1. Scholarly Activity
Art Creation and Analysis
Your task is to create a piece of art that reflects a text that has some meaning to you. The art can be in any form you can imagine. You can paint, draw, sing, perform a dance, take a photo, make pottery, make a collage with magazine pictures, create a meal, or whatever you can think of. You can use any text that is important to you. It can be a religious text, but it does not have to be. You could use a poem, a song, a newspaper story, a letter from an old friend, or anything else that has some value to you.
You do not have to be an artist to do this assignment and you do not have to be an expert in symbolism. The point of this assignment is to see the connection between art and religion by creating your own art and your own symbolism. By participation in the analysis of a text based on your beliefs of what it means and creating a work of art based on those beliefs, you might better be able to analyze works of art and their connection to religion.
Consider what you read in the Unit III lecture concerning exegesis. Take into consideration every element that might affect how you interpret the piece of text for your art. What is your cultural lens through which you are reading the text? (Think back to your spiritual autobiography in Unit I.) Who is the author of the text? What is the author's culture? Who was the intended audience of the text and what is their culture like? What is the purpose of the format of the text (Scripture, poem, story, etc.)? What is the grammar and sentence structure like? These are all elements to consider as you analyze your chosen text.
Follow each step in the list below.
1. Choose a text to analyze. (It can be as small as one or two sentences from a piece of work. You do not need to choose an entire piece of work, as that would be too much to contain in one piece of art.)
2. Read the text several times and write a short summary of what it means to you. This can be just a list or words. Consider this to be a brainstorming activity.
3. Decide what form of art you think would best convey the meaning the text has for you. Ask your professor if you have any questions about whether or not what you want to create would be considered art for the purposes of this assignment.
4. Create the piece of art. (Try to make it something fairly simple that will not take up too much time using whatever supplies you might have around the house.)
5. Write an essay, at least 250 words in length, explaining the choices you made with your art and how each choice reflects the text you chose. Be sure to consider the list of exegetical questions provided in the paragraph above.