Miserere: The Life and Work of Marilyn Seven

81 Leonard Gallery, in collaboration with Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, is pleased to announce Miserere, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Marilyn Seven, curated by Sebastian A. T. Grant.

Marilyn Seven, an alumna of Union Seminary, has dedicated her life to examining the conflicts between spiritual faith and brutal reality, using her work to tackle The Problem of Evil, a theological concern that has been a major part of the discussion regarding Christian faith. Over a sixty year long career, Seven creates her work as a warning to humanity, as well as a meditation on the challenges of her faith.

The exhibition will focus mainly on her three major series Miserere, The Torture Series, and The Black Paintings. Each series focuses on specific points of Seven’s career, and will be situated in the gallery in the form of a triptych. The triptych has always been an important Christian object of personal devotion, and its incarnation in the gallery symbolizes Seven’s own engagement in private devotion as artistic practice. While The Torture Series and the Black Paintings will be placed in the triptych’s figurative side wings as observations of human nature, the Miserere series will prominently symbolize the central panel, the holiest of the triptych, and the home found on the path to redemption.

Seven’s Miserere marks the earliest of her three series, and it captures her lifelong and complex relationship with faith. Inspired by the work of Expressionist artist Georges Rouault, she started this series in 1965 as a response to the horrifying atrocities of the Vietnam War. In this series, Seven makes her most direct connections between God and human suffering, depicting both human and Christian imagery in a continuous checkered pattern. This series continues to this day, as she creates versions of the same image as if repeating prayers on rosary beads, hoping these prayers can one day bring about human salvation.

Seven started the Torture Series in the 1980’s in response to the violence of the Latin American civil wars, capturing the suffering caused by men who were taught to murder. In these more figurative pieces, she is unafraid to show the mutilated bodies of the tortured, the grieving mothers with their dead children in their arms, and the deafening screams of the innocent. Among this unsettling imagery, Seven also exposes the United States’ part in the wars, decrying the human suffering that destroys the lives of all, when it is caused by the hands of the powerful.

In her last major series, The Black Paintings, Seven takes a much more reflective approach to her artistic themes, using bold abstraction to express a more pensive meditation on the role of faith found in trials and tribulation. Painted during the 1990’s, a series of 50 black squares reveal various textures in the thick coats of paint, each expressing a void filled with an abyss of pure darkness. Yet the darkness isn’t created to capture utter despair and hopelessness, and instead it symbolizes the search for light within the darkness. Ruminating on the quote from the Gospel of John “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it,” Seven encourages the viewer to search through the piece, as one would search within oneself, and find the light in the darkness, because you cannot create the absence of light, without light being there in the first place.

Marilyn Seven was born in 1937 in Borger, Texas, and grew up in Amarillo. She earned her BA from Abilene Christian University, and later completed an MAR at Union Theological Seminary and an MA at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. While supporting herself as an artist, she worked as the typesetter for the journal Christianity & Crisis from 1976 to around 1991, occasionally writing reviews and poems for publication. Seven currently lives in Woodstock, NY where she has retired from painting.

This show is dedicated to her late husband Ted Yanow, who recently passed away, weeks before the show’s opening. Ted was a lifelong champion of Marilyn’s work, and this show would not have happened if not for him.