ART & SOUL J o K adlecek
Seeing Hunger in a Stone Blame it on the girl. Or in this case the daughter, because if she hadn’t cared about issues like sustainable agriculture and hunger in developing countries, Jim Zingarelli’s artwork might look very different. But her volunteer efforts as a college student prompted the Christian art professor to respond to the same concerns in the language he knows best: sculpture. The result is Zingarelli’s newest exhibit, “Host & Hunger,” which opened this fall at Gordon College’s Barrington Centre for the Arts, just north of Boston. The collection includes 20 carved heads—each with gaping mouth—in marble, ebony, granite, limestone, and serpentine and from countries throughout Africa, the Mediterranean, and North America. The carvings incorporate influences as diverse as Western pop art and ancient African sculpture, the smallest standing only three inches high and the largest 31 inches and weighing 250 pounds. But for Zingarelli, each represented a much bigger issue he’s become passionate about changing: world hunger. “When my oldest daughter, Gina, took some college-sponsored mission trips to learn about agricultural work in developing countries, I began to realize how unfamiliar I was with the same faces and issues she was seeing,” Zingarelli says. “It began to raise a question for me: How do I, as an artist who believes Jesus is the bread of life, also make art out of a social conscience, without it becoming propaganda on the one hand or overly sentimental on the other?” So the father followed in his daughter’s footsteps and three years ago began working with the same organization she
had: ECHO, a nonprofit interdenominational ministry based in Florida whose mission since 1981 has been to network with community leaders in over 180 countries to “seek hunger solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions.” Zingarelli spent his spring break in Florida, teamed up with a biology professor, and the two helped students create over 100 botanical drawings, photos, and paintings that were later sold at a silent auction to benefit the hungry. That fall, during his sabbatical, Zingarelli went with ECHO to Honduras to work with farmers on a sustainable tropical agricultural project, and last year he traveled as part of a Gordon team to South Africa, where he worked with black African sculptors. He and his wife
also volunteered recently at an orphanage in Morocco, where he taught art. Each trip, Zingarelli says, had a strong impact on his life and his work, helping him reconcile the connection between art and justice. “Host & Hunger” is an extension of each experience. PRISM 2008
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“Jim’s tragicomic heads are compelling images of the basic human dilemma,” writes Bruce Herman, colleague, fellow artist, and longtime friend of Zingarelli. “Despite our bids for immortality, we are weak and frail creatures who need to be fed. We can’t live on ideas and art alone, but require bread, water, and other humble creaturely necessities.” Herman believes that Zingarelli’s head carvings also draw viewers into the mystery of the Eucharist and its connection with our human need for both physical and spiritual nourishment. The “host” referred to in the title points both to hospitality and to the Eucharist, the bread of heaven. At one point Zingarelli even considered carving thin, wafer-like pieces of stone for a gallery visitor to “feed” the sculptured heads— their wide-stretched mouths certainly invite such action. But the artist later decided not to, preferring instead the more symbolic absence and lack as a way of communicating both the Lord ’s Supper and the perennial problem of starvation. When Zingarelli finished his sculptures, he also decided to donate 50 percent of his Host & Hunger exhibit sales to organizations such as ECHO and Heifer International and to individual sculptors and farmers he worked with in Honduras, South Africa, and Morocco. “I hope this work will raise an awareness of the enormous need for hunger relief, that it’s a problem we can solve,” Zingarelli says. “Maybe in a small way we’ll make a difference in the lives of some of these farmers and artists I’ve met. And maybe these carvings will also help others wrestle with these same questions of art and social awareness.” ■ Jo Kadlecek is on the communication arts faculty of Gordon College in Wenham, Mass., where she is lucky enough to have her office just down the hall from creative types like Zingarelli and Herman.