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Sep 8th - Oct 13th

Opening Reception Sep 8th 2-5pm

Art-Talk Sep 21st

Closing Reception Oct 13th 2-4pm

A physical desert is defined by lack–specifically the lack of water.  Yet, in most wisdom traditions, the desert’s lack makes it a landscape of inward flourishing: testing, temptation, self-revealment, and transformation all occur there.  While many have intentionally sought the isolation and clarity of actual desert spaces, the condition of being “in the desert” may happen to each of us at any time, mostly against our will.  However we find ourselves there, from its lack the desert offers us its wisdom, which we receive with trembling hands. 

This exhibition invites a group of artists working in various modes and media, to offer, in visual form, the wisdom the desert has worked in them.  While works that take up the desert as a physical/visual site/sight are welcome, so too are works that emanate from the inner desert wanderings that attend us all.  The “desert” is broadly defined here as physical, spiritual, psychological, mythic, and/or metaphoric space.     

Wisdom of the Desert takes its name, and loosely its theme, from Thomas Merton’s translation of the collected sayings of the desert fathers (Wisdom of the Desert, Burnes and Oates, 1997). 

Artists