Art Matters by Rev. Dr. Theresa S. Thames

As a curious and precocious child, I spent my mornings reading our local newspaper, the Sun Herald, on the front porch with my grandmother. Our morning routine gifted us quality time together and made me feel grown up. While Granny Ruby read the local news section and obituaries, I was interested in what was happening across the country and around the world. I considered myself too mature to limit my reading to the Friday kid pages and Sunday comics. As in most papers, the entertainment and style sections listed the birthdays of famous people. On my birthday, I saw an artist named Georgia O’Keeffe listed. Until then, the only artists I knew were Michelangelo and Vincent van Gogh, the guy with one ear. So I immediately ran inside the house to our bookshelf, which housed a complete collection of the world’s knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to learn more. While I do not remember the paragraph of writing about O’Keeffe’s life, I will never forget the two pictures on the page—Two Calla Lilies on Pink (1928) and Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (1935). I was too young to understand then, but over the years, I learned that these two paintings would speak to me of not only Georgia’s life of love and loss but also of my own.

When I left my hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and headed to Washington, DC, to attend Howard University, I was in awe of the art scene. My education off campus rivaled my education on campus as I connected the names I heard in my African American history courses with the works I saw in art collections across town. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Phillips Collection became my weekend hangouts. Their free admissions, public transportation-friendly locations, and programming made art accessible. Not only did I encounter a world of art, but spending time in galleries and museums also expanded my social circle by introducing me to artists, curators, museum directors, and scholars who delighted in conversations about the artworks with eager and impressionable college students. These off-campus getaways expanded my knowledge and guided me deeper into my own creativity.

As the late, great Toni Morrison once wrote, “Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.” Whether it was Gordon Parks’s photographs providing visuals of the Black American experience in the 1940s and ’50s or the colorful and textured works of Alma Thomas, I learned that art was not off-limits to Black people. At such a formative time in my personal development, it was important for me to see the walls of museums display melanin faces like those of my ancestors and share the diasporic stories of my people in varied media; this is why I celebrate and support the Princeton University Art Museum’s partnership with HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). What a time to live in a world with contemporary Black artists such as Renée Cox, Derek Fordjour, Lanecia A. Rouse, and Amy Sherald. Their artistry has left an indelible mark on American art history by centering Black culture and ushering in a new wave of art and artists for the next generation.

The Office of Religious Life is in Murray-Dodge Hall, a neighbor of the Princeton University Art Museum. Over the years, I have sat at my desk, delighting in the excitement in the voices and giggles of elementary, middle, and high school students from the surrounding area visiting the Museum. For many, this is more than a field trip; it is their first time on a university campus and their first glimpse into what is possible for them too. As group leaders and teachers try to hush the students, I consider that if the celebrity birthday section of a local newspaper was my foray into the art world, imagine how a visit to an actual art museum has the potential to awaken within these students a curiosity about art that will transform their futures.

I still read the newspaper each morning, though on a digital device, and the calla lily is my favorite flower. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, I get an adrenaline rush from the bustle of the city, and I have seen the majesty of creation unfold in a Southwestern sunset. I am forever thankful for how art continues to expand my world and add beauty to my life.

Rev. Dr. Theresa S. Thames
Associate Dean of Religious Life and the Chapel