Playful Theology: Dr. Dan Siedell Discusses Faith in the Curation of Art
Photo Courtesy of The King’s College
Dr. Daniel A. Siedell, a senior fellow at The King’s College, presented a lecture entitled “Exhibiting God: The Curatorial as Theological Method and Spiritual Practice” on Thursday, Nov. 17. He earned his doctorate in Modern Art from the University of Iowa and has worked in the art world for his entire career.
Siedell has been with King’s for 10 years. He was discovered by Dr. Henry Bleattler, an Associate Professor of History and the Humanities at Kings, when he curated an exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art in 2010. The exhibition consisted of a collection of works by Enrique Martinez Celaya. Bleattler saw the exhibit and invited Siedell to speak to the King’s community. After ten years, Siedell said it was time he reintroduced himself.
The talk was an intersection of Siedell’s story and his passions regarding theology and art. Siedell explained that he grew up in a conservative evangelical Nebraskan community and didn’t grow up around significant artistic influence. He was exposed to art by reading art criticism, which is what really made him love it. He said that “language opened up the experience of art.”
For a while, Siedell was a curator for the Sheldon Museum of Art in Nebraska. Here he learned “to be a curator not just of artwork, but of ideas.” He sought “to create relationships…and conversations among the artworks that [he] would share with audiences.”
Siedell worked with artists such as Enrique Martinez Celaya, Robyn O’Neil and Charley Friedman. These are artists who Siedell says did “not express any explicit religious commitment or interest but whose work seem[ed] to resonate with this kind of percolating interest that [he] had.” The artists were not explicitly Christian, but he felt that their work exuded something biblical or theological.
When working on the Celaya exhibit, he said his goal was to elicit a “liturgical” mindset. He enjoys exploring the “relationship between the aesthetic and the spiritual.”
Siedell feels that artworks open up a space to think about life. Every time he’s “thinking about art, [he’s] also thinking about…theology” and vice versa. He says that when people talk about art, they talk about all kinds of other things. One of his goals in curating is to create disjunctive relationships between pieces that might generate interesting conversation. It is his goal to experiment with “what does it mean theologically to make junctions and to allow these different elements to touch” and “the intimacy, the danger, the vulnerability generated through that.”
Siedell wrote several books including God in the Gallery and Who’s Afraid of Modern Art. He did a book-signing event on the latter at King’s in April 2015 and was interviewed by Charley Friedman, an artist with whom he had worked.
Siedell is currently attending Drew Theological School to study under Catherine Keller and attain a doctorate in theology. He said that how he “practice[s] faith…is as a curator.” He is also involved with a “surrealist theology group” called International Congress of Infrathic Studies which seeks to prove that theology can be “something playful.”
Juliette Hacquebord, a sophomore MCA major, asked Siedell where the particular connection between art and theology comes from. Siedell answered that both are seeking “to embody…or to represent or to give an account of what can’t be spoken, what can’t be shown, what can’t be articulated, yet that process of articulation — that failure — is part of the beauty of it.”
Matthew Peterson is the Podcast Editor for the Empire State Tribune. He is a freshman at The King's College studying Journalism, Culture and Society.