Last year (2010) in the weeks leading up to Christmas, we did an art project at Wicker Park Grace during our Sunday Gatherings in which we transformed Christmas advertisements into a spiritual symbol. The idea was to disconnect from the excessive commercialism that Christmas has become, and reconnect to the underlying spiritual story of how the Divine came into human form through the birth of Jesus.

We got the idea from our friends at House for All Sinners and Saints and their pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, in Denver, CO. They did the project in 2008. They called their icon, Our Lady of the New Advent. They did theirs on poster board, but we wanted something more long lasting so we used a 1/2 inch thick art board and painted details on top of the collage.

I describe the project, tongue-in-cheek, as a paint-by-numbers Mary and Jesus project. The first week, with the background painted in green but Mary and Jesus blank white space, we thought it looked like an alien snowman from outer space. Each week we painted in a new color as background, and during the prayer time at our Spiritual Practice, people brought forward torn up bits of Christmas advertisements they brought from home, and glued them into the color-coded section.

Artist Monica J. Brown guided the project, and painted in the details, the faces and hands, at the end of the project, using an Ethiopian icon as a model for the features. Now this piece of art, collaboratively created, holds a central place in our gathering space on Sundays.

For pictures of the project all along the way, check out this set in flickr:
Theotokos icon project