The director and editors of Mary Page under the auspices of the International Marian Research Institute do not necessarily endorse or agree with the events and ideas expressed in this feature. Our sole purpose is to report on items about Mary gleaned from a myriad of papers representing the secular press.

It Was Multicultural Before Multicultural Was Cool
[Source: New York Times, October 19, 2005]

I was flabbergasted when I saw ''African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia'' in New York City in 1994, the first big display of Ethiopian religious art to travel to North America. I had known this art only in intriguing bits and pieces. But the sight of a hundred blazingly colored icons and glinting metal crosses in one place was sensational. I remember its impact in aural as much as visual terms, as a kind of charged chanting, though no music was playing.

What was news to me was news to a lot of other people too, not to mention the city's art institutions. The show wasn't at the Metropolitan Museum or the Brooklyn Museum. It was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Famed for its library and archives, the Schomburg has an active gallery, though one unlikely to pull in the huge crowds that ''African Zion'' should have had. ''Lucky Harlem,'' I thought at the time.

And now, lucky Midtown. The first major gallery sale exhibition of Ethiopian art in the United States opened yesterday at PaceWildenstein on East 57th Street. Organized by the London dealer Sam Fogg, it's a fierce, gorgeous, category-scrambling encounter.

With 50 objects, the show covers centuries of Africa's oldest Christian culture. In antiquity, Ethiopia was a mix of African people and Semitic people who had crossed the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. According to tradition, the first Ethiopian emperor, Menelik, son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, brought the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to establish Ethiopia as the new Israel.

This Old Testament identity was, however, tailored to accommodate Christianity. And in the fifth century A.D., when Ethiopia was, with Rome and Persia, one of the superpowers of the ancient world, Ethiopian Orthodoxy became the state religion. Later Islam swept in, cutting the country off from the Byzantine world and adding its own cultural impulses. Influences from sub-Saharan Africa were subtle and constant.

These ingredients contributed to a church distinctive in its beliefs, worship and art. The most familiar and durable forms are openwork crosses of bronze or iron mounted on long staffs carried by priests.

Meant to be seen in pierced silhouette against the sky or candlelight, they became ever more elaborate and delicate hybrids of Byzantine and Islamic designs. The workmanship of the finest of them is beyond superb, rivaling pieces from the royal ateliers of the West Africa kingdom of Benin. And Mr. Fogg has fantastic examples dating from the 12th to the 19th century.

The real attraction, though, lies in icons and manuscripts, several dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, a high point in Ethiopian church art, which means in Christian art, period.

Icons, painted on wood panels or made of cloth glued to boards, come in many sizes. Small, closeable, pocket-size diptychs were made to be portable, maybe worn on the body. Others are larger and structurally more complex. Almost all have the image of the Virgin Mary, the central figure of Ethiopian Orthodoxy, as their focus.

In a grand 17th-century triptych, Mary shares the central panel with Jesus, who grasps her wrist, raising her hand as if declaring her a champion. In another, she takes the more characteristic form of the divine mother with the infant Jesus in her lap. She is attended by startlingly un-serene company: wide-eyed angels, jubilant warriors and the hermit-saint Gabra Manfas Qeddus who lived for more than 500 years, fed birds with his tears and, apparently, wore his floor-length hair cinched at the waist like a bathrobe.

This figure of Mary was based on a miraculous icon at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, which had been reproduced in prints that Jesuit missionaries took to Ethiopia. Even earlier, though, European art had arrived firsthand in the person of the Venetian painter Nicolo Brancaleon.

Brancaleon came to Ethiopia in 1480 on what he might have planned as a quick trip, but ended up staying as a captive court painter for 40 years. Two diptychs associated with him are in the show. In one, he is clearly an Italian painter working in the international Gothic style; in the other, most likely done years later, he has absorbed Ethiopian art and is a more stimulating artist.

Less easily traceable are the specific influences that fed into the show's most splendid Gospel, probably produced by a heretical and isolated monastic sect. Its monumental pages include rows of small, vertical portraits of prophets and apostles, dark skinned and light skinned, their shovel-shaped heads with squared-off mouths recalling sub-Saharan sculptural styles.

Cultural breadth is one of the most thrilling things about Ethiopian art. It is also one reason it remains little studied. It requires scholars equally conversant in European, Islamic and African art--a tall multicultural order. In addition, there is the spiritually interactive nature of the art. You look at it, and it also looks at you. It radiates blessings, a difficult concept to convey in a Western context.

Yet as elusive as it is, Ethiopian material is an increasingly hot property. Around the time of ''African Zion,'' the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, which helped organize that exhibition, initiated an acquisition campaign. It now has the largest collection of Ethiopian material outside of Addis Ababa. In 1997, the Museum for African Art in New York presented ''Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia,'' which incorporated non-Orthodox talismanic painting, a few samples of which are at PaceWildenstein.

Meanwhile, the Met bought--from Mr. Fogg--a fabulous 15th-century Gospel, now in the Michael C. Rockefeller wing. The museum also had Ethiopian material in ''Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)'' last year, and recently organized a symposium on early Christian art in Africa. Can we consider Mr. Fogg's 57th Street exhibition a herald of further museum interest in Ethiopian art? I don't know. But I do know that, with its exhortative rhythms, it's as entrancing a show as any in the city right now, and in less than two weeks it will be gone.

''Art of Ethiopia'' is at PaceWildenstein (Pace Primitive), 32 East 57th Street, seventh floor, Manhattan, (212)421-3688, through Oct. 29.

Little Pebble's Cult to Go On Without a Ripple
[Source: The Australian, October 17, 2005]

Followers of a doomsday cult based on the NSW south coast have vowed to "go forward" after their spiritual leader was jailed for sex offences.

Malcolm Broussard, now the most senior member of The Order of St Charbel, issued a statement yesterday urging followers to remain at peace and assuring them that "the forces of evil" had not won.

Mr Broussard, a Texan who uses the title bishop but was officially excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 2003, posted a message on the group's website saying "this community will continue to go forward".

William Kamm, known to followers as The Little Pebble, was jailed on Friday for up to five years for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl who lived in the sect's community in 1993.

He was found guilty in July of four counts of aggravated indecent assault and one of aggravated sexual intercourse.

Kamm's devotees believe he receives messages from the Virgin Mary and will be the last pope on earth. He molested the girl soon after he told her she had been chosen, at the direction of the Virgin Mary, to be his mystical wife.

Kamm and his followers believe he will have 12 queens and 72 princesses with whom he will father a divine tribe after the "end times."

Mr Broussard said: "It would seem, on the surface, that the dark forces of evil have won a victory, but it is not true."

The Catholic Church has outlawed the order. A school in the grounds of the community at Cambewarra, outside the south coast town of Nowra, is under investigation by the NSW Board of Studies.

Kamm's barrister Greg Stanton said his client would appeal against the conviction and the sentence.

Basilica's History Wins Out Over Purity of Design
[Source: The Baltimore Sun, October 16, 2005]

The idea was to peel away layers of history, to strip off non-original details and get back to the essence of the building envisioned by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe.

Going back in time, architecturally, was the overriding concept behind the $32 million restoration and modernization of Baltimore's Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was built starting in 1806 and dedicated in 1821. It was the reason the 1940s-era stained-glass windows were removed. It was the impetus for re-creating 24 skylights in the dome--to "restore the light" in the cathedral as Latrobe meant for it to be seen.

But what happens if restorers discover works of art or other artifacts that are so significant and so well-preserved that it would be a shame to peel them away?

Architect Stephen Reilly faced that situation last summer, when he unearthed four 140-year-old paintings hidden in recessed panels beneath the basilica's dome.

Reilly is an architect with John G. Waite Associates, the New York architectural firm that is guiding the restoration work for the Basilica of the Assumption Historic Trust. Work is scheduled for completion by November 2006.

The uncovered paintings are allegorical depictions of the Gospel evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Created with distemper water-based paint and measuring 15 feet by 8 feet, they depict Matthew as a human, Mark, a winged lion, Luke, a bull, and John, an eagle.

Reilly and other members of the restoration team have determined that the paintings date from 1865 and were covered over in the 1870s, as part of a later renovation.

That timeline poses something of a dilemma for 21st-century restoration experts aiming to take the interior back to its early 1800s appearance.

From the start of the restoration project, some observers have lamented that the architects would want to take the building back to the way it looked at a certain point in time, as if everything that happened later was less significant.

"Historic preservation respects the evolution of a building," says John Murphy, a Baltimore attorney who has questioned architect John Waite's approach.

But Waite and his colleagues argue that Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol, was America's first great architect and that the cathedral was his masterwork. They say that more people will visit the cathedral if it's restored to the way Latrobe envisioned it.

If the restoration architects are right about the 1865 date of the paintings they uncovered, that means the images did not exist when the building was dedicated in 1821. It is doubtful that Latrobe had any knowledge of them, since he died in 1820.

So why should these paintings be saved when other elements, such as the stained-glass windows, have been taken out?

Reilly points out that the images were painted on recessed panels that were part of the original building, as shown in Latrobe's drawings. They may have been blank when the building was dedicated, or they may have had earlier surface paintings that were covered by the ones painted in 1865. Either way, Reilly said, Latrobe designed them to be settings for works of art.

Additional arguments for keeping the paintings are that they are in extremely good condition, and that their colors echo the coloring on rosettes and other building features that are even older.

Flexibility necessary

A final factor in the decision to keep the paintings in place is that Cardinal William Keeler, leader of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, wanted them to stay.

Baltimore's basilica has contained an interpretation of the four evangelists, in one form or another, for 140 years, starting with these paintings.

"The cardinal felt very strongly that the four evangelists should be represented in the restoration of the basilica," said Nolan McCoy, director of facilities for the Archdiocese of Baltimore. "When these paintings were discovered, he felt they were significant enough to satisfy this requirement."

The paintings won't be the only features in the building that don't go back to 1821, of course. The modernization work is adding new restrooms, mechanical equipment and an elevator that links all public levels.

The decision to keep the paintings points out the difficulty of adopting a hard and fast design approach that calls for taking the appearance of any building back to a given point in time, especially when that building is as steeped in history as Baltimore's basilica is.

From a preservation standpoint, it's reassuring to know the restoration process is flexible enough that discoveries such as the four paintings can be incorporated into the final design.

Because it is being restored in accordance with Latrobe's vision, Baltimore's basilica will be a powerful testament to the architect's genius. But it will offer an even richer experience for visitors, and perhaps be more accessible, because not all of the successive layers of history have been peeled away.

Exploring Beliefs
[Source: New York Times, October 16, 2005]

Faith, a hot-button issue in the political arena these days, is the subject of a messy, restless new exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

The exhibition, organized by James Hyde from New York, with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation and others, consists of artworks in all media by a dozen artists.

Some of the artists, like Matt Collishaw, Patty Chang and Josiah McElheny, are rising stars. This is a fashionable show.

To speak about faith in art, film and literature often furrows people's brows. But faith and art have, of course, long been intertwined. Until the 15th century, the colorful illustration of biblical scripture to dazzle and then indoctrinate the faithful was the sole justification for visual imagery, at least within the Western or European art tradition.

The church no longer commissions art, but faith still lingers as a subject of intense interest for artists. This is where the present exhibition positions itself, surveying the spectrum of work by artists dealing with questions of faith -- a subject broadly understood to mean having complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Thus some of the artwork here is about religion, and some of it is not.

Heading the bill is a series of five photographs from Rachel Harrison's ''Untitled (Perth Amboy Series)'' (2001). The grainy, un-artistic-looking photographs document the hands of anonymous worshipers on a window of a suburban New Jersey house upon which, in 2000, it was said that an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared. The apparition drew thousands of miracle seekers and faithful eager to touch the windowpane.

While those drawn to the New Jersey windowpane may not have seen the apparition, they found something to believe in. They are not unlike the pilgrims that today seek out the sites of the multiple miracles attributed to Saint Anthony of Padua, including the one at the bell tower in Padua from which a glass jar apparently was dropped and not only survived the fall, but also broke the pavement below. This is the subject of a curious installation by Mr. McElheny, consisting of a black-and-white reproduction of a 16th-century fresco depicting the story of the ''miracle of the cup'' and next to it a recently crafted cup in the style of that time.

There is also some wacky stuff in the exhibition. As you wander about Nari Ward's ''Savior'' (1996), an assemblage of plastic garbage bags, bottles, an old ladder, a mirror and other junky objects stuffed into a rusted shopping cart, you haven't the slightest idea of what the message is supposed to be, even as you feel the effects of the work infiltrating your mind. This inclusion, I guess, speaks to the curator's wayward taste.

Other works are more tangential to the theme, with references to faith so obscure that they don't feel like references at all. The Pakistani painter Sabeen Raja's delicate miniatures, for example, are confessional in tone rather than faith-related. Or Ms. Chang's video performance, from 2001, in which she fills her blouse with live electric eels. I suspect this is more about endurance than faith.

''Faith'' is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor Street, Hartford, through Jan. 29. Information: (860)232 1006 or www.realartways.org.

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