Tell Me a Story, a new piece commissioned by the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota for the Iverson Center for Faith, was installed in mid-December. Tell Me a Story is a compilation of mixed media panels from the Anastylosis Project. The fourteen panels include hand-drawing, collage, silver leafing, and gold leafing on…

Spring Term Exhibitions: Wriston Gallery, Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin · March 28 to May 5, 2019. This exhibition will feature work from Mary Griep’s Anastylosis Project, a series of large-scale drawings of sacred spaces around the world. The drawings are the visual manifestations of her exploration into how to represent the experience of being present in these special spaces, including Ulu Camii mosque, Agios Dimitrios Church, the Castillo from Chichen Itza, and Thatbinyinyu Temple.

Paper and Presentation for 2018 Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum · In 1998 I accompanied a group of students to Europe for a month. I took along 100 small pieces of paper for drawing and found myself deeply inspired by medieval architecture. These small drawings evolved into what has become a 20-year project of large-scale drawings inspired by 12th century buildings. This love of global medieval architecture has immersed me in many issues raised by preservation of cultural heritage. I have shared in the dismay over the tremendous number of sites, monuments and objects destroyed, removed, or significantly damaged since the year 2000. This destruction has been caused not just by political acts, terrorism, vandalism and acts of war, but also by fire, flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes and global warming. It seems overwhelming, but it is actually difficult to determine if the pace of loss has significantly increased, or if we are just more aware of the accumulation of loss.

The Anastylosis Project was featured in the January, 2018 issue of The Christian Century magazine. “I am not trying to represent the monuments but rather to meditate upon them and reflect their long and numinous lives,” Griep writes. “The act of drawing on such a scale is a contemplative act that mimics the role of these buildings as a way of concentrating attention.”

The 2017 Spring Mellby Lecture, “Descent into Detail” was given by Mary Griep, Professor of Art & Associate Dean of Fine Arts at St. Olaf College, On April 11 in the Viking Theater at St. Olaf, as part of the 34th Annual Carl A. Mellby Lecture series. Her Mellby lecture is an exploration of careful observation and an homage to a thousand years of human creativity and attention to these particular places.