Sunday, December 30, 2012

2013 Indigenous Christian Art Calendars

I hope everyone had a peace-filled and joyous Christmas season.  May God continue to incarnate through our individual and corporate lives during 2013!

With January 1st fast approaching, I was conducting my annual wall calendar search.  Among others, I decided to look for calendars that contained artwork by indigenous Christian artists, as I had come across a couple in the past.  I found a total of three, and perhaps you might know of more.  If so, please share in a comment to this post.

Unfortunately, only two of the following three calendars are available outside of Europe (UPDATE: See note at the end of this post), but I thought I'd mention all three anyway.

The first is "The Guardian of Paradise," the 2013 Papua New Guinea wall calendar by Missio Aachen, a Catholic Mission organization.  Through Google ChromeTranslation, the website states that "the focus of the calendar is divine creation and preservation... The pictures in the calendar [reflect the] daily life of the islanders and simultaneously follow the biblical creation story in Genesis."  The calendar does not contain boxes for each day of the month, but rather shows one art image with a column or line of dates in small print on the side or at the bottom, as seen on page 3 here.


Monday, December 24, 2012

Nativity by Australian Aboriginal artist Duwun Lee



This Christmas image is by Australian Aboriginal artist Duwun Lee, and it appears in a set of 2012 Indigenous Catholic Christmas Cards for sale here by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council (NATSICC).

Friday, December 21, 2012

Nativity by Jackson Beardy

An interesting indigenous nativity painting, though certainly not orthodox:

Nativity by Jackson Beardy, 1975


Sunday, December 9, 2012

Icon Exhibit, "Imaging the Invisible: Angels, Demons, Prayer & Wisdom"


Joy to All Who Suffer, c. 1750

For those of you in the Boston area (or will be by February 2, 2013), here's an exhibition of Russian Orthodox icons that you might want to check out, at the The Museum of Russian Icons.  The show's description states:

The great masters of iconography developed the use of symbolism to depict otherworldly beings and imprecise subjects such as angels, demons, prayer, and wisdom. Over time, these developed into beautiful and sometimes mysterious images.