Student Artist’s Mixed Media Exhibition Imagines Hope

Selected as this year’s C. Eric Lincoln Fellow in Theology and Arts, Duke Divinity School student Jaden Dejesus Blango (pictured above) will present an exhibition of his mixed-media collage and figure drawings at Duke Chapel from January 16 to February 28. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held Thursday, January 23, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Chapel.

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Titled Imagination and Promise: The Theological Aesthetics of Hope, the exhibition presents pencil drawings of people on cut paper layered on backgrounds textured by water marbling, gold ink, ashes, and magazine clippings. In each of the pieces, Blango said the Christian theology of God as a Trinity provides a framework: the abstract background represents God the Father, the figure in the foreground represents God the Son, and the viewer seeing the relationship between the two plays the role of the Holy Spirit. 

“What I want to invite people to imagine is God's promises of a reality that is already-but-not-yet is present and can be lived into and encountered,” said Blango, who is pursuing a master of theological studies degree with certificates in Latinx studies and theology in the arts. “Nothing spectacular or super sentimental, I'd imagine, is going to be in in the work, it's more like how does the everyday bus ride bear witness to a reality that in Christian terms is ‘New Creation?’”

Blango was selected as this year’s C. Eric Lincoln Fellow by a committee comprising former Lincoln Fellows, Chapel staff, and campus partners.

“We were impressed by the depth of his process and the ways that he invites viewers to also participate in it,” said the Rev. Racquel Gill, the convener of the committee and the Chapel’s minister for intercultural engagement. “There is a real theological richness in his thinking about how art is doing the work of theology.”

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Raised on New York’s Long Island, Blango comes to Duke from the University of Texas at San Antonio where he earned a bachelor of fine arts. An accomplished artist, he has had more than a dozen exhibitions of his work in New York and Texas. He said he was drawn to Duke because of programs that integrate visual art and theology, such as the C. Eric Lincoln Fellowship and Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts.

“There's this sense of openness in the coursework where the professors want you to apply the theory that you learn,” he said about his classes at Duke. “In my work, I wonder about what it means to think about Christ as the perfected image of God—and specifically using that word 'image' as a visual artist?”

Blango’s spiritual practices are integrated with his process for making art. For example, he burns incense while meditating and then uses the ashes from the burnt incense to make a colored paste that becomes part of his background palette. Also, to create the pieces he will exhibit in the Chapel, he is working in the Chapel’s crypt, which contains an altar, a cross, a large Bible, and the remains of former university leaders.

“The practice of drawing can be a contemplative one,” he said. “I don't come close to God through drawing, but I do think that I release all the things that keep me from God as I draw.”