I’ve published on religion and art for Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and Arab American press, on topics ranging from idolatry and the Second Commandment to biblical interpretation.
My review of Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice (New York: Vendome Press, 2010. 256 pp.) and Peter C. Sutton, Reclaimed: Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008. 224 pp.) appeared in Vol. 5, No. 1, 2011 (pp. 135-138) in the academic journal Images, published by Brill. (See full Scribd file at bottom of page.)
An article I wrote about Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, and the Jewish community of 17th century Holland was cited in a footnote in the catalog, Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus (Yale University Press, 2011), edited by Lloyd DeWitt, and with preface by Seymour Slive and contributions by Lloyd DeWitt, Blaise Ducos, Franziska Gottwald, George S. Keyes, Shelley Perlove, Larry Silver, Ken Sutherland, and Mark Tucker. The catalog accompanied an exhibit which traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
I presented on “Art History 2.0: A Religion and Art Blog as a Model for a New Critical Approach” on the panel “The Beam in Thine Own Eye: Criticism and Aggiornamento,” chaired by Andrea Ferber, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at the Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2008 in Indianapolis, and on “Pinning the Kabbalistic Tail on [William] Blake” at the 6th annual Graduate Student Symposium in The History of Art in Oct. 2008 at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C.
Menachem Wecker. “Jerusalem.” (2002) 18″ x 24″, acrylic on canvas.
I was also part of the first annual meeting (2008) of the Contemporary Art Think Tank, “Resistance in Contemporary Art,” at the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art in Washington, D.C.
In January of 2009, I moderated the panel “Mormon Art: Definitions and Directions” at a conference of Sunstone Magazine – Mormon Experience Scholarship Issues and Art. Here’s the panel blurb:
Spencer W. Kimball declared that the full story of Mormonism has yet to be written, painted, sculpted, or composed — and the task of Mormon artists is to accomplish this. How close are they? This panel gathers a group of Mormon artists in a variety of disciplines to address several questions: Does such a thing as Mormon art exist? If so, what is it? If not, should it exist? What’s the relationship between those two words? How is the faith of artists who are Mormon expressed in their work? Or is it? Should it be?
My blog on faith and art for Houston Chronicle can be viewed here. I also wrote on art for the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based The Jewish Press (see here) from 2003 to 2012, and was an artist in residence at the Makor gallery (of the 92nd Street Y) in Manhattan, where I exhibited five drawings on the Wandering Jew. (Click here to see a PDF of Joanna L. Brichetto’s thesis, which was submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of Vanderbilt University and which references my Wandering Jew project.)
I’m also cited, or quoted, in several academic papers, including:
- Kellie Kotraba. “Reshaping the ‘God Beat’: How Three Community News Websites Frame Religio,” a thesis presented to the faculty of the graduate school at the University of Missouri in May 2012 (Thesis supervisor: Dr. Debra Mason)
- Chelsea Ryanne Behle. “‘Art is Love is God’: Wallace Berman and the Transmission of Aleph, 1956-66,” submitted to the department of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2012, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.S. in architecture studies.
- Comparative Cultures Journal, Dr. Dennis B. Klein, general editor, Vol. 5, “The Bystander: On the Politics of Disengagement,” Dr. Julia Nevárez, editor.
- Alia Nour-Elsayed. “The Making of the Dahesh Museum of Art: An Account of its Founding, Ten-Year History, Its Academic Art Collection, and Exhibitions,” submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of M.A. in museum professions, Seton Hall University, fall 2005.
Below is an embedded version of my article in Images.
An Update on Holocaust Restitution Cases