AAR Religion and the Arts Award

A visual artist, writer, and educator, Mesa-Bains has reconceived how we think about Chicano and Latino art through works that explore ongoing histories of spirituality, colonialism, and gender. “We are thrilled to honor Amalia Mesa-Bains with this year’s award,” said Anthony Petro, chair of the Religion and the Arts Award Jury. “Throughout her amazing career, and in her continuing artistic and writing practice, Mesa-Bains explores themes and questions of spirituality, politics, and aesthetics that exemplify the American Academy of Religion’s commitment to expanding public knowledge about religion.”

tabor-smith (she/they) is an Oakland, CA-based dance and performance maker, and the artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater. With its ensemble of dance and performance artists, Deep Waters Dance Theater draws from the folklore of Africana and Black cultural heritages and ancestral traditions to create multimedia dance theater works rooted in a Black feminist framework, one that promotes healing and liberation from environmental, gender, and racial oppression.

A recording artist since the age of 17, Reagon was shaped by the music she heard as a child. Her parents, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell Reagon, were founding members of the original SNCC Freedom Singers. Her own music, however, is highly distinctive and reflects the wide range of her sonic education at home: her parents’ rehearsals and artists such as Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and the Jackson 5. Synthesizing rock, reggae, soul, folk, and sacred music, Reagon’s music reflects her capacious understanding of African diasporic musical traditions and Americana. Since her early recordings Justice and Kindness, she has received considerable critical acclaim for her fusion of traditional music, contemporary protest anthems, rock, and love songs into a broader social vision of inclusivity and justice. Reagon’s music has contributed substantially to public understanding of the revolutionary potential of what she calls “the sacredness of our everyday living” and the “divine part of our existence.” Building from relationships—to the past, to God, to “that which is unseen”—Reagon understands her music as a steady vessel in an uncertain world, one that also has the capacity to transform through emotional and social change. Across her career—from collaborative projects like Wade in the Water or Africans in America to recent albums like Spiritland—Reagon has consistently cultivated and contributed to African-American religious and musical history.

A queer American performance artist, Athey has engaged with religious visual and aural forms throughout his career. Athey’s performances boldly probe the intersection of sexual, religious, and political discourses. Utilizing imagery and ritual actions deeply rooted in Pentecostal traditions of faith-healing as well as Catholic and Orthodox iconography, the artist perforates traditional pieties, enacting new visions of the sacred in their stead. He has performed regularly since the early ’80s, including such significant works as his collaboration with Rozz Williams on the experimental musical project Premature Ejaculation. In the ’90s, Athey explicitly turned his attention to religious motifs in works such as Surgical Stigmata, Martyrs & Saints, and Torture Trilogy, which were assailed by conservative cultural critics. These jeremiads often had as much to do with the artist’s identity as an openly HIV-positive gay man as the content of his work.

Born in Mississippi in 1941, composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has a musical background as diverse as his output. Whether playing in blues bands or avant-garde ensembles, Smith has always understood music to be not only an aesthetic practice but a vehicle for historical, political, and religious investigation. His Ankhrasmation Symbolic Language is constituted of symbols and graphemes indicating “rhythm units” through which players could “calibrate the relationship between sound and silence.” For Smith, these are fundamental, generative properties of the “divine life force,” which act transformatively on players and listeners. Many of Smith’s projects are more overt in their socio-political implications. Cosmic Music focuses on “the issues of borders, refugees, and immigrants.” Tabligh “deals with the issue of the way people look at Islamic ideas and people in Islam.” Smith believes that his music can establish new ethical worlds for audiences, focusing on “creative images that cause people to think in a provocative way” about these and other issues.

With a career spanning more than fifty years, Scorsese is widely regarded as one of the most important directors in American cinema. For scholars of religion, Scorsese’s filmography holds particular significance in its frequent meditations on faith, apostasy, and morality—from allegorical references in works like Cape Fear (1991) to the more overt engagement of religion in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997). Critics have hailed Scorsese’s most recent release, Silence (2016), as a culmination of themes that have influenced his work from the very beginning. Like so many of his films, Silence brings religion into public consciousness and conversation, serving as only the latest example in a long and storied career meriting this recognition by the Religion and the Arts Award Jury.

Sikander is a Pakistani-born American artist whose artwork is deeply rooted in Muslim and Hindu traditions of Indian and Persian miniature painting. From tiny layered drawings that insert the personal into traditional ritual forms, to video projections that re-interpret the miniature for the digital age, Sikander’s work ranges across media, including drawing, painting, large-scale installations, and performance. Her work is owned by numerous modern art collections around the world, and has been exhibited in solo and collective shows throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. In 2004, Newsweek listed Sikander as one of the most important South Asians transforming the American cultural landscape. She is a member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and has also served on the artist advisory team for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.