Katie Kresser

Recently I walked with students among the self-portrait collection at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Most of these portraits were glamorous and proud, but a few were melancholy, desperate, even brutal. Some were fanciful, others despairing. Almost all faced outward as if to catch the eyes of passers-by and elicit recognition, acknowledgment, and sympathy.…

Sometime in your life, you have been a scapegoat. At some point in your life, you have been at the bottom of a pecking order, or at least very near to it, and you have felt ashamed and afraid. It’s likely that this experience morally compromised you. Maybe you lied to protect yourself. Maybe you…

Recently, thanks to a collaboration with fellow CCCU school Gordon College, I was able to spend a month in Italy teaching art history to a wonderful group of Christian students. This was, of course, a priceless opportunity for an art historian. Italy abounds in stellar museums and archaeological sites, and over the years, I have…

How do two utterly dissimilar things come together? How can they be reconciled? By rising. As the phrase goes, attributed to the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and popularized by the novelist Flanner O’Connor, “everything that rises must converge.” And it converges upon a lofty, shared Object, the source and end of our desire,…

I am an art historian by trade, and recently, I had the opportunity to deliver an art history lecture at my church. I always relish these occasions, because they give me a chance to share my passion with a wider audience. They also, maybe surprisingly, help me with my own research. I’m deeply interested in…

This year, at my daughter’s suburban, mostly upper-income middle school, a certain kind of water bottle has become au courant. It is expensive and unwieldy, but there’s a sense that one can’t do without it. I found out today that another, nearby middle school (no surprise) is aflutter about the same bottle. To be deprived…

I am an Art Historian. And one way of making a “history” of art is to trace a history of gesture. The Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman summed this up in his 1947 manifesto, The First Man Was an Artist.This essay was first published in the art magazine Tiger’s Eye (1947, issue 1) and can…

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” - Luke 2:10 Beneath the dissonant, thrumming symphony of contemporary culture, I think the creeping bass line is fear. I’m not sure if this was true a few years ago, but…

In the modern world, youth culture, and especially collegiate culture, is often activist culture. Among the college-aged, a freshness of vision combines with just enough personal skill and knowledge to beget (at least sometimes) a burning sense of responsibility. One phrase associated with collegiate protest culture, and with social activism in general, is “be the…

Lately, I have been especially attentive to outbreaks, like a rash, of what I call to myself the “Hell dynamic.” It is a spirit of domination and destruction, in that order. It begins with a struggle for power, exerted with greater or lesser straightforwardness. (This is “domination.”) It ends with a reckoning full of blame and…

Every year in my Contemporary Art class, I guide my students through a 1960s manifesto called Society of the Spectacle. Written by the angsty, art-adjacent theorist Guy Debord, it captures the philosophical energies informing contemporary fine art in a pithy and memorable way. Debord’s central thesis (informed by Marxist thought) is this: that modern society…

The world is full of recrimination nowadays. There’s the online marketplace of terror, for one thing: doxxing, death threats, so-called “cancelling,” and just plain old ad hominem bomb throwing. There is the bloodthirsty tribalism that casts one’s opponent as an existential (and almost inhuman) enemy. And there is always, in abundance, that quiet world of “bitching…

Though few of us have the patience to really contemplate them, great pictures are rich “icons” of human nature. They are considered great precisely because they contain timeless, complex, interlocking truths in one small “box.” They are the world’s most dazzlingly efficient form of deep, rich, and instantaneous-yet-endless communication. The old platitude says “a picture…

“We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” - Pope Francis Written on the Feast of Pentecost. Graduation is coming here at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). (Our school year in the PNW starts and ends late compared to the rest of the U.S.). Graduation, of course, is a time…

A few days after Easter, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled “Our Many Jesuses.” The blurb below the headline read: “At a time of shrinking church membership, Jesus remains a uniquely powerful and popular figure in American culture. The great divide is over what he stands for.” Next to the headline were Warhol-esque…

In the Seattle Art Museum, there is a little painting that often perplexes my students. It shows a scrawny, aged, half-nude man kneeling on desert ground and facing a small crucifix mounted on a stick. His left arm is extended with its empty hand splayed; his right hand holds a gray, prism-shaped rock. And despite…

Albrecht Durer, Rock Study, ca. 1497, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria In a memorable exchange from Luke’s gospel, Jesus (as he was wont to do) rebukes the Pharisees. The jubilant events of Palm Sunday are happening. The Pharisees are scandalized and tell Jesus to make His disciples quiet down. In response, Jesus says, “if they keep…

John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Huguenot,_on_St._Bartholomew%27s_Day In 1852, the pious British artist John Everett Millais (who has been featured elsewhere in this blog), painted a heart-rending image called A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day. Here, beside an ivied wall, two young lovers furtively embrace. The air is thick and the…

This December, in her Language Arts class, my fifth grader is retelling the Christmas story. And she can’t just write any old, kid-style paraphrase. Instead, my daughter’s story has to be from the vantage of a minor, or even invisible, character. What, my daughter must consider, did the Nativity look like to the overlooked? Well,…