Meet Chicago-based Artist Joseph Malham

Joseph Malham is a Chicago-based Catholic artist, specializing in iconography and writing. Visit his website at TrinityIcons.com.

CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to Chicago?

JOSEPH MALHAM: I am from Merrillville, IN and by a long, torturous and circuitous route around the nation, ended back in the Chicago area in 1980. Aside from school overseas, Chicago is and most likely will be my home.

How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist?

Without sounding too pompous, my take is along the lines of how Graham Greene described himself: not a Catholic writer, but a writer who happens to be Catholic. I honestly believe that describing myself as a Catholic artist is limiting and confined to theological and dogmatic boundaries. My belief is that all art produced by artists who are Catholic is by nature evangelical in that it proclaims the Verbum Dei as the Imago Dei. It is my hope that my art as a Catholic can transcend denominational boundaries and make it an invitation to the True, the Good and the Beautiful for everyone.

Where have you found support in the Church for your vocation as an artist?

First and foremost, in community. In 2001, I was invited by the newly installed pastor at St. Gregory the Great Church in Chicago to be the artist-in-residence. The support of the community, as well as the structure of the parish schedule and being answerable to the pastor and staff, kept my vocation as an artist from becoming a pointless, self-centered solipsism.

My twenty years as artist-in-residence allowed me to reach out and offer to the parish, and then beyond to a wider audience (including non-Catholics) the opportunity to learn about iconography and sacred art in icon workshops, lectures, retreats and exhibitions. The parish then became a home for several other artists in residence, including a composer, poet and theater group. No one pursued their own work for their own sake but worked jointly for one purpose: Evangelization Through the Arts.

Where have you found support among your fellow artists for your Catholic faith?

Honestly, I found very few other iconographers and artists to associate with and, to be perfectly honest, I always believed the brilliant quote (attributed to Picasso and about two dozen others):

"When art critics get together they discuss form, structure and meaning. When artists get together they discuss the best places to buy cheap turpentine."

If anything, I have associated mostly with secular artists, writers, poets and musicians. They have (and continue to be) atheists, Bohemians and even Buddhists. It is in that moist artistic and relational soil that seeds of respect, discussion and mutual learning take their deepest root. It is also my "zone of discomfort" where I am not in a community of people with the same point of spiritual reference and speaking the same spiritual lingua franca.

Mingling with non-Catholic and non-Christian artists makes me doubly aware to be respectful of other faiths while making sure that my work, my words and most importantly my actions make me a genuine ambassador of my faith.

Chapel Consolation

How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?

I've fought that fight for over a quarter century and still have yet to see the battle over and the war won. I was lucky in finding St. Gregory, a pastor and community who saw the value in my vocation, the potential for evangelization and the connection to a long and rich tradition of the Church supporting artists. Mine was the exception, not the rule.

In the final analysis, and with brutal candor, the majority of parishes would see no purpose or value in supporting artists and the sacred arts in a way that would require more than an occasional commission, exhibition or sacred choral event. Again, from a quarter century of experience as an artist in residence, the majority of parishes do not see a correlative value in cost of art the way they do plumbing, renovation, electrical and snow plowing. There are no guides to how to value artists and their work in the way there is for construction and renovation.

The rich tradition of sacred art and the core power of evangelization in sacred art is as essential a part of Catholic formation as is sacramental theology. It is the artist who is able to make the Verbum Dei visible as the Imago Dei. Knowledge of artists, art and architecture needs to be integrated into the core curriculum of the parochial and school education programs or the heirs of the greatest artistic spiritual heritage in history will be illiterate on the subject in a few generations.

Also, having been part of a parochial art residency and helped facilitate an evangelization through the arts program, I think it an essential component of the Renew My Church initiative to include artists of faith in the conversation. Programs should be integrated into each diocese through the Office for Divine Worship, where artists of faith could be paired with parishes, schools or institutions, given space for free and allowed to paint, write, compose or whatever their particular discipline is. This would not be a solipsistic sojourn, but an active participation in the life of the local and Universal Church, in which artistic contributions would also be offered to the community in terms of classes, retreats, workshops and ongoing formation for children, young adults and adults.

St. Therese

How can the artistic world be more welcoming to artists of faith?

Without again going for the yearbook answer, my experience is that artists of faith are and always will be a sign of contradiction in the world, and their work will not be embraced and absorbed as expressions of that faith. While I have personally experienced nothing but respect and admiration for my work (especially by non-Catholics) in secular exhibition venues for several decades, that does not mean to say that I have been fully accepted.

However, it is that otherness, that spiritual apartness that makes the secular art world more interested in my vocation, why I do what I do, what it means and how I use it for my own spiritual growth and that of those who encounter my work. My personal belief, flawed though it may be, is that I do not need to be welcomed by the secular art world and it is not their job to make me welcome.

I think that more important than secular artists welcoming artists of faith, both sides should be engaged more and more in dialogue and find common ground of beliefs which say God's name, even though they may not be allowed to do so in their realm. It is Chesterton's paradoxical maxim: "Fences do not separate men, they unite them."

Where do you regularly find spiritual fulfillment?

Churches that are left open during the day are rare and extremely hard to find. Not being musically inclined, I do not seek out parish Masses with a rich and vibrant music ministry. A good organist who does a prelude, postlude and has a good cantor adds to the Mass just as much as a chamber ensemble or a twenty-piece orchestra and fifty-voice choir.

I do love finding hidden places like grottoes, niches and tucked away statues for prayer, meditation and spiritual reading. I also love finding communities of retired religious and attending Mass or evening prayer with them. The music ministry may not be expansive but their prayer is genuine and the very walls of their chapels seem to be saturated with genuine prayer, wisdom, pain of all sort and especially hope. There are still quite a few communities in the greater area, and they generally are very welcoming to people who'd like to come to Mass or the Divine Office.

Br. Solanus Casey

Where in Chicago do you regularly find artistic fulfillment?

A pretty big lummox I'd be if I didn't say the Art Institute of Chicago is a big pond from which I drink my artistic fulfillment. LUMA at Loyola downtown has a spectacular collection, but I also like to take in the vast array of architecture downtown, Printers Row and up and down the streets of the Loop. There is also an incredible collection of public art, statues, cenotaphs and memorials in the parks.

I do also conflate my spiritual fulfillment with my artistic in visiting Chicago's old churches. I'm an absolute nut for the magnificent Catholic Churches (as well as other denominations) built after the Fire, seeing how their architecture reflects the community who built them. I am a great student of Henry Schlacks, who built over a dozen churches in Chicago between the two World Wars and each one is a masterpiece.

How have you found or built community as a Catholic artist in Chicago?

For twenty years I was part of the St. Gregory the Great Artist in Residence program, as well as the Evangelization Through the Arts ministry, in which all the multi-disciplined artists in the program came together to support each other and plan outreaches to the community. Since leaving St. Gregory last year, I have not connected with a Catholic arts community.

What is your daily spiritual practice? Do you have a spiritual director?

Yes, I have a spiritual father to whom I have seen and confided in for decades. Without his wisdom, insight, guidance and honesty, my life would be a solipsistic mess of my own paths, directions and self-congratulatory pitfalls. I found my spiritual father at a parish when I reconnected with the Catholic Church after being away for many years and being in a dark wood wandering.

When I go on retreats, my preference is for monasteries and religious order houses rather than retreat centers. The monastic practice of silence and prayer is to me like water in the desert and I prefer being guided in a private retreat by a single director instead of a group dynamic. However, in my daily life I do like to begin my day with a spiritual offering, followed by silence, prayer, spiritual reading and coffee. I like to keep an intentional sacred space in my house with my icon, candles and devotional images.

What is your daily artistic practice?

As mystic Adrienne Von Speyr once wrote:

"Have a plan, be ready to change."

Mother Teresa

I've tried to live that out in my own vocation. For me, it is vitally important to have a plan for the day and not let time slip by without working on a project, be it iconography, writing or working promoting my art on my website or just ideating about new directions and possible projects. Even thinking is working.

However, in order to avoid becoming my own regulator and determinant, I try to also allow for the Spirit to blow in through free spaces of time that I create. My vocation is a Spirit-driven one and I have to allow time and space for inspiration, which could be reading, taking a walk, leafing through art books or even grabbing a nap to rest the body and recharge the brain.

I do everything but lay around and waste time watching tv or mindlessly browsing the internet for news or entertainment. That also has its own time and place, but not during the day reserved for my vocational work.

Describe a recent day in which you were most completely living out your vocation as an artist.

In my book "Drawing Closer to Christ: A Self-Guided Icon Retreat," I closed with the story about how I came to be the artist in residence at St. Gregory the Great Church, how it radically changed me, and how for twenty years it was not an important part of my life, but gave me my vocation and my life.

The pastor who invited me to be the artist in residence and be part of the community of artists of faith gave me a lesson that has guided me to this day. He told me that the first thing I needed to do in my vocation as an artist of faith was to unlearn what our hyper-technologized, Yankee-American work-driven culture has taught me. In a career, work can be quantified and qualified but in a vocation to sacred art everything has to change. It would be folly to measure success or failure of my vocation by how much I produced in a single day.

The pastor told me that not only is creating art my vocation, but also that it is achieved by doing that which is contradictory and abhorrent to Western culture. Reading is part of that vocation, thinking, sketching, idling over books and going to museums and walks along the lake are part of that vocation, because they feed the end: creating that which honors God and serves the Church.

Doing this is actually harder than one imagines, and in twenty plus years, I am still struggling to achieve this breakthrough mentality, especially in a culture where if one does not work eight hours a day producing one is a bum. The struggle goes on but it has become one of the key expressions and primary goals of my vocation.

How do you afford housing as an artist?

For several decades I was extraordinarily fortunate to have secured on campus housing at two parishes in exchange for work done around the plant such as security, 24hr first responder for emergencies, etc. That was my situation for two decades, but I am sure that has all radically changed in the past several years with new parochial restructuring, mergers and a scaling back on payroll.

At this point I am able to afford an apartment which doubles as my studio. I haven't had a roommate in over twenty years and, short of sharing a room in a nursing home, not sure I could do that again. Moving into "hot,” "cool," or, worse, "artsy" neighborhoods may sound good and make for good coffee houses, restaurants and bars, but it militates against an artist in terms of economics. The hot neighborhoods with lots of galleries and artists are invariably overpriced and therefore out of the range of an artist struggling to live by their work.

Best thing for an artist to do would be to find a neighborhood on the lower end of the rent spectrum, especially one that has not yet been discovered, which means landlords will be more amenable, eager for good tenants and disposed to locking in a price without raising it every year.

How do you financially support yourself as an artist?

It depends and varies on a year to year basis. Sometimes I have a windfall in terms of commissions, restoration and writing projects and can afford to live primarily off my art. Other years are lean and I must do pick up work and take jobs here and there in order to support myself and pay my bills. Being a writer I can also make a bit of extra cash (not enough to live on) from magazine articles and speaking engagements. Also, my icon painting workshops were a great profit center for nearly two decades and with the Covid restrictions lifted I may be able to focus on building those up again.

How do you market your art?

Like good house painters, artists will find word of mouth better than full page newspaper, magazine or online advertising. That, of course, takes a while to build up a good reputation so websites with good design that insure people will find you with the right keywords. For artists of faith, trade shows such as liturgical conventions, priest convocations and archdiocesan events that offer space to vendors are a lot of work, can be a bit pricey but still the best way to connect with the interested parties and decision makers in parishes, universities, schools and diocesan offices.

Me and my work have been the subject of dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines as well as interviews for television and radio, with one of my icon studio stories winning an Emmy for Best Religious Interest Story. However, in twenty years of such seemingly important interviews, they have rarely brought in any commissions. They feed the ego more than the vocation.

Participating in exhibitions, solo or group, is also an excellent way to heighten profiles in the community. Events are usually easy to promote and while sales are not guaranteed, if the artist has a solid collection of good work and either professionally done brochures to hand out or well-built websites to direct people to, it could lead to dividends being paid in the future.

What other practical resources would you recommend to a Catholic artist living in your city?

My neighborhood of Andersonville has one of the greatest concentrations of spots both visible and tucked away, that make unwinding and relaxing not only possible but a joy on a daily basis. Coffee houses such as Kopi, Colectivo, La Colombe on the Clark Street Strip along with Eli Tea Bar are little havens and hideaways where one can go for hours to read, work or just be. If they get too loud with chatter headphones and earbuds make the problem go away.

There are also many shops and galleries through which one can browse and not only see and support other local artists but get some inspiration and perhaps even an idea for possible marketing venues.

As stated above, I was extremely fortunate in finding St. Gregory and being offered an artist in residency with a massive studio space for twenty years. It may not be as easy for artists today but it is certainly worth asking if a parish would be willing to invest in an artist in residence who could be given a space for free. In exchange the artist would lend the talents of their particular discipline to the parish. There is no template and every artist would have to work things out with the parish but it may still be possible.

In terms of emergency assistance, the Catholic presence in Chicago is a boon to people in need. There is Catholic Charities, which offers a wide range of aid and assistance and then there is the St. Vincent De Paul Society, both the centralized office and local confraternities at different parishes. The SVDP is on the frontlines of assistance to people in need and monies can usually be found to help somebody out who is in straits and needs assistance, both counseling and financial, for a wide range of problems.

What are your top 3 pieces of advice for Catholic artists post-graduation?

1. Find a community to be part of.

2 Find an established artist who can be a mentor and a guide.

3. Don't strive to be a success in terms of fame and monetary rewards. Strive to be good and continually improve in your field. Even if one doesn't achieve fame and financial rewards for their work, being the best, most intentional and most honestly faithful artist they can be means they will have already succeeded.