. Three exhibitions each year and related public programming offer opportunities for learning, reflection, and enjoyment for GTU students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.
Lily Manderville is programs manager at the Center for the Arts, Religion and Education in Berkeley, California.
Although not currently on view in the Doug Adams Gallery, the CARE Art Collection is available on loan as an educational resource and is available online at care-gtu.org. It represents twenty-four works including Chagall, Rembrandt, and De Staebler. For more information about CARE, see http://www.care-gtu.org.
It was the year 1987, and the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) was brimming with energy as a center of meaningful interreligious dialogue. One man in particular, Doug Adams, an international scholar in religion and the arts, had a desire to create a center dedicated to supporting the arts in every aspect of religious life at the GTU. A professor in worship and the arts at the Pacific School of Religion (a member school of the GTU), and one of the core doctoral faculty of the GTU, Adams founded the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education (CARE) in 1987. Located in Berkeley, California, at the heart of a rich and diverse creative community, CARE, thanks to Adams’ fierce commitment to the arts and spiritual practice, began to offer graduate courses in drama, poetry, and the visual arts. Fundamental to Adams’ vision was that the arts should become part of the required curriculum at the GTU, where everyone, including faculty, students, and practicing artists, could engage in meaningful dialogue. As CARE gained momentum, it became recognized as a place where students could become aware of the integration of arts and religion.
Doug Adams
1945-2007
Adams was committed to introducing the GTU community to how religious practice could become enriched through art. In 1988, he introduced the artist Christo at the opening of the art exhibition entitled, Christo and Peter Selz, The Running Fence Project Revisited, featuring Christo’s plans for the Umbrella Project. Adams stressed the importance of Christo’s visual art as a metaphor for lifting. “[U]mbrellas in both California and Japan help us see our affinities with one another.” Adams’ implementation of Christo’s exhibition in the GTU’s Flora Lamson Hewlett Library exemplified not only how religious sentiment could be expressed artistically, but also how art could function religiously to create relationships between people.
After 31 years as a professor and minister, Adams passed away on July 24, 2007. His generous spiritual and personal dedication toward young people, religion, and the arts, made Adams a memorable and profoundly influential figure in the emerging field of theology, worship, and the arts. CARE continues to carry forth Adams’ vision of promoting the impact of the arts and religion at the GTU.
Affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union
As an independent affiliated center of the GTU, CARE is in a unique position to provide resources for students, faculty, and staff of all affiliated member schools. While promoting scholarship, reflection, and practice in the arts and religion, CARE strives to serve the GTU and benefit the broader community. As an independent non-profit organization, CARE’s goal is to facilitate the integration of the arts and religion across the GTU by presenting exhibitions and programming in the Doug Adams Gallery, offering courses in the arts and religion, and awarding grants and prizes. CARE sponsors or co-sponsors lectures, special events, and performances.
Doug Adams Gallery
Following Doug Adams’ untimely death in 2008, Carin Jacobs was announced as the Executive Director of CARE. A museum educator and scholar of museum studies, Jacobs, whose previous experience included the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, directed CARE in developing the Doug Adams Gallery as an academic art gallery, purposefully integrating a gallery into a seminary environment. As a celebration of Doug Adams’ legacy, CARE’s Doug Adams Gallery presents exhibitions that examine themes of religion and spirituality, broadly defined. Three exhibitions each year and related public programming offer opportunities for learning, reflection, and enjoyment for GTU students, faculty, staff, and the wider community.
Christo and Peter Selz, The Running Fence Project Revisited, Graduate Theological Union Library, April 15, 1988
The Doug Adams Gallery shares space with the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology, whose display includes artifacts from Tell-en-Nasbeh (a mostly Iron Age site northwest of Jerusalem). Because of this unique arrangement, each summer the gallery and the museum collaborate on the “Mining the Collection” series, in which a gallery guest artist is invited to create new works inspired by the museum’s antiquities. This year, guest artist Marianne Lettieri, Vice President of CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts), uses mixed media constructions created with common artifacts of domesticity and manual labor to help visitors gain a fresh perspective on the Badè collections. Lettieri’s work shows us how much we have in common with the potter who left her thumbprint in a clay vessel 2,000 years ago. She creates art with cultural detritus and everyday objects, artifacts that people eventually discard along with memories embedded in them.
Doug Adams, Jane Dillenberger and artist Frederick Brown, 1995
Marianne Lettieri
Rose Window, 2013
Mixed media construction
Doug Adams Gallery
Exhibition Related Programming
Under Jacobs’ leadership, CARE hosted a number of co-sponsored programs, including partnerships with the Oakland Museum of California and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. After Jacobs’ departure in August of 2013, CARE appointed Dr. Elizabeth S. Peña as the new Executive Director. Since she arrived at CARE in November 2013, Dr. Peña has instigated a new collaboration between CARE and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California. Dr. Peña successfully brought to completion fourteen planned exhibition-related programs in the Doug Adams Gallery, and has been instrumental in designing exciting new shows and related curricula for the 2014-2015 academic year. Some of CARE’s new programs have included events that encourage student involvement, such as exhibition label writing and “brown bag lunches” that give students the opportunity to present their work in a collegial environment.
Curriculum
In addition to offering a wide variety of arts courses, CARE is excited to announce the appointment of Dr. Frank Burch Brown as Visiting Professor of Art and Religion for the 2014-2016 academic years. Dr. Devin Zuber, CARE board member and core doctoral faculty member in art and religion at the Graduate Theological Union, lauded Dr. Burch Brown as, “a leader in the field of theological aesthetics and a pioneer in the study of art and religion.” We are confident Dr. Burch Brown’s experience will help further promote scholarship and reflection in the arts and religion at the GTU. Through CARE, he will be teaching “Theological Aesthetics” in the fall semester of 2014, where students will explore the main issues, ideas, and themes in theological aesthetics, while paying close attention to the arts and creative expression, beauty, and problems posed by ugliness and suffering.
Dr. Rossitza Schroder, CARE/PSR Assistant Professor of Art & Religion, will be teaching two courses for CARE this fall, including “Christian Islamic Interactions” and “Icons and Their Audiences.” In the latter course, Dr. Schroder and her students will research and organize an exhibition for the Doug Adams Gallery of 18th- and 19th-century icons from the collection of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute.
Art With Purpose
For more than 25 years, CARE has enhanced the GTU community by providing theological reflection and practice through exhibitions, events, performances, and educational curriculum in the arts and religion. While representing diverse views of art and religion, CARE and the Doug Adams Gallery present the arts as an instrument for knowing and expressing all that is spiritual and experiential, helping others reconnect beauty and the arts to religion. In the future, CARE wishes to continue to serve students, faculty, and the wider community, always inspired by Doug Adams’ enthusiasm and commitment.
Under Jacobs’ leadership, CARE hosted a number of co-sponsored programs, including partnerships with the Oakland Museum of California and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. After Jacobs’ departure in August of 2013, CARE appointed Dr. Elizabeth S. Peña as the new Executive Director. Since she arrived at CARE in November 2013, Dr. Peña has instigated a new collaboration between CARE and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California. Dr. Peña successfully brought to completion fourteen planned exhibition-related programs in the Doug Adams Gallery, and has been instrumental in designing exciting new shows and related curricula for the 2014-2015 academic year. Some of CARE’s new programs have included events that encourage student involvement, such as exhibition label writing and “brown bag lunches” that give students the opportunity to present their work in a collegial environment.
Curriculum
In addition to offering a wide variety of arts courses, CARE is excited to announce the appointment of Dr. Frank Burch Brown as Visiting Professor of Art and Religion for the 2014-2016 academic years. Dr. Devin Zuber, CARE board member and core doctoral faculty member in art and religion at the Graduate Theological Union, lauded Dr. Burch Brown as, “a leader in the field of theological aesthetics and a pioneer in the study of art and religion.” We are confident Dr. Burch Brown’s experience will help further promote scholarship and reflection in the arts and religion at the GTU. Through CARE, he will be teaching “Theological Aesthetics” in the fall semester of 2014, where students will explore the main issues, ideas, and themes in theological aesthetics, while paying close attention to the arts and creative expression, beauty, and problems posed by ugliness and suffering.
Dr. Rossitza Schroder, CARE/PSR Assistant Professor of Art & Religion, will be teaching two courses for CARE this fall, including “Christian Islamic Interactions” and “Icons and Their Audiences.” In the latter course, Dr. Schroder and her students will research and organize an exhibition for the Doug Adams Gallery of 18th- and 19th-century icons from the collection of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute.
Art With Purpose
For more than 25 years, CARE has enhanced the GTU community by providing theological reflection and practice through exhibitions, events, performances, and educational curriculum in the arts and religion. While representing diverse views of art and religion, CARE and the Doug Adams Gallery present the arts as an instrument for knowing and expressing all that is spiritual and experiential, helping others reconnect beauty and the arts to religion. In the future, CARE wishes to continue to serve students, faculty, and the wider community, always inspired by Doug Adams’ enthusiasm and commitment.
