It Began in the Lobby of Algonquin
A Reflection on the History of ARTS
ARTS began twenty-five years ago in the summer of 1988 and over those years grew and thrived only to suffer the threat of extinction. But, then, it started over. And, to its credit—as one of that long march of small publications that began with fanfare only to find survival unpredictable—it did indeed survive, and even, in its own fashion, flourish. This is a personal narrative. It is not, however, a spinning of after dinner stories of congratulation. It is, rather, a short narrative of some of what happened in those years that seems to warrant remembering. I write on the eve of ending my twenty-five years of tenure as editor—a tenure that closes with this issue.
What did ARTS do? Simply put, it played a significant role in shaping the conversation among those interested in how theology, spirituality, and the arts engage each other. It helped define the theology and the arts dialogue in the seminary, in the college, in the church, at least among those who found the conversation to be an important one. And most importantly it published—sometimes found—younger scholars, as well as established ones, who would define the parameters and forge ideas of what that conversation should be about. The names of writers tumble out from the earlier to the middle to the later years—John Dillenberger, Jane Dillenberger, Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Frank L. Dent, Doug Adams, Jo Milgrom, Deborah Haynes, Rod Pattenden, Rosemary Crumlin, Barbara DeConcini, John W. Cook, Ed Farley, B. J. Stiles, Gregor Goethels, Susan Bauer, David Kelsey, Brian Wren, Gayle Graham Yates, James L. Waits, Catherine Kapikian, George Pattison, Terrence Dempsey, Patrick Negri, Kenneth Lawrence, Frank Burch Brown, Cliff Edwards, Graham Howes, Robin Jensen, Mary Charles Murray, Victoria R. Sirota, Ann Foster, Robert Haveluck, Charles Pickstone, Kevin Lewis, Inge Linder, Sandra Bowden, Margaret Miles, Tom Devonshire-Jones, Don Saliers, Natalini Jayasuriya, Peggy Parker, Mev Puleo, Kimberly Vrudny, Catherine Kapikian, Peggy Shriver, Carolyn Manosevitz, Donald Shriver, William Dyrness, Jann Cather Weaver, Wayne Roosa, David Jasper, Donna La Rue, Deborah Sokolove, Rebecca Davis, Clyde Steckel, Cindi Beth Johnson, Maureen O’Connell, Paul Myhre, Peter Hawkins, Marilyn Chiat, Bob Brusic, Linnea Wren, Bobbi Dykema, Mark Burrows, James Malone, Sophia Rose Shafi, Eileen Crowley, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Cecilia González-Andrieu, John Handley, Amy Levin Weiss, Ted Smith. And all the others: theologians, artists, art historians, ethicists, who through their writings made ARTS a voice to be listened to.
The Beginning of ARTS and the Algonquin Lobby
There is an historical note to the launching of ARTS. I had written a study for Lilly Endowment on The Arts in Theological Education: New Possibilities for Integration at the same time John Dillenberger published his study The Visual Arts and Christianity in America. Jim Waits held a conference at Candler School of Theology to discuss and debate the premises of these books, though, more broadly, the conference focused on the future of the theology and arts discussion as it was emerging in theological studies and seminary education. Jim Waits was to become a major player in the development of ARTS and when I sought support to create a small publication that would enhance the theology and the arts conversation, his ideas and influence were pivotal. Joining this effort was Barbara Wheeler, on behalf of Lilly Endowment and Frank L. Dent, who would become the co-editor of ARTS in its first years of publication and who would help give shape to its basic design and focus that still mark its life as a publication. We all met in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, on a rainy day in the spring of 1988 and within close proximity to the round table and the ghosts of Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley, who haunt that lobby, we created a journal over glasses of sherry and a deep sense of excitement. It was agreed that ARTS would be published by the Religion and Arts Program of United Theological Seminary, where I was dean, and the publication would be financially launched by Lilly Endowment. It was to be “a resource letter . . . to serve as a forum for dialogue regarding theological work with the arts in seminary education including general announcements on what professional societies, arts organizations, churches and selected publications (were) doing with the subject of religion and the arts” (Vol. 1, No. 1). A rather staid mission—perhaps it could have benefited from a ghost or two, as I now look back. It was, however, never to be a resource letter for, from the beginning, its focus was on articles, symposia, political commentary on the state of the arts in theological education, the work of artists, book reviews, poetry, and the resonant sound of debate. The first issue, published in June of 1988, was filled with lively essays by Frank Dent, John Cook, Doug Adams, and Barbara DeConcini, and treated themes such as Segal’s Holocaust, how to see theologically, the power of outsider art, and the future of the arts in theological studies.
The Cultural Wars and the Founding of SARTS
In the beginning, ARTS informally aligned itself with the American Academy of Religion’s Arts, Literature, and Religion section where people working in religion and the arts, as well as theology and the arts, would gather for their annual sessions. ARTS promoted each year’s program of the ALR and made informal reports to that group on what the publication was attempting to accomplish. In 1990, however, the ALR was suspended for a number of reasons by the Program Committee of the AAR. The suspension would be discussed in letters and in debates at the ALR meetings presided over by Barbara DeConcini, the executive director-elect of the AAR. That history is complex and need not be rehearsed here except to say that ARTS wrote about the controversy in each of its issues and would publish articles by Barbara DeConcini and Robert Detweiler regarding the issues at hand and the final decision on the future; namely, that an ALR section would be reconstituted with a steering committee and offered a fresh start. It was the first foray of ARTS into academic politics and I think that the role it played contributed to both the lively discussion and, perhaps, the final resolutions. But in the midst of that controversy, there emerged another matter regarding the role and place of theologians in the ALR section. Many voices in religious studies and cultural studies—several of whom proposed in the debates to turn the section into a forum on religion and cultural studies—deemed that the “normative” work of theologians had no place in the section. (As one rather vociferous woman shouted, “art” and “religion” are creations of “dominant culture.” “We must be rid of them and their imperialistic trappings”—after which there was applause.) That was not finally to be the case, though in the 1990s theological papers were scarce, and the tide had turned towards non-theological work that was more akin to discussions in art history and cultural criticism than theological work.
The effect of this rather amazing period was to give impetus to an idea that came out of the ARTS brainstorming group that met each year at the AAR/SBL meeting—the creation of a society that would invite discussions of both theological and religious studies work with the arts. These conversations began in the late 1990s and on November 21, 2003, in conjunction with the AAR/SBL meetings in Atlanta, SARTS: The Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies was born. In those early years, the Henry Luce Foundation provided financial support and ARTS and United Theological Seminary shepherded its development with United providing, as it did for ARTS, an institutional context, organizational support, and financial agency for this fledgling organization. In July of 2006, SARTS received its 501c3 status that gave it full independence as an academic society. In 2008, ARTS became the journal of SARTS with United Seminary its publisher. In 2013, the University of St. Thomas, where Kimberly Vrudny teaches theology, became the context for its editorial work.
In the Beginning
Its public role unfolded over the years of its life. But its internal life was of a different order. “In the beginning,” I had a publisher who gave me back print copy from the marked up copy from my typewriter that I had given him, and I took scissors and paste and gave back to Jim Sexton the montage of images and headlines defining what it ought to look like. We phoned each other back and forth on one problem or another until we had it right and then Sexton printed it and we mailed it. Its only use of color was design bars on the front and title pages; it was, alas, an arts publication that had no color images. Remember the years were the late 1980s and early 1990s. My only help was a student assistant who deposited checks, dealt with subscribers’ inquiries, and joined me for coffee to discuss the proofs of my not always satisfying layout—though to this day, I think, after finding writers and editing the articles, it was lay-out that delighted me most. Color did not come until 1999 with Andy Warhol’s Christ figure from his Last Supper splashed across the cover page accompanying my review of Jane Dillenberger’s study of The Religious Life of Andy Warhol. The next issue was more “colorful” and with it we fully broke the color barrier.
In the midst of this and other changes, Kimberly Vrudny joined me. A graduate student at United in theology and the arts, she became my assistant and then, in time, an editorial assistant, and finally an editor. She created our divisions of articles under the themes of “In the Studio,” “In the Study,” “In the Classroom,” and “In the Sanctuary,” and occasionally the use of other designations that gave a consistent balance to the types of articles we printed and, more, the types of subjects we wanted to offer our readers. During this period of the late 1990s and early 2000s, we received funding from Luce that made possible color printing and a redesigning of the publication. It was a dynamic period. We moved from a publication of 32 pages to 56 pages, with occasionally more. And ARTS was selected to be indexed in the ATLA Serials database—all of which meant that all the issues were available to view online. In 2009, Ann Delgehausen of Trio Books joined me. She redesigned the format with a much sharper contemporary and more sophisticated feel, she professionalized our work with images, and she worked closely with editorial details. And Kayla Larson created the online issue that has developed into a mainstay.
And so it is that I am writing in the fall of 2013 in the last issue that I will edit. I retire from this position with great hope that I will finish a book that I am in the midst of writing. But more importantly, I turn to my own work with the wonderful sense that under Kim Vrudny’s editorship, we will enter a new period of growth and an ongoing discovery of artists and articles for our readers.
A Postlude
Were there issues of ARTS that I remember better than others? Yes, there was one issue where I couldn’t have paid the printer’s bill without a friend and donor’s special gift. There was the issue with Anne H.H. Pyle’s article on Watanabe that was to be recognized as the best work on the artist that had been published in English. There was Sandra Bowden’s essay and images of Otto Dix’s works on St. Matthew. I rather enjoyed the “battles” in the AAR around the future of the Arts, Literature, and Religion section and the role ARTS played. And it is important to acknowledge that without ARTS there would have been no SARTS. Publishing Bob Haveluck’s Over the Line cartoons delighted me, and I came to divide the people who got what he was saying from those who didn’t as a bellwether of who understood the moral ambiguity of life and who didn’t. And to help a young writer edit his or her article that, otherwise, sounded like a dissertation chapter, so that the article flowed easily and gracefully as it said something important to its reader, was quite fulfilling. The large issue on Stephen de Staebler’s sculpture, Winged Figure, published with CARE: The Center for the Arts, Religion and Education at the GTU, was very important to me. The issue, edited by Diane Apostolos-Capadona, was in memory of Doug Adams—Doug, who was my friend and colleague, sometimes my muse, from the very beginning of ARTS until his untimely death at the age of 62. But I must stop listing issues, for there are too many.
United Seminary made ARTS possible and I shall never forget what it meant to us, for it sustained us for all of those twenty-five years. Surely another meeting in New York City at the Harvard Club with Jim Waits to determine a new way of shaping ARTS’ future—such a visit would be in order, except that it is not, for those meetings and all the future meetings, where the deep and abiding belief that a conversation between theology and the arts must be given press, must pass to others. I bid our new editor Godspeed. And I say farewell to all of you who have supported ARTS and, in so doing, supported me. —wy
by
Wilson Yates
Wilson Yates has served as founder and Senior Editor of ARTS for the twenty-five years of its existence (1988-2013); he is Professor Emeritus of Theology, Society and the Arts, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
ARTS began twenty-five years ago in the summer of 1988 and over those years grew and thrived only to suffer the threat of extinction. But, then, it started over. And, to its credit—as one of that long march of small publications that began with fanfare only to find survival unpredictable—it did indeed survive, and even, in its own fashion, flourish. This is a personal narrative. It is not, however, a spinning of after dinner stories of congratulation. It is, rather, a short narrative of some of what happened in those years that seems to warrant remembering. I write on the eve of ending my twenty-five years of tenure as editor—a tenure that closes with this issue.
What did ARTS do? Simply put, it played a significant role in shaping the conversation among those interested in how theology, spirituality, and the arts engage each other. It helped define the theology and the arts dialogue in the seminary, in the college, in the church, at least among those who found the conversation to be an important one. And most importantly it published—sometimes found—younger scholars, as well as established ones, who would define the parameters and forge ideas of what that conversation should be about. The names of writers tumble out from the earlier to the middle to the later years—John Dillenberger, Jane Dillenberger, Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Frank L. Dent, Doug Adams, Jo Milgrom, Deborah Haynes, Rod Pattenden, Rosemary Crumlin, Barbara DeConcini, John W. Cook, Ed Farley, B. J. Stiles, Gregor Goethels, Susan Bauer, David Kelsey, Brian Wren, Gayle Graham Yates, James L. Waits, Catherine Kapikian, George Pattison, Terrence Dempsey, Patrick Negri, Kenneth Lawrence, Frank Burch Brown, Cliff Edwards, Graham Howes, Robin Jensen, Mary Charles Murray, Victoria R. Sirota, Ann Foster, Robert Haveluck, Charles Pickstone, Kevin Lewis, Inge Linder, Sandra Bowden, Margaret Miles, Tom Devonshire-Jones, Don Saliers, Natalini Jayasuriya, Peggy Parker, Mev Puleo, Kimberly Vrudny, Catherine Kapikian, Peggy Shriver, Carolyn Manosevitz, Donald Shriver, William Dyrness, Jann Cather Weaver, Wayne Roosa, David Jasper, Donna La Rue, Deborah Sokolove, Rebecca Davis, Clyde Steckel, Cindi Beth Johnson, Maureen O’Connell, Paul Myhre, Peter Hawkins, Marilyn Chiat, Bob Brusic, Linnea Wren, Bobbi Dykema, Mark Burrows, James Malone, Sophia Rose Shafi, Eileen Crowley, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Cecilia González-Andrieu, John Handley, Amy Levin Weiss, Ted Smith. And all the others: theologians, artists, art historians, ethicists, who through their writings made ARTS a voice to be listened to.
The Beginning of ARTS and the Algonquin Lobby
There is an historical note to the launching of ARTS. I had written a study for Lilly Endowment on The Arts in Theological Education: New Possibilities for Integration at the same time John Dillenberger published his study The Visual Arts and Christianity in America. Jim Waits held a conference at Candler School of Theology to discuss and debate the premises of these books, though, more broadly, the conference focused on the future of the theology and arts discussion as it was emerging in theological studies and seminary education. Jim Waits was to become a major player in the development of ARTS and when I sought support to create a small publication that would enhance the theology and the arts conversation, his ideas and influence were pivotal. Joining this effort was Barbara Wheeler, on behalf of Lilly Endowment and Frank L. Dent, who would become the co-editor of ARTS in its first years of publication and who would help give shape to its basic design and focus that still mark its life as a publication. We all met in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, on a rainy day in the spring of 1988 and within close proximity to the round table and the ghosts of Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley, who haunt that lobby, we created a journal over glasses of sherry and a deep sense of excitement. It was agreed that ARTS would be published by the Religion and Arts Program of United Theological Seminary, where I was dean, and the publication would be financially launched by Lilly Endowment. It was to be “a resource letter . . . to serve as a forum for dialogue regarding theological work with the arts in seminary education including general announcements on what professional societies, arts organizations, churches and selected publications (were) doing with the subject of religion and the arts” (Vol. 1, No. 1). A rather staid mission—perhaps it could have benefited from a ghost or two, as I now look back. It was, however, never to be a resource letter for, from the beginning, its focus was on articles, symposia, political commentary on the state of the arts in theological education, the work of artists, book reviews, poetry, and the resonant sound of debate. The first issue, published in June of 1988, was filled with lively essays by Frank Dent, John Cook, Doug Adams, and Barbara DeConcini, and treated themes such as Segal’s Holocaust, how to see theologically, the power of outsider art, and the future of the arts in theological studies.
The Cultural Wars and the Founding of SARTS
In the beginning, ARTS informally aligned itself with the American Academy of Religion’s Arts, Literature, and Religion section where people working in religion and the arts, as well as theology and the arts, would gather for their annual sessions. ARTS promoted each year’s program of the ALR and made informal reports to that group on what the publication was attempting to accomplish. In 1990, however, the ALR was suspended for a number of reasons by the Program Committee of the AAR. The suspension would be discussed in letters and in debates at the ALR meetings presided over by Barbara DeConcini, the executive director-elect of the AAR. That history is complex and need not be rehearsed here except to say that ARTS wrote about the controversy in each of its issues and would publish articles by Barbara DeConcini and Robert Detweiler regarding the issues at hand and the final decision on the future; namely, that an ALR section would be reconstituted with a steering committee and offered a fresh start. It was the first foray of ARTS into academic politics and I think that the role it played contributed to both the lively discussion and, perhaps, the final resolutions. But in the midst of that controversy, there emerged another matter regarding the role and place of theologians in the ALR section. Many voices in religious studies and cultural studies—several of whom proposed in the debates to turn the section into a forum on religion and cultural studies—deemed that the “normative” work of theologians had no place in the section. (As one rather vociferous woman shouted, “art” and “religion” are creations of “dominant culture.” “We must be rid of them and their imperialistic trappings”—after which there was applause.) That was not finally to be the case, though in the 1990s theological papers were scarce, and the tide had turned towards non-theological work that was more akin to discussions in art history and cultural criticism than theological work.
The effect of this rather amazing period was to give impetus to an idea that came out of the ARTS brainstorming group that met each year at the AAR/SBL meeting—the creation of a society that would invite discussions of both theological and religious studies work with the arts. These conversations began in the late 1990s and on November 21, 2003, in conjunction with the AAR/SBL meetings in Atlanta, SARTS: The Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies was born. In those early years, the Henry Luce Foundation provided financial support and ARTS and United Theological Seminary shepherded its development with United providing, as it did for ARTS, an institutional context, organizational support, and financial agency for this fledgling organization. In July of 2006, SARTS received its 501c3 status that gave it full independence as an academic society. In 2008, ARTS became the journal of SARTS with United Seminary its publisher. In 2013, the University of St. Thomas, where Kimberly Vrudny teaches theology, became the context for its editorial work.
In the Beginning
Its public role unfolded over the years of its life. But its internal life was of a different order. “In the beginning,” I had a publisher who gave me back print copy from the marked up copy from my typewriter that I had given him, and I took scissors and paste and gave back to Jim Sexton the montage of images and headlines defining what it ought to look like. We phoned each other back and forth on one problem or another until we had it right and then Sexton printed it and we mailed it. Its only use of color was design bars on the front and title pages; it was, alas, an arts publication that had no color images. Remember the years were the late 1980s and early 1990s. My only help was a student assistant who deposited checks, dealt with subscribers’ inquiries, and joined me for coffee to discuss the proofs of my not always satisfying layout—though to this day, I think, after finding writers and editing the articles, it was lay-out that delighted me most. Color did not come until 1999 with Andy Warhol’s Christ figure from his Last Supper splashed across the cover page accompanying my review of Jane Dillenberger’s study of The Religious Life of Andy Warhol. The next issue was more “colorful” and with it we fully broke the color barrier.
In the midst of this and other changes, Kimberly Vrudny joined me. A graduate student at United in theology and the arts, she became my assistant and then, in time, an editorial assistant, and finally an editor. She created our divisions of articles under the themes of “In the Studio,” “In the Study,” “In the Classroom,” and “In the Sanctuary,” and occasionally the use of other designations that gave a consistent balance to the types of articles we printed and, more, the types of subjects we wanted to offer our readers. During this period of the late 1990s and early 2000s, we received funding from Luce that made possible color printing and a redesigning of the publication. It was a dynamic period. We moved from a publication of 32 pages to 56 pages, with occasionally more. And ARTS was selected to be indexed in the ATLA Serials database—all of which meant that all the issues were available to view online. In 2009, Ann Delgehausen of Trio Books joined me. She redesigned the format with a much sharper contemporary and more sophisticated feel, she professionalized our work with images, and she worked closely with editorial details. And Kayla Larson created the online issue that has developed into a mainstay.
And so it is that I am writing in the fall of 2013 in the last issue that I will edit. I retire from this position with great hope that I will finish a book that I am in the midst of writing. But more importantly, I turn to my own work with the wonderful sense that under Kim Vrudny’s editorship, we will enter a new period of growth and an ongoing discovery of artists and articles for our readers.
A Postlude
Were there issues of ARTS that I remember better than others? Yes, there was one issue where I couldn’t have paid the printer’s bill without a friend and donor’s special gift. There was the issue with Anne H.H. Pyle’s article on Watanabe that was to be recognized as the best work on the artist that had been published in English. There was Sandra Bowden’s essay and images of Otto Dix’s works on St. Matthew. I rather enjoyed the “battles” in the AAR around the future of the Arts, Literature, and Religion section and the role ARTS played. And it is important to acknowledge that without ARTS there would have been no SARTS. Publishing Bob Haveluck’s Over the Line cartoons delighted me, and I came to divide the people who got what he was saying from those who didn’t as a bellwether of who understood the moral ambiguity of life and who didn’t. And to help a young writer edit his or her article that, otherwise, sounded like a dissertation chapter, so that the article flowed easily and gracefully as it said something important to its reader, was quite fulfilling. The large issue on Stephen de Staebler’s sculpture, Winged Figure, published with CARE: The Center for the Arts, Religion and Education at the GTU, was very important to me. The issue, edited by Diane Apostolos-Capadona, was in memory of Doug Adams—Doug, who was my friend and colleague, sometimes my muse, from the very beginning of ARTS until his untimely death at the age of 62. But I must stop listing issues, for there are too many.
United Seminary made ARTS possible and I shall never forget what it meant to us, for it sustained us for all of those twenty-five years. Surely another meeting in New York City at the Harvard Club with Jim Waits to determine a new way of shaping ARTS’ future—such a visit would be in order, except that it is not, for those meetings and all the future meetings, where the deep and abiding belief that a conversation between theology and the arts must be given press, must pass to others. I bid our new editor Godspeed. And I say farewell to all of you who have supported ARTS and, in so doing, supported me. —wy
by
Wilson Yates
Wilson Yates has served as founder and Senior Editor of ARTS for the twenty-five years of its existence (1988-2013); he is Professor Emeritus of Theology, Society and the Arts, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
