In the “Voices Together Hymnal”, one of the things you may notice while leafing through the pages is the black and white pieces of art on several pages throughout the book. This is significant because the “Voices Together Hymnal” is the first Mennonite hymnal with visual art inside.
On Friday Jan. 28 between 4 and 5 p.m., Anne H. Berry, a professor at Cleveland State University, talked about a piece of art she created, named “Alive,” within the “Voices Together Hymnal.” This art piece, among others within the hymnal, will be available in full color in the gallery beside Common Grounds until Feb. 25 at 4 p.m.
Benjamin Bergey, assistant professor of music at EMU, worked as one of the music editors for the “Voices Together Hymnal.” He mentioned that, from the beginning, visual art was meant to be in the hymnal in some way. One of the challenges he noted was that the committee in charge of sourcing these pieces of art wanted them to be topical, so they had to put a call out into Mennonite communities to source the art.
Bergey likes Berry’s art because it gives the effect of being three-dimensional. The challenge with Berry’s piece, among other artists who had their work chosen, was putting it onto a paper page in black and white. Bergey suggested that this process was incredibly difficult and time consuming.
In her talk, Berry mentioned the struggles she had while creating “Alive.” She is a firm believer that, “As humans we are innately creative.” She shared her creative process, from an early sketch of the artwork to the inspirations she drew from to create it. One of the issues she wanted to tackle within the piece was the way our culture portrays black as death or negative. She wanted to portray the art in a way that didn’t fall into the stereotype of black being bad and white being good. In representing her own experience through art, she emphasized that the “Mennonite church is a diverse global community”.
For Junior Autumn Bailey, this idea of black and white made her look at Berry’s art differently. She enjoyed hearing the story behind the art and how Berry drew from her background with music and writing to inform her creation of “Alive.”
Senior Zafri Yussoff is a Graphic Design major and, even though he hasn’t interacted with the “Voices Together Hymnal,” he is always interested in hearing about someone else’s creative process. As someone who is visually creative, he connected with how she expressed her art in a visual and emotional way. At EMU he has learned the importance of keeping a consistent theme in his artwork, which Berry’s work presented.
