Curator Liturgist

Every year, during early December, Yale Divinity School offers an Advent service to the community. A revered event, it is an opportunity to reflect on the present and hope for the future. My last year at Yale I was honored with the task of overseeing this event. Beginning with the Word Made Flesh, the service noted the curses and the blessings of the pandemic years refusal of the body and imagined what enfleshed dancing might carry us forward into a more just future.

For the 2022 Yale Advent Service, Kathryn-kay Johnson presented an eight-panel installation of embroidered tapestries inspired by the year’s theme of Word Made Flesh. The tapestries interpret the traditional advent stories of the annunciation, the proclamation to the shepherds, and the birth of Christ. Utilizing abstraction to explore movement, divinity, and incarnation, while allowing for a breadth of  experiences of The Word, the pieces draw from the artist’s Caribbean and West African heritage, as well as from Greco-Roman and Romantic influences inspired by the Neoclassical architecture of Marquand Chapel. The materials of silver thread and velvet reference Renaissance church art, while the digital elements prompt us to consider the meaning of embodiment in our increasingly virtual world. These pieces invite viewers into a conversation with the space, with the sacred, celebrating the tenuous transition between word and flesh, past and present, static and animated, between divine and human.