Hospitality of the Soul: Visual Artist Maria Eugenia Fee
in Conversation with Judy Ko
Art is one way to establish humility and cement the fact that we are guests in a neighborhood God created called planet Earth.
— Maria Eugenia Fee
Videography by Allen Wong.
As an artist, theologian, and educator, Maria Eugenia Fee embraces the term mestizaje to reference her bi-culture identity, a multi-ethnically rich urban upbringing, and interdisciplinary studies in art and religion. Mestizo is visually represented through the mixed-media composition of her artwork. These notions also drive her theological research explored in the upcoming book The Art of Theaster Gates and a Theology of Hospitality. She is currently an adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University and The Seattle School.
I first met Maria about 15 years ago when I was attending Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. She was co-leading the Redeemer Inter-Arts Fellowship, a community I was engaged in. Years later, our individual paths led us both to Seattle. I started noticing a newer series of 3-dimensional art compositions that she created while she was working on her PhD in Theology and Culture at Fuller Seminary. They are multi-layered contemplative objects that stirred my sensibilities and met me deeply. We recently reconnected over a conversation about her art. - Judy Ko
The following transcript has been compiled and edited from several conversations.
Judy Ko: It’s really cool to see that you’re out here in the Pacific Northwest as well. Catch me up on what happened after the arts ministry at Redeemer, after NYC. I’m aware you went back to school for a postgraduate degree?
Maria Eugenia Fee: My job at Redeemer had me asking tons of questions concerning the art and faith conversation. I knew I was really fortunate to have the job; it offered some great opportunities. Yet, I wondered why our work in the arts ministry was consistently side-lined, ignored. Now, there were benefits to being overlooked--we produced some successful covert operations--but, ultimately, we felt we weren’t taken seriously. There were other felt discontinuities at play such as race and gender issues. When I began to read Poetic Theology by Bill Dyrness, a lightbulb went on. Bill spoke to some of the pesky issues I was experiencing. Subsequently, I ended up studying with Bill, at Fuller, to get my PhD in Theology and Culture. I began to practice constructive theology, specifically through the arts. For instance, my dissertation analyzes the art works of Chicago artist Theaster Gates as the means to construct a theology of hospitality.
JK: I remember Redeemer Arts created the Living Room gatherings for a season. Folks opened up their tiny studio homes and hosted salon events, such rich and connecting offerings for creatives in the city wrestling with art and faith. Tell more about that and the theology of hospitality for you.
MEF: Hospitality became a way for me to talk about experiences of disconnect and alienation within my Christianity. In the evangelical and Reformed Protestant tradition that I mostly inhabit, there are plenty of hostilities concerning embodiment. Specifically working in a conservative denomination, my personhood is held suspect: I am a woman, a daughter of immigrants, an artist, and a female religious leader. The perspectives offered by these identities do not align with certain theological assertions. Yet they are all embodied, concrete, tangible realities that inform the ways I understand the world.
An artist pays attention to both the interior life and the external world, and when something is off, they begin to grumble, ask questions, investigate through creative play as a way to process.
I have concluded that a faith practice that is solely dependent on conformity to theological stipulations and dogmas can’t always handle the complexities of real life. Instead folks kind of blip over parts of reality that don't neatly fit into theoretical propositions. So in a way, the theoretical frameworks of my faith community at the time, and in that job, were inhospitable to many dimensions of my beingness.
An artist pays attention to both the interior life and the external world, and when something is off, they begin to grumble, ask questions, investigate through creative play as a way to process.That’s what artists do, right? Subsequent art forms, then, are a measure of critique.
JK: Yes, critiquing reality — artists are vital in that way. With all the multi-faceted identities that we bring.
MEF: Yeah, and the essence of those identities are formulated and filtered through gendered, pigmented bodies in time and space. Many Christians operate in terms of thinking their way to belief. It’s all up in the head or in the heart while their body wanders off a separate way, disconnected from faith formation. For many, their bodies are even a source of shame. You're a woman, sorry. You’re an immigrant, bye-bye. Subtle and not so subtle hostilities arise when we detach from material reality to follow a type of Gnosticism. Eventually we become suspicious of certain people, places and things.
JK: When we were at Redeemer I don’t think I ever heard you speak to your Hispanic immigrant identity. We were in an era where we didn’t have much language, there was no place for that to really show up.
MEF: I had no language for it. My last year at Redeemer coincided with my last year of seminary. I was able to attend HSP, Hispanic Summer Program, which academically equips and encourages Latinx seminarians. For myself, I had lost the language. I had lost my heritage in my struggle to identify with the majority culture, so I’m totally westernized. But I go to HSP. And my professor opened up a lens that I didn’t know I had. It was a New Testament class, we’re going through the Book of Hebrews, but Dr. Padilla didn’t just teach us hermeneutical or exegetical technicalities. He’s also taught us about being Hispanic scholars/pastors in mostly white theological institutions. He said “when you’re bicultural, you’re always moving from one world to another.” One must be flexible and in flux. In Western theology, it’s always about etching a line in stone. People who are bicultural, who navigate multiple experiences in multiple spheres of life, know that the line is drawn in sand. The Western world loves binaries. Holding opposing truths simultaneously is unsettling for many. It’s either this or that; we are made to choose. I argue with friends, and I’m like, well why do I have to choose? Why can’t both be true? Why can’t elements of truth be found on both sides? So those are the things that I was able to begin to digest and explore when I arrived at Fuller to pursue my PhD studies. It’s a journey right? The dissertation was a way for me to explore some of these issues, and art offered a way for me to talk about them.
In Western theology, it’s always about etching a line in stone. People who are bicultural, who navigate multiple experiences in multiple spheres of life, know that the line is drawn in sand.
JK: Something that popped in my mind, as you were sharing is how Jesus is a prime example of someone who can hold contradictions. And in considering the intersection of art and hospitality, I think hospitality is inherent in a created piece of art. By hospitality, I don’t mean the space is necessarily going to be comfortable. We might be inviting discomfort, a wake up call perhaps. You looked at the artwork of Theaster Gates—how does his art in particular speak to hospitality?
MEF: As a theologian, I want to critique our theological assumptions while at the same time explore various aspects of Christian traditions as ways to advantage Christian formation. Similarly, Theaster Gates’s art assesses discrepancies and presents tangible opportunities to improve various situations. Specifically, he leverages Black spaces and Black culture with the ethos of the African American church. As a theologian, I want to understand the kind of spiritual formation Gates was exposed to that informed his belief—his belief that people, places, and material things matter. He makes faith tangible through stewardship campaigns he labels as art. There is no doubt that there is a sacred dimension to a lot of what Gates does. As an artist and theologian, there is a lot I can learn from Gates and his religious upbringing in the Black church. This also means that in the vastness of Christianity, and other religious traditions, there are faith communities that can teach us something about God’s hospitality.
For those who are not familiar with Theaster Gates, he is an African American artist from Chicago. He studied urban planning, ceramics, and religion. After taking on the job of arts program director for the University of Chicago, he settled in a neighborhood in the South Side. Here, he started purchasing abandoned properties and transforming them into cultural venues for his neighbors as an art piece called the Dorchester Project. This durational, place-making art form became the way to highlight the results of Chicago’s redlining history while bringing about revitalization. In my mind, Gates’s activities are about stewardship, especially when he poses the question we should all be asking: how can one foster commitment to place in an artful manner?
In the vastness of Christianity, and other religious traditions, there are faith communities that can teach us something about God’s hospitality.
Another art text that I write about from a theological perspective is Gates’s 2012 piece called Soul Food Pavilion, which is a series of dinners hosted in one of the localities of the Dorchester Project. The meal gatherings included music from his ensemble the Black Monks of Mississippi, soul food served as high cuisine and as a history lesson. Being a ceramicist, the food was placed on plates he crafted specifically to retain the favors of soul food. Soul Food Pavilion is a really lovely affair where he invites his neighbors, city bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and artists, all kinds of folks, to sit and eat together. A millionaire could be sitting next to the 5th grade teacher from three doors down. The dinner ritual, then, becomes a way of creating a safe space where people can let down their guard and become present to one another—no matter their social standing. Guests listen to music, learn about soul food, then Gates says like OK, we’re going to talk about God. We’re going to talk about power. We’re going to talk about race. Let’s talk about money. And so art—beauty—these aesthetic experiences—enable folks to enter into really tough conversations. For me, Soul Food Pavilion highlights the power behind meal-sharing. This type of hospitality is something that the church owns as well. Therefore, I want to ask how Christians can reenergize the just and arbitrating elements of the Lord’s Supper seen at work in Soul Food Pavilion, thereby reinvesting in their own tables.
In the dialogue on hospitality, the philosopher Derrida, and others, talk about the vulnerable position of hosting. A stranger might take over and become the host. I mean, this is the fear behind our immigration laws, right? What is more, the stranger being in a new situation asks questions. Through their queries, they reflect, like a mirror, our assumptions and biases. They make us assess why we do what we do. The alien, then, can make us hunker down or actually open up our horizons, broaden perspectives that enlarge our being-ness. Look at the role Jesus portrays in some of the table narratives in the gospels. He's a guest, but he ends up switching to host when he embodies and articulates kingdom hospitality.
We think of hospitality as a pleasant operation, but true hospitality always entails vulnerability. In the Christian conversation on this subject, as hosts, we remember that we are always guests first. Whatever we have to offer to others is not really ours. We are guests and stewards of God’s hospitality.
We think of hospitality as a pleasant operation, but true hospitality always entails vulnerability.
JK: We’ve been talking about cultural and collective hospitality. And I want to pivot inward. I think what you’ve laid out about our external experiences of hospitality provides fertile ground for an interior hospitality of the soul. There’s something about your dimensional art that I feel invites an internal hospitality, something I think that’s worth exploring.
MEF: Just like Gates’s ceramic vessels retain the flavors of soul food, I see my small-scaled paper sculptures as mini sanctuaries that accommodate tangible discoveries. Using humble materials, and its ritualistic manipulation affords a kind of sacred space, which sets an equivalent pattern for how I address other situations. In other words, studio practice is an intellectual process that informs and flavors how I approach other parts of life. And, I am always surprised how the product—the art—continues to nourish and communicate things about myself, God, the world.
As an example of what I am talking about, I think of my small paper objects as nests, and large-scale canvas panel installations as soft walls. Both are placemaking elements. I recently realized that I need to create localities as a way to resist the alienations I, and others, have been subjected to. The nests are also a response to society’s rootlessness. I am interested in the ways art can hold together ideas of transience and belonging.
Another way I think about my work reflects my own heritage. I utilize the mestiso logic of Latinx theology to recognize that cultural mixing is fraught with terror, chaos, contradiction, and celebration.
Maria Eugenia Fee. Convergence. 2016. Acrylic on paper.
JK: What first resonated for me about your pieces were the visceral experiences I felt in my body, and gratitude that your dimensional collages met my healing journey around neurological issues. I immediately think of neuroplasticity, a hope-filled term for me over the years, that our brains are resilient and can continue making new neural connections. I see the paper veins and arteries, the negative space of the cutouts holes and find expression, containment even, for my grief, one being loss of memory. Or your materials may represent rib bones, cells, membranes. I notice the shadows that are created. My imagination takes me in various directions simultaneously as I get sucked into the layers, the textures and colors that evoke what I don’t have words for. I see your various elements in playful relationship with each other. In viewing your work, it elevated for me an experience of a body trying to figure out how to heal what’s felt broken, and grants permission to feel deeper, almost saying, “it’s messy!” And, “get on in here!”
MEF: I like what you’re saying because we live segmented lives. Who sees me as a whole person? The realm of education only sees me as a viable future nine-to-fiver. A doctor only sees me as a complex biological system. In some religious communities, the salvation of my soul is all that matters. We don’t live integrated holistic lives, yet what you’re saying is that my work visually reflects the way disparate items can interact and become reconciled to one another to create a whole. Is it possible to uphold autonomy and difference yet display connection through layered materiality? Ideas of unity and particularity are at the heart of my work; can there be ways to uphold the one and the many? I am interested in ways all of our mini worlds can cohere. I’m glad that you picked up on how that is visually represented in the work, including the theme of interior/exterior correlations.
JK: I’m picking up on that embodied action of bringing together seemingly disparate elements and reconciling them to each other. It leads me to think of the unifying force of the Holy Spirit, creating, regenerating, sanctifying.
MEF: Yes. Exactly! One of the reasons I wanted to go back to seminary was to address pneumatology, the work of the Spirit. Interestingly enough, Theaster Gates, and consequently African American Christianity, offered a broader, more holistic view of the work of the Spirit. As artists, the Spirit is so present in what we do. We recognize it. We feel it. We know it. We learn how to depend on it. This type of spirituality via making holds theological implications for Christian formation. The Spirit’s connecting function is overlooked. I mean, look at us. I don’t remember the last time I saw your face, it’s gotta be like 10 years, eight years?
JK: Probably, since New York!
MEF: Right, and that’s the beauty of the Christian body of Christ — that we are tethered together, by the Spirit.
JK: That’s resonating for me in a richer way because of this conversation. I feel it to be true that Spirit is always moving and working in some kind of mysterious way. Speaking of pneumatology, I have to share with you one fact about the breath that continues to astound me. Our breath is the one bodily function that happens autonomically and that we can also consciously control. It’s the only bodily function where we can switch back and forth in that way.
MEF: Wow! I am trying to wrap my brain around this ruach capacity concerning control and what is involuntary--or a given. I know that actual breathing exercises taps into what you are talking about--gaining a sense of control when chaos is at hand. Yet, I’m wondering about revitalizing acts like those of Theaster Gates. Can we agree alongside Jurgen Moltmann or Simone Weil that the impetus to heal our neighbor, to fix things, is Christ’s Spirit at work in the world?
JK: I would love to hear you speak specifically to one of your pieces. I’m intrigued by your Nebel series, particularly Nestle. The white and cream tints are soothing, and I find myself drawn in for a closer look to distinguish the material, shapes and textures which evoke images of trampled leaves and dirt, a wing hidden under rubble. It makes me want to crawl in there and nestle into the feathers. Would you share your vision and concept here?
Maria Eugenia Fee. Nestle. 2017. Acrylic on canvas.
MEF: Yeah. First, I am using canvas. This represents the modernist tradition of art that I was trained in; while three-dimensional, the piece is still a painting and I am very much concerned with formal issues. Conceptually, the repetition of the cut forms express the fragmentation we spoke of earlier. Yet, these pieces coalesce to create a home, much like the way a bird constructs a nest out of bits and pieces of their natural surroundings. In fact, the forms are the negative spaces cut away from my larger canvas panels that comprise the Pared Poroso or Porous Wall installation series. I like the image of wings. There is a lot to unpack here--but ultimately, wings reference my favorite poem by Lucille Clifton where sorrows are “winged.”
JK: There’s a phrase I wanted to share with you that made me think of your work. It’s from a book about the science of human emotions, called A General Theory of Love. The phrase is “landscapes that lie hidden within the human soul.” To me, you are creating landscapes that describe or contour embodied and felt experiences.
I understood my paintings as topographies of the inner life. Studio practice was a type of map-making.
MEF: Ooh I like that. Yeah, inner landscapes. When I was working predominantly in the painting format, I understood my paintings as topographies of the inner life. Studio practice was a type of map-making. In a sense, the paintings were external maps of my inner life. So yeah, pretty right on. I’ve been writing proposals for art residency programs. As I was writing, I thought of my kids and how they would create blanket forts. They would create multiple dwellings: they’d have a whole city in the bedroom, and I thought wow, that’s a good analogy for my work in that they are fragile domains created to situate the self in a place.
The blanket forts were always places of invitation for playmates to come into. And, so, I like the kids’ hospitable apparatus that’s place based, fragile, yet movable, flexible. At a young age, they were practicing the precariousness and playfulness of hospitality, and in many ways I think my art does the same.
JK: As a play therapist working with kids, and yes I’ve seen some blanket fort adventures, this brings delight to my ears. The themes of hospitality, embodiment, faith, healing, breath, art and play are converging in your art. This leads me to my last question, which is how do you see yourself as a guest in your own art?
MEF: I’ll answer with what immediately comes to mind. I have to invite myself into the studio. The world values a lot of things, art is not one of them--well maybe in theory, but not in practice. It takes a lot of time to create, to investigate, to learn a craft. This is time that could be spent feeding the poor, writing a book, working to get ahead. Making art is a luxury and a privilege. I need to recognize these facts and balance it with another set of truths in order to position myself in the studio. Art-making empowers; it informs. It is a mode that resists discouragement because it enables a perspective filled with possibilities. Lastly, because I have a responsibility to others, I become a guest in the studio so I can invite others in. As a professor, I try to transfer what I learn in the studio to give people access to the things we have been talking about: healing, integration, the ability to hold multiple and conflicting perspectives. But most importantly, there are intellects that necessitate the body. This is especially necessary for Protestants to practice since they have dissociated belief from concrete reality. Art is one way to establish humility and cement the fact that we are guests in a neighborhood God created called planet Earth.
Judy Ko is interested in the intersections of faith, creativity, beauty, truth, trauma, and soul care. She received a design education from Carnegie Mellon and worked as a visual designer in Manhattan before deciding to pursue the field of therapy. She moved to the Pacific Northwest to earn a counseling psychology degree at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. Judy is currently a Licensed Mental Health Associate working as a play therapist in the Seattle area.
Photographer and videographer Allen Wong was trained classically on the piano and violin, and later studied viola. He has played with the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra and was a finalist in the Washington State Solo & Ensamble Contest. After picking up the guitar, bass, and drums, he recorded his first EP, As Headaway Ahem. After graduating from the University of Washington with a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering, he produced the Theotech Podcast and had a quick run on YouTube before taking on photography.
