See our Call for Papers here. The full programme of speakers will be published in due course and tickets for attendees will be released summer 2025.
Visual Theology’s third event is a major two-part conference, the first of which will take place in New York City, 24-26 October 2025 at the Salmagundi Club along with a special visit to the Met Cloisters, New York City.L The second part will take place in the UK, summer 2026. (Details forthcoming.)
Part One: Imperfect Beauty: Visions of Fractured Faith will use the history and material culture of the Met Cloisters as a starting point for conversations about the space between brokenness and beauty, and to consider how art, in its many forms, can replant, remake, and reaffirm Christian truth, even when the results demonstrate synchronic anxieties between the past and the present, and faith and fragmentation.
Keynotes: Julia Yost (First Things, NYC) and Dr. Tracy Chapman Hamilton (Sweet Briar College), and artists Anthony Visco and Maya Brodsky
Julia Yost is senior editor of First Things. She holds an M.A. in English from Yale and an M.F.A. in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Her essays on literature and culture appear in First Things, Compact, and the New York Times. In her recent book Jane Austen’s Darkness (2024), Yost reads Austen’s six major novels and her unfinished last manuscript to show how Austen turned her protest into art. Yost lives in New York City with her husband and four sons.
Anthony Visco is an award-winning sculptor and the Director of the Atelier for the Sacred Arts. Among many awards, he has twice received the coveted Arthur Ross Award for sculpture. He has taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the New York Academy of Art, and the Sacred Art School in Florence, Italy. Visco’s sculptures, murals, and reliefs adorn churches and shrines throughout the U.S, and he is currently working on the 20 Mysteries of the Rosary in relief, to be cast in bronze for St. Edmund’s Retreat in Mystic, CT.
Tracy Chapman Hamilton, Ph.D., is an art historian and digital humanist whose research focuses on late medieval visual culture in Europe and the Mediterranean and is rooted in questions of gender, collecting, and material culture. Recent publications include Moving Women Moving Objects 400 – 1500, and her book Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France: The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321) won the 2020 International Center of Medieval Art’s Book Prize.
Maya Brodsky, born in Minsk, Belarus, is an award-winning painter based in Cambridge, MA. She received a B.F.A. in painting and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and gained an M.F.A from the New York Academy of Art, where she was awarded a Post-Graduate Fellowship. She was the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2018 and 2014, and held the Acadia Foundation Artist’s Residency in 2013. Her work is represented by George Adams Gallery in New York City.