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Dennis Raverty

Dr. Dennis Raverty is a retired professor of art history whose work has been published in Art Journal, Art in America, International Review of African American Art, Women’s Art Journal, Illustration Magazine, and Art Papers, where he was a contributing editor.

Resistance and Responsibility

This exhibition reveals how artist Ben Shahn retained a position as both an outsider and an insider to multiple art world and political discourses simultaneously.

Friedrich’s Subjective Landscapes of the Soul

In the extraordinarily subjective world of Caspar David Friedrich, we are almost always positioned before a landscape that strongly suggests our presence.

Gravitas with Grazie: Sienese Art at the Met

The art of Siena represents a moderate, graceful, and less realistic alternative to the naturalistic but sometimes inelegant and occasionally even somewhat awkward art of Giotto.

Aribert Munzner’s Playfully ‘Ignorant’ Davening

Aribert Munzner claims that his drawings and paintings are not his “works” but rather his “play.”

Munzner’s Playfully ‘Ignorant’ Davening

According to the great 20th-century rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, there are two types of ignorance: one dull, lazy, and uninquisitive, the other...

‘Classicism’ and Chaos in Dalí

Salvador Dalí stated his intention of creating, with a camera’s accuracy, the dreamscape of the unconscious mind.

Layering Christian and African Symbolic Worlds

Veteran African American artist Ben Jones has long explained his art as a corollary of his spiritual journey, having not only a formal beauty and a social message, but also a spiritual purpose.

The Slumbering Shepherd: A Case of Mistaken Identity

The Good Shepherd window designed by John La Farge is among the artist’s last and most magnificent works in stained glass.

Saint Francis and the Embodiment of Grace

St. Francis modeled a fully embodied approach to the spiritual life, by imitation of Christ's poverty and suffering and ultimately by the physical marks of the stigmata on his body.

Freedom and Transfiguration on the Frontier

To fully appreciate the painting within its historical context, we must understand that the frontier West was not merely a geographical region in the 19th-century imagination.