If \u201creligious nature of religious art\u201d\u009d seems tautological, blame Western curatorial history for making it not so. Although most important American institutions abound with the art of faith, until recently, those museums provided almost no information about that art\u2019s spiritual inspiration, its ritual use, or where it fit into the roiling histories of popular belief or religious politics. Or as Ena Heller\u201d\u201dMOBIA\u2019s founding director and now director of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Orlando, Florida\u201d\u201dremarked in 2004, most museums displayed \u201can undeniable reluctance to interpret the religious component of art.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
That flaw is breathtaking: Imagine a museum showing Warhols being \u201creluctant\u201d\u009d to talk about late-20th-century consumerism, or an institution exploring German Expressionism being leery of bringing up World Wars. For a decade, MOBIA, which Heller founded in a shoebox in 2005, has acted as a kind of two-cylinder antidote, presenting Christian and Jewish religious art with all the context museums traditionally ignored. And it’s done so while maintaining a strictly secular curatorial philosophy, confuting those who think that to concentrate on religion means to evangelize. The victorious Donatello show seemed to assure that MOBIA could continue to explain the cultural influence of the Bible on art\u201d\u201dobvious yet ignored\u201d\u201dfrom a perch of true national stature.<\/p>\n
Now, it’s up to art consumers to internalize the museum\u2019s insight for themselves.<\/p>\n