Description

RECOMMENDATION: Discretionary grant of $50,000 to Bard Graduate Center to support the publication of the catalogue for Agents of Faith: Votive Giving Across Cultures. In late 2016, Ittai Weinryb, an assistant professor at Bard Graduate Center (BGC), approached the Theology Program regarding possible support for a project entitled Agents of Faith: Votive Giving Across Cultures. The project will revolve around an exhibition that will be on view at BGC in New York City from September 14, 2018 to January 6, 2019. The exhibition will be accompanied by multi-platform components, including a full-length catalogue, digital interactives, a symposium, related public programs, and a short documentary film. The exhibition and related project components will investigate the practices of votive giving, in both religious and secular contexts. As Professor Weinryb’s letter of inquiry states: “As tokens of gratitude, desires, memory, miracles, and vows, votive offerings represent the most basic material transaction with the divine…charged with significance once consecrated at a sacred space or site of communal memory, [they] become iconic and non-utilitarian testimonies for the interaction between people and the supernatural.” Further details on the exhibition and project are included in the letter of inquiry, and in additional documents shared by Professor Weinryb (including a detailed draft budget and draft table of contents for the catalogue). While the initial inquiry requested a responsive grant of $65,000, this project seemed more suitable as the potential recipient of a discretionary grant. Following a series of communications with Ittai Weinryb, and multiple consultations with Michael Gilligan and Terry Carbone, we are recommending a special grant to partially support the publication of the ambitious catalogue. Set to be published by Yale University Press, the full color exhibition catalogue will include contributions from an impressive group of distinguished scholars. The Theology Program has a well-established history of focusing on the relationship of religion and material culture, and its grantmaking in religion and the arts is perhaps most associated with emphases initiated by former president John Cook in the early 1990s. More recently, grants to Yale University, Duke University and others have continued the attention to the importance of “material religion.” This would be the Theology Program’s first grant to Bard Graduate Center.