Religious Art

Father Jerome Tupa is not a missionary, but he understands the urgency of a mission. As a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., he belongs to a Catholic order that emphasizes prayer and work within a religious community. During an artistic pilgrimage to all of California's 21 missions, he began to appreciate the work of his long-ago fellow traveler, Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who launched the building of these churches, starting in 1769.

In this city on wheels, this city of wheels, an image has to be large and vivid and striking to make an impression. For more than three decades, the light, the climate, the speed, the invitation of long blank walls have made Los Angeles one vast plein-air gallery, the mural capital of the world, exterior-decorated by artists like Kent Twitchell, Willie Herron, Glenna Avila, Leo Politi — and Judy Baca. Baca leads brush-first, blending aesthetics and politics, first as the mother of the city's original community mural project, Neighborhood Pride, and now as founder of the Venice-based Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC.

With his long black robes and salt-and-pepper beard and ponytail, Father Justin Sinaites hardly looks the part of rock star. But when the tall, lean monk walks through the exhibition of Byzantine icons and manuscripts on display through March 4 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, visitors descend on him like so many grown-up groupies.

For decades, the faithful say, a 1-foot-tall crucifix has been granting the wishes of people in need. By the thousands, people have come to pray at El Señor de los Milagros -- Lord of the Miracles -- a shrine on the side of a one-story stucco home in a working-class Mexican American neighborhood in Tucson. People have come from as far away as Germany to worship at the shrine, but most visitors come from Arizona and Mexico. The carved wood sculpture, encased in glass, has been in the Romo family for five generations, said owner Pauline Romo.

Pope John Paul II has urged Roman Catholic bishops to promote Christian art as a spiritual weapon against the influence of advertising and the mass media. The Pope, in a letter sent in December to mark the 1,200th anniversary of the Second Council of Nicea and released by the Vatican recently, said religious art had an important role in an increasingly secular society.

The work of Conejo Valley artists will be featured in the seventh annual Interfaith Art Show at St. Pascal Baylon Catholic Church in Thousand Oaks on Oct. 18 and 19. Open to the public, the religiously themed art will be a mixed-media show of oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings, calligraphy, drawings and sculpture. The work will be for sale. The artists will be at a reception at noon Oct. 19.

While a reported encounter between an Indian peasant and the Virgin Mary inspired the religious art now on display at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, visitors Saturday also had culture, homeland and marriage on their minds. "We made a promise to ourselves that--because our families were against the marriage--if we got married, it would be at the basilica," said Hortencia R. Cervantes, who was married almost 47 years ago to the day in Mexico City's prominent Basilica de Guadalupe.

At the Tretyakov Gallery's department of antiquities, they were already past the first stage of mourning--denial--and were well into anger. "This is just crime," said a resentful Valentina Ukhanova, senior research associate at the gallery's department of ancient Russian art. "It could happen only in Russia." If Ukhanova and her colleagues at this country's leading gallery of Russian art were sounding as if someone dear to them had passed on, that is not surprising. For on Nov.

DAVID-MICHAEL Madigan is not a religious man. Yet he has placed something sacred in each room of his North Santa Ana home. There is a 14th century holy water font in the entry, an aged oak prayer kneeler in a bedroom. Mixed among the Art Deco in the living room are a Gothic-style pulpit, a centuries-old painting of Buddha by a Tibetan monk, Chinese grave figurines thought to protect in the afterlife and heirloom menorahs.

This Easter and Passover season, a show at Loyola Marymount University's Laband Art Gallery is launching a fresh term onto the Los Angeles art scene: "artists of faith." It serves as a reminder that not all serious contemporary art addressing religious issues is necessarily irreverent.

For my niece Rachel, it was that magical summer between high school graduation and the start of college. I hoped our trip would be the beginning of a new set of memories, the adult life realized. I had already treated a niece and nephew to graduation celebrations in Hawaii, but the islands somehow seemed the wrong fit for Rachel, a devout Catholic and, at 18, already a cancer survivor. She is a remarkable young woman, my sister Tina's middle child, who, even before her illness, had exhibited a graciousness that continued into adolescence, lifting her past the awkward it's-all-about-me stage into an early serenity.

Art that spans global divides often relies either on the loveliness of gauzy universals or the shock of gritty minutiae. Chronicling a tumultuous period in the career of an urbane internationalist, the African music superstar Youssou N'Dour, filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi tries to split the difference between these approaches in her documentary "Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love." She shows a certain weakness for gorgeous words and pictures.

Relations between the United States and Russia have been chilly since Russia invaded Georgia in August, but there's some warming at a small museum in Clinton, Mass. The Museum of Russian Icons said Thursday that the State Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow has agreed to send 16 of its most precious icons there for display from Oct. 16 to May 1. It's the first time some of the icons have left Moscow. The crisis in Georgia, which was condemned by the United States, almost scuttled the exhibit, but officials at the museums were able to reach an agreement.

A newly discovered wood sculpture of a Buddha has sold for $14.3 million, a price the auctioneer calls a world record for any Japanese work of art. Christie's said the seated figure of Dainichi Nyorai, or the supreme Buddha, is attributed to 13th century sculptor Unkei. The work was sold in New York on Tuesday to Mitsukoshi Ltd., one of Japan's major department stores. Christie's said the previous record for a Japanese work of art was $1.76 million for a Rakuchu Rakugai screen, which it sold in 1990.

A $2-million, golden altarpiece that stands more than four stories tall within the Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano will be unveiled today at an afternoon Mass. On Friday, as workers hurried to apply finishing touches to the lighting of the Grand Retablo, worshipers entering the basilica froze upon viewing the altarpiece for the first time. One woman with rosary in hand stood for several minutes, staring in amazement as tears rimmed her eyes.

With his long black robes and salt-and-pepper beard and ponytail, Father Justin Sinaites hardly looks the part of rock star. But when the tall, lean monk walks through the exhibition of Byzantine icons and manuscripts on display through March 4 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, visitors descend on him like so many grown-up groupies.

An organization of religious art dealers has turned to the Internet to recover 19 rare statues stolen from churches across Wisconsin this month. The National Church Goods Assn. posted a list of the icons stolen from congregations since Nov. 9 on its Web site to inform dealers to be on the lookout. The statues are generally made of cast fiberglass or plaster and are worth thousands of dollars.

Thieves broke into a chapel housing a museum of religious art and stole about 40 paintings and statues made in the 17th and 18th centuries, police said today. Officials said it was difficult to estimate the value of the items, stolen late Wednesday or early Thursday by thieves who broke in through a window at the Chapel of the Penitents in the southern town of Val. Investigators said they were examining footprints at the scene, but no arrests have been made.

For 94 members of St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, the freeway drive north to Brentwood in morning traffic was the equivalent of a pilgrimage. They recently traveled in two buses to the Getty Museum and its current exhibition of ancient icons and spiritual artifacts from a monastery in the Sinai, a show that has taken on special meaning for Greek Orthodox and other denominations in Southern California.

SUNRISE is spectacular public theater on Mt. Sinai. Hours before dawn, tourists and pilgrims -- on foot or camel -- start a trek to the 7,349-foot peak, determined to get there before the show begins. When the sun finally makes its appearance, the audience at the pinnacle breaks into applause or bursts into song. Oohs and ahs accompany the second act, when light transforms the sky into an ethereal, golden hemisphere and the land far below into a craggy moonscape.