Befriending Wilderness: Dwelling In the
An Exhibition Featuring Wheaton College Alumni and Faculty
What does it mean as an artist to pass through seasons of confusion, disorientation, or despair? Befriending Wilderness takes up this question, using "wilderness" not simply as a description of landscape but as a metaphor for the disorienting passages that mark a creative life.
The works in this exhibition are personal responses to that inquiry. Artists were invited to submit a single work that depicts or embodies their own experience of creative, spiritual, or vocational wilderness. So, the show is both a collection of individual testimonies and a platform for shared conversation.
This exhibition is part of "Befriending Wilderness: Intergenerational Formation in Contemporary Art," a year long collaboration between Wheaton College’s Art Department and Biola University’s Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts. The project listens to the wilderness experiences of Christian visual artists, gathering not only stories of struggle but the wisdom earned in navigating them. It seeks to acknowledge the challenges to mental and spiritual well being among artists and foster an intergenerational conversation about sustaining one’s artistic practice through seasons of uncertainty.