NEW YORK.- The Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA), the nation’s first scholarly museum of art and the Bible, just opened in a newly designed facility at Broadway and 61st Street. A ground-breaking inaugural exhibition, Coming Home!: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South, examines the phenomenon of modern-day folk art in the South as an outgrowth of the region’s deep evangelical Christian roots. Coming Home! sheds light on the different streams of Christian tradition that flow into untrained artistic expressions in the South – rural white as well as African-American. As one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever organized on the subject of Southern vernacular art, Coming Home! assembles more than 120 works by 73 artists, from the acclaimed to little-known but gifted practitioners whose work will be new to New York audiences. More than a quarter of those represented identify themselves as ministers, street preachers, or missionaries, as well as artists. Coming Home! has been organized by the Art Museum of the University of Memphis with support from Humanities Tennessee, National Endowment for the Arts and The Rockefeller Foundation. MOBIA is a new museum that aims to create a new model for exploring the meaning of religious art and artifacts in culture, one which emphasizes the original functions and meanings of objects growing out of the Christian and Jewish traditions.

“MOBIA has been established to shed light on the many ways in which the stories and symbols of the Bible have influenced art,” says Dr. Ena Heller, executive director of the Museum of Biblical Art. “ Coming Home! exemplifies how this mission can yield new, even surprising, insights. MOBIA’s inaugural exhibition is a pioneering study, the first of many we hope to present in the coming years.”

Dr. Carol Crown, organizer of Coming Home!, and associate professor of art history at the University of Memphis, says: “Many avant garde artists have been drawn to the creations of self-taught artists, especially for their pictorial rule-breaking and free play of non-traditional materials. Although stylistic affinities exist, they belie gaping differences. More often than not, the selftaught artists represented in this exhibition mean what they say: they are proclaiming the word of God as found in the Bible, which they believe to be an unerring authority on morality and the future.”

The title of the exhibition, drawn from a gospel hymn, refers to a commonly held fundamentalist belief that the Day of Reckoning is imminent, when Christians will enter paradise and dwell eternally with God. In Coming Home!, “end-time” scenarios reoccur in the work of artists of different generations and regions. Joe Minter, the creator of an extraordinary yard installation outside Birmingham, Alabama, which he calls the African Village in America, illustrates an event foreseen in the Book of Revelation in a delicate, exhortatory sculpture entitled The Last Trumpet (2001), fabricated from discarded parts of bicycles and appliances tethered to a battered brass trumpet.

Terrifying foretellings of end-time demons and the seven-headed beast, who has sometimes been interpreted as the Antichrist, are contributed by artists as varied as Myrtice West of Centre, Alabama, who has created numerous paintings inspired by end-time prophecy; Robert Roberg of Gainesville, Florida, who has painted more than a hundred; Samuel David Phillips of Chicago, Illinois; Alyne Harris of Gainesville, Florida; Annie Lucas of Pink Lily, Alabama; Minnie Evans of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Cherry ShaEla’ReEl of East Texas.

On loan from the collection of Aurora University Library, Aurora, Illinois, are adventual materials that provide a sense of the long legacy of end-time teaching in this country. These include a Millerite Chart of 1843, so-named for its popularization by the lay Baptist preacher William Miller, the Bingham Prophecy Chart of 1927, and a hand-painted banner created in the early 20th century as a teaching aid for the Advent Christian Church.

Coming Home! identifies other evangelical themes in the art-making of the modern-day South: original sin, as embodied in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and conveyed pointedly in a number of works, including Ned Cartledge’s brightly painted, carved wooden sculpture of a naked Eve alongside a human-sized snake and three tiny apples, under which the artist has carved the words: “Get wise, eat an apple, direct from the Tree of Knowledge”; the possibility of being redeemed or “born again,” thanks to Jesus’ suffering and sacrifice on the Cross; and the importance of Christian community in the fight of good versus evil. Scenes of ecstatic worship are depicted in Charlie Owens’ Holy Church o God-in-Christ (n.d.), Linda Anderson’s Mt. Vernon Fire Baptized Pentecostal Holiness Church (1984), and Clementine Hunter’s Tent Revival (c. 1950s).

John W. Cook, President Emeritus, The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Biblical Art, says, “In presenting Coming Home! MOBIA hopes to stimulate an ecumenical and crossdisciplinary exchange of ideas about the particular ways in which Christianity has taken shape in the American South and is manifested in the arts.”