Cover letter
The art of Sean Scully, abstract and deeply interior, silent and contemplative, leads us to convert Santa Cecilia de Montserrat into a center to promote artistic and human values, similar, although it’s different in many aspects, to the Rothko Chapel in Houston (Texas). For this reason, the Museum of Montserrat has created the Sean Scully Art and Spirituality Institute, to promote the cultivation of spiritual and artistic values among artists, Fine Arts students, Art History scholars, philosophy students interested in aesthetics, musicians and conservatory students and, generally, people to whom art, music and artistic beauty means a path of inner growth.
Speaking about spirituality and religion we do not refer specifically to any faith, but to the scope of confluence of emotion and aesthetics, the premonition of sacredness and the religious feeling, being conscious that these topics are not closed to each other but united. We are not interested in any religious affairs or controversies in this genre. We always think about human being that wonders about the sense of its existence, but we'll never give people prefabricated answers.
The cultural humus in which we are installed is the European man: Greek-Roman culture, Jewish-Christianity and the different options and modalities of thinking that emerged from Illustration. These are three traditions that we don’t want to put in a position of dialectical and exclusive confrontation, but we want them to be united from the basis of an integral humanism. Our space is open to believers and unbelievers, to Christians who live its faith peacefully and other Christians that doubt, agnostics that feel fine on their agnosticism and agnostics who feel concern and are open to transcendence although they can’t specify it. We are convinced that only from our western, assumed and vertebrate identity, we can open ourselves in a healthy and enriching way –without disfiguring eclecticisms– to other valuable wisdoms, such as Sufism and diverse Asian cultures: Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism in its variety of forms and schools.
Sean Scully Art and Spirituality Institute, located in Santa Cecilia de Montserrat, is an activity promoted by the Museum of Montserrat and its director team. The Institute has an Advisory Council composed by top artists like Sean Scully, Bill Viola and Joaquim Chancho, art critics, art historians, aesthetics and philosophy professors, accredited poets, musicians, musicologists and composers. The function of this Council is to propose activities and ensure a high quality level.
The activities of the Institute:
- Meditation - Contemplation Sessions
- Lectures on topics of spirituality and aesthetics
- Readings on spiritual poetry
- Lectures on contemporary art
- Concerts
- Musical auditions
- Conferences and colloquiums by musicians and composers