The Sacred Arts Festival: You can't miss it!

Tomorrow at 7pm a keynote address by juror, Linus Meldrum opens the Pentecost Sacred Arts Festival held May 16th to May 20th at Our Lady of Grace Church in Scott Township.  There is a growing movement of Catholic artists coming together across the United States and Pittsburgh, yet again, is at the forefront.  The Pentecost Sacred Arts Festival offers Pittsburghers a glimpse of high art with a purpose.  
 
An MFA graduate of the nation’s premiere Yale University School of Art and current Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Franciscan University, Linus Meldrum selected works for the visual art exhibition. On Saturday, poet and Catholic University professor, Ryan Wilson will read from his debut book of poetry, The Stranger World, which won the 2017 Donald Justice Prize for Poetry.  Joe Negri, accompanied by his jazz ensemble, will perform Negri’s original composition, “Mass of Hope”, at the 11:30am Mass Pentecost Sunday.  
 
Over the past decade Catholic artists have come together founding conferences, small presses, journals and Catholic arts venues.  Micro-communities galvanized with the 2013 publication of “The Catholic Writer Today”, an essay by Dana Gioia, former Chair of National Endowment of the Arts Chairman and current California state poet laureate.  Afterwhich, Fr. James Heft, of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, hosted the first of a series of “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination Conference” in 2015.
 
All the while, Pittsburgh’s Sacred Arts Festival originated in the 1990’s, during which time the city shut down part of Liberty Avenue to accommodate the gallery exhibitions, musical performances and literary readings.  Founder, Fr. Richard Infante, graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in Creative Writing, says, “there is no event in the country that I know of like this that brings together visual, musical and literary artists from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”  The event continues to expand its reach from regional to national talent and event participants. 
 
Traveling in from the Baltimore/DC area, Ryan Wilson will read from The Stranger World.  Wilson is “winning literary prizes at an astonishing rate”, says popular author Mike Aquilina. Wilson’s poetry encounters the liminal space between the everyday and a greater cosmos at play, one that Catholics know to be part of God’s great mystery.  
 
In Wilson’s poem, “ L’Estraneo”, the speaker describes the sense of being followed:  “Almost a sense of trespassing,/ Of having crossed a boundary, of being/ An interloper in a stranger world”.  The feeling that there is more around the speaker than he can see culminates in his encounter with a stranger.   “I saw a face I recognized, although/ To say I recognized it isn’t quite true...A man’s face, nothing much about it special,/ Except it found a kind of answer within me…”  The speaker confirms his intuitive sense without being able to explain how a stranger can “answer” him especially considering that “I’ve not known people whom I thought I knew…”
 
While Wilson’s poetry encounters strangers, Aquilina’s poetry celebrates the sacred in what many Americans believe is unattainable: marital love that is as grand as Petrarch’s yet requited.  Of “the perfect wife” the speaker in Aquilina’s poetry exclaims, “A synod’s worth of bishops with their crooks/ can’t pull me from the one I found in books.”  In another poem heaven is found in the wife’s healing kiss and being surrounded by their children. Mike Aquilina reads Friday night at 7pm.  
 
Sam Hazo, who will read Thursday night, is, as Dana Gioia points out, “a treasure in American poetry” who we are fortunate to have reading.  Hazo has a new poem about the obstinance of a crocus to be a crocus despite impending frost and I hope he shares it among his many new works written recently.  
 
The sense that more is at work in the world than the secular point of view acknowledges is one of the ways that artists working from the Judeo-Christian worldview answer a thirst in the modern reader.  Dana Gioia discusses this intersection of the secular and the sacred reminding us of the Roman in our Catholic in his keynote address to attendees of the inaugural “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination Conference”.  
 
Gioia and colleagues first hosted the conference at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California in 2015 and then at the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in 2017.  From the original gathering in Los Angeles, the journal Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry was founded.  As stated in the journal’s mission, “the primary principle for inclusion in the journal is artistic excellence.”  This gathering also brought together publications and groups already at work such as First Things, Wiseblood Books, Dappled Things, Image and others.
 
This emphasis on craftsmanship above all else is what sets apart artists galvanizing around Gioia’s essay.  Fordham’s Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and Paul Mariani and USC’s Gioia have dedicated a lifetime to perfecting their craft, much like Pittsburgh’s own Hazo.  Again the mission statement of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry best describes the goals of these particular Catholic artists, whereby “Thomas Aquinas suggests, art is a good in and of itself, and the artist is primarily concerned with the goodness of his or her creation.”
 
The musical performances by the Joe Negri Jazz ensemble, Duo Dulce, and Mike Gallagher all showcase excellence in the musical arts. Local visual artists, such as James Sulkowski and John Del Monte, also have international influence.  Del Monte, for example, founded and directed the Creative Art Studies summer school in Lucca, Italy from 1969 to 2010. 
 
It is no surprise then why the Pentecost Sacred Arts Festival continues to grow in scope and increase its regional and national presence. In additional to DC’s Ryan Wilson and Pittsburgh own’s nationally recognized writers Mike Aquilina and Sam Hazo, Presence editor, Mary Ann Miller, for example, is interested in holding a Presence reading at the 2019 festival.
 
Catholic artists such as Joshua Hren have been forming micro-communities dedicated to craft over the past several decades.  Hren founded Wiseblood Books which looks for works that “find redemption in uncanny places”.  Hren is also the editor of Dappled Things, which seeks “To unveil the truth about the beauty and goodness of the world” and recognizes that in order to do so “one must not hide the facts of the Fall.”
  
The Sacred Arts Festival uniquely brings together talented visual, musical and literary artists inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Please see the attached schedule for details.  The week’s PSAF events, which are free and open to the public, promise to inspire and uplift attendees. 

Get the schedule here!