This interview is one in an ongoing series exploring the intersection of art and religion in HDS courses.
The Harvard Divinity School course, “Spiritual Paths to Abstract Art,” is more than just an academic exploration. Led by Ann Braude, Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at HDS, the course is a journey of generational spirituality, connection with the divine, and art-sharing as a profound experience of connection.
The idea for the course began to take shape in 2018, with Hilma af Klint’s “Paintings for the Future” exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Braude’s book, Radical Spirits, discussing spiritualist women’s experiences, bubbled to the forefront of conversations about af Klint’s practice as the exhibition attendees and the art world struggled to understand the intersection of af Klint’s spiritualism and abstract expressionism.
“Spiritual Paths to Abstract Art” bridges two of Braude’s long-term interests: the impact of women’s connection to spiritualism and abstract expressionist painting. Inspired by the work of her grandmother, the twentieth-century painter Vicci Sperry, a Christian Scientist, Braude expanded the course to include abstract artists from various spiritual backgrounds.
The course has attracted the interest of students from across Harvard University. Michelle Segura Castro, a Harvard Graduate School of Design student studying architecture and design, cross-registered in the class because of her curiosity about the spiritual possibilities of art.
“I also engage in painting and strive to stay connected to the art world because I believe in its transformative power to challenge norms and reshape our perspectives," she said. "Art fosters connection, builds communities, and encourages the exploration of solutions beyond our existing knowledge. This course enlightened me about the significance of spirituality in the creative process for artists and the responsibility they bear toward their audience. Additionally, I found examining justice and marginalized groups—their struggles and fights for rights—particularly intriguing.”
Connection as a spiritual and pedagogical practice has shaped this course into a primer on contemporary possibilities within spiritually inspired artwork. Braude intentionally created an interactive course that included a visit from musician Maggie Rogers, MRPL '23 and an alum of the course, viewing the Harvard Art Museum collections, and student-led art-making inside the classroom.
Below, Braude discusses her course, how abstract art can express the ineffable, and the experiences of connection that come from learning about art in community.
HDS: Does art inform or affect your understanding of religion or religious practices?
Braude: It doesn't inform my personal religious practice very directly at all. But art, particularly abstract art, has been an attempt to express the ineffable. And so I don't see it related so much to religious practices but instead related to spirituality and to the human desire to connect with that which is beyond our individual existence. That's what I think abstract art is.
HDS: Why did you focus on abstract art in this course?
Braude: Well, this course bridges two of my long-term interests. I wrote my first book about women who were spirit mediums in the nineteenth century and how spiritualism as a religion supported an expansion of women's roles that they previously believed were impossible for women to aspire to or to perform. External spirits empowered these women to speak publicly and fill roles others believed only men could fulfill. My other long-term interest came from the fact that I grew up with a grandmother who was an abstract expressionist painter. There were all kinds of abstract expressionist artworks on her walls. As a child, I was always compelled by her artwork, in particular, but also by all of the art she introduced me to. I took her art class, and it was pretty unconventional. It was always a thin line between art and spirituality in her class.
She was trying to free our spirits to free our expression. She believed you could not be creative if you were hampered by conventionality. You had to throw off the limited expectations of what you could do to express yourself. She believed that creativity and self-knowledge were mutually reinforcing—that the more you connected with your creativity, the more you could be your true self and not experience limits or conventions.
The thing that gave birth to this course and those two very different sets of ideas coming together was the Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. I got a call from Brooke Gladstone from On The Media. She said, could you help our listeners understand what it means that Hilma af Klint painted under spirit guidance and how these monumental abstract artworks were directly inspired by spirit presence? And I said, yes, I can help you understand that!
I think it was very shocking to many people that her work, which was so modern and so unconnected to her academic training in art, was also unconnected to what was happening in the art world in her time. However, it didn't seem far-fetched to me that her work resulted from spirit communication. In American history, spirit communication has been a source for women to exceed society's limits. And that's definitely what was going on with Hilma af Klint. Then I became interested in looking at other artists who moved to abstraction in connection with unconventional spirituality. Many twentieth-century abstract thinkers and modern artists were interested in theosophy. They all read Madame Blavatsky, and some of them explored other unconventional spiritualities as well.
So, what I wanted to do in this class is to look at how we view an artist's work and learn to see their spiritual path. If we look at their artwork in connection with their spirituality and spiritual autobiography, we can see how they illuminate each other. Although my training is in American religious history, my grandmother taught me to see the spiritual in abstract art. I learned from watching her that creative people would express different kinds of spirituality and different forms of religiosity in their artwork.
HDS: How can understanding an artist’s spiritual background influence our perception of their work?
Braude: We often ask artists for an artist’s statement to talk about their work, and what they're trying to accomplish. And some of them don't have much to say or feel like they said it in the artwork. But when they talk about their spirituality, you're not asking them to talk about the artwork. You're asking them to talk about what motivates them and what experience they want people to have when they see the artwork. That might be a feeling, or it might be a sense of being able to experience a feeling that you haven't been able to bring into focus when you did the artwork, or it could be an experience of liberation from mundane aspects of the material world that you see beyond when you look at a painting.
HDS: Why do you think so many artists take your course?
Braude: Very artistic students take this class, and I think that is because it builds practical skills for them to understand how spiritual expression leads to successful artwork. I hope students will come away seeing that creative expression can be a path to the divine and vice versa. One of the reasons I love working with so many HDS students who are artists is because I'm not an artist. I'm a historian; I always want to know what happens when someone creates. If we can understand the past, we'll better deal with the future. In this course, I'm applying the historian's question to these artworks, what happened with the work, the artist, and their spirituality. I’ve learned that so much relates to each artist’s spirituality. That's how these great expressions of human creativity come into existence through spiritual experiences and goals.
HDS: What are your long-term goals for what you hope students take away from this class?
Braude: This is a post-COVID class. And we learned a lot of things during COVID. One of the things that we learned is our need for experience of beauty and our need for expression. And a lot of art criticism doesn't take those things into account. I felt that the post-COVID students were hungry for ways to connect with the world around them. They had been isolated from each other, isolated from the world. They were hungry for connection, and they felt healed by this class, by the community, by spending two hours every week with students of religion looking at artwork together and seeing it through each other's eyes. I hope that they learn something they can take with them about viewing art can allow us to transcend mundane reality. I hope they learn how to be there for each other, and how to share their creative expression.
What is it that draws artists to study religion? And what is it that makes students who have a spiritual practice take this class? For some of them, it involves art. For some of them, it doesn't. After COVID, people have found ways to preserve themselves, their creativity, and a desire to connect. We had such an experience of disconnection, and we all suffered from that. It seems like learning about art is a profound experience of connection. I want students to be able to use their intellect to think about the connections between art and spirituality. When we approach abstract art intellectually and try to connect it with the artist's biography, we can see how it's not random and how it's very intentional, and it may not always be consciously planned. I hope that students will come away with some ideas about the human experience because that's what art is. It's a human expression. And it is not the divine. That is what artists are doing is they're trying—at least, abstract painters are trying—to express the immaterial using material form. They're trying to bring together the human and the more than human.
—by Maddison Tenney, HDS communications editorial assistant