Description

The result of a series of conversations with David Leslie, Rothko Chapel’s executive director, the idea behind this proposal first came to the Theology Program through two distinct points of contact. The first was a June 2019 meeting between David Leslie and Terry Carbone, the Luce Foundation’s Program Director for American Art, who met with David in June of this year and facilitated a subsequent introduction. 
A second point of contact was David’s regular participation in a small working group on Shaker art, design, and religion. Supported by a Theology Program special grant to Fordham University, this interdisciplinary working group was devised to intersect productively with work at the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (including a project supported by the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program). David’s participation in the working group led him to believe that a similar process of engagement and reflection might be beneficial to the efforts of Rothko Chapel, especially at this particular moment in the Chapel’s history. The project he proposes is structurally similar, in certain respects, to the Shaker arts project based at Fordham, though with different foci and anticipated outcomes.
While the Theology Program currently provides support primarily for seminaries, divinity schools, and research universities, the program is periodically able to consider support for thematically relevant projects based at others sorts of institutions. This proposed grant to Rothko Chapel would fall into that latter category, extending the program’s support for work at the intersections of religion, spirituality, and the arts.
The Theology Program has a long history of grant support for projects and initiatives focused on the arts and religion, though that support has been somewhat sporadic in the last decades. More recent Theology Program grants have supported projects emphasizing the materiality of religion, including, for example, larger grants to support projects at Yale University, Saint Louis University, and Ohio State University; and smaller, special grants to Bard Graduate Center, Fordham University, and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
This would be the Luce Foundation’s first grant to Rothko Chapel.