All are invited to an opening reception immediately following the 11 a.m. service on July 13, with remarks from D’Vorah Kost and Rev. Mark Miller. Refreshments will be generously provided by the Bishop’s Committee for Peace in the Middle East, including volunteer contributions and Syrian catering.

UDPATE: D’vorah Kost, one of the organizers of Healing & Hope in War Zones, has shared the GoFundMe of Wejdan Diab, the teacher working in Cairo with the Gazan children who created many of the artworks in the exhibition. Learn more and make a donation to support her work here.

D’vorah also commends the following organizations to those who wish to support relief efforts in Gaza: IMRelief , which delivers aid directly, and the organization HealPalestine.org

As always, you are encouraged to donate to the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, either directly or through the cathedral’s giving page at saintmarks.org/give (select “Holy Land Humanitarian Relief” from the list of options).

photographs by Jim Friedrich

by Fr. Peter Pearson

January–March and Eastertide, 2025

Icons have served since the earliest days of Christianity as spiritual aids, and they have enjoyed something of a renaissance of spiritual purpose in recent times. Byzantine iconography is an ancient and deeply prayerful art form in the Christian tradition, dating back nearly to the apostolic times. Over the centuries, it has evolved and developed as the faith spread throughout the world. Iconography follows a highly systematic and disciplined process which has been handed from teacher to student for centuries. It’s also a very comprehensively demanding educational course for those who want to explore and master the technical, historical, and spiritual aspects of this field.

The Visual Arts Ministry presented an exhibition of a selection of sacred icons by Peter Pearson. There are 18 icons in total, each painted with acrylic paint on wooden panels using traditional Byzantine methods and varnished to protect the surface.

About Peter Pearson

Peter Pearson has been on this path for fifty four years, after being introduced to an icon by his elementary school art teacher. He’s painted thousands of icons and has introduced scores of students to the process. He holds an Masters of Divinity in Sacred Theology from Saint Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and recently completed a Doctorate in Sacred Theology with a thesis on Byzantine icons and spirituality.

Peter is the author of three books on iconography—including A Brush with God: An Icon Workbook and Another Brush with God: Further Conversations about Icons—and is working on a fourth. He regularly offers workshops and lectures on iconography around the country. He’s a sought after speaker with enthusiasm and the ability to make complicated issues accessible to every audience. His icons grace the walls of churches, monasteries, and homes throughout the world. Peter is also a priest and a Brother in the Community of Francis and Clare in the Episcopal Church.

by Virginia Maksymowicz

Since 2018, the Stations of the Cross by artist Virginia Maksymowicz have been displayed in the nave of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle each Lent. Although they were originally commissioned by St Thomas Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA—a very different kind of church interior than Saint Mark’s—their elemental quality and stark appearance resonate visually and spiritually with the nave of Saint Mark’s. Many are surprised to learn that they were not created specifically for this space! In fact, they have only been on loan to the cathedral since their first appearance here in 2018.

In 2022 Saint Mark’s Cathedral announced that these artworks are now a permanent part of the cathedral collection. They were given as a gift by The Rt. Rev. Gregory Rickel, Bishop of Olympia, and Mrs Marti Rickel, to the glory of God and in loving memory of Bishop Rickel’s father, Morris E. Rickel Jr. These Stations of the Cross will serve the cathedral community, the diocese, and wider community as a beautiful and prayerful aspect of our Lenten observances for years to come.

About the Stations of the Cross

Religious imagery depicting Jesus’ journey to Golgotha and the tomb dates back to the 13th century. The artistic tradition began as a way to replicate the experience of pilgrims in Jerusalem, who would walked the Via Dolorosa—traditionally believed to be the route Christ walked in final hours—pausing at prescribed “stations” to reflect and pray. For her interpretation, Maksymowicz worked with a variety of models, culled from a wide range of ages and ethnicities. She explains, “I wanted the narrative of Christ’s passion and death to be represented in a way that is tensioned between the ‘specific’ and the ‘universal.'”

Read a statement and a journal article by the artist.
Read the article in the Episcopal Journal about the Stations.
Check out the feature in Saint Mark’s quarterly magazine, The Rubric.

by Peter Boome

April 2022 through July 2022

The Visual Arts Ministry of Saint Mark’s Cathedral and Saint Mark’s Creation Care Ministry are delighted to co-sponsor an exhibition of works by Peter Boome, Coast Salish Artist and member of the Upper Skagit Tribe of Washington State, April 24–June 5 in the cathedral nave. He works in a variety of mediums, and his exhibition at Saint Mark’s will include both prints and paintings. Each of his works tells a story, and his exhibition at Saint Mark’s will explore themes including the connection between spirituality and natural world. Works on display in the nave will include new work created especially for this exhibition, a template for a mural on the Seattle waterfront displayed here publicly for the first time, large-scale works on canvas, and smaller prints and paintings. Works will available to be purchased from the artist.

Peter Boome joined Saint Mark’s parishioners for a Sunday morning forum. Watch the recording here.

Peter Boome is a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe of Washington State. He earned his AA from Northwest Indian College, his BAS and MES from the Evergreen State College, and his JD from the University of Washington School of Law.

Peter’s work has been aggressively sought after by collectors around the world. He has emerged as a leading Coast Salish artist, winning prestigious awards at shows such as Indian Market in Santa Fe, The Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and many more. Peter has worked with both new and established indigenous artists from around the country and as far away as New Zealand.

His work has been displayed at institutions including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, and the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, and is part of the permanent collections of the Burke Museum and Washington State History Museum.

site-specific textile installation by Josh Faught

January 2017 – October 2018

For Sanctuary, a commissioned work for Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, Josh Faught creates a textile that extends the length of the cathedral’s massive southeast pillar. Through woven texts, sheet music, DVDs, and archival documents affixed to the textile’s face, the work integrates popular and sacred music, a supernatural soap opera, and records of gay politics, sexuality, and culture in Seattle. Bringing together craft, sociopolitical, and personal histories, Sanctuary also links expressions of romantic and erotic love with songs of praise and prayers.

The work was hand-woven by the artist over the summer and fall of 2016, using hand-dyed cotton, hemp, and gold lamé. This abstract, painterly surface serves as a matrix and support for other found objects: novelty pin-badges, sheet music, magazines, and advertisements. Sourced from the artist’s personal collection and Seattle archives, these objects refer to cultural touchstones, political histories, pop culture, and jokes.

Running down the entire right side of the work are woven texts, each repeating the title of a song from Heaven on Earth, a 1987 solo album by former Go-Go’s singer and gay icon Belinda Carlisle. Each track on the album is structured like a traditional pop song, full of references to love and desire. Heaven on Earth can also be read as a thinly veiled hymnal; the continual use of second-person leaves open the identity of the “you” to whom each song is addressed. Every song has the potential to oscillate between earthly eroticism and sacred devotion. These texts are woven using a method called summer and winter, where two contrasting weft yarns in light and dark colors alternate to create a reversible pattern. This two-sided structure reminded the artist of the sides of a LP, and give a structure to the piece as a whole, which switches from predominant reds to blues halfway down as the song titles from the A-side of Heaven on Earth turn to those on the B-side.

On the other edge of the work, a column of pockets open up from the double cloth, holding a number of DVDs containing the complete first season of the cult-classic paranormal soap opera Passions (1999-2007). Set in the quaint New England village of Harmony, Passions opened up the typical range of soap operatic narratives by exploring supernatural realms. The melodrama of the soap opera, with its Mephistophelean villains and pure-of-heart young couples, was brought into new settings (hell, heaven) with higher stakes than fame, fortune, love and loss.

Between the smash hit and the soap opera, a set of objects are affixed to the textile like memoranda on a bulletin board. These mostly reproduce documents found in a pair of local archives kept at the Allen Library, University of Washington: the papers of Peter Hallock (1924–2004), organist, countertenor, composer, and founder and longtime director of Saint Mark’s lauded Compline Choir; and a large archive of correspondence, newsletters, magazines and fliers documenting LGBT politics and culture between 1964 and 1998, assembled by Tim Mayhew, a Seattle activist.

A manuscript of Hallock’s composition “A Song of Deliverance” connects the themes of Passions and Heaven on Earth to a more local, specific, and ecclesiastical context. Zines and ephemera from the Mayhew archive limn the mores of gay culture in the second half of the 20th century: the goofy-naughty Seattle zine Pot Pourri, with dispatches from pageants and boat cruises; a slip advertising “The Date-Record,” allowing men to call in their whereabouts on blind dates or hookups as a safety measure; advertisements for The Monastery, a notorious, long-since closed all-ages discotheque/church which gives its alternate name, “The Sanctuary,” to Faught’s piece. Founded in a deconsecrated church in 1978 by a complicated figure named George Freeman, the Monastery closed in 1985 after a series of police stings and court battles, when a Seattle judge gave Freeman a permanent injunction against operating any venue. In memorial articles published in The Strangerand other local papers, past attendees remember it variously as a den of sin and a safe haven,  sometimes as both.

These disparate elements run through the weft and across the surface of Faught’s monumental weaving, setting up a complex chain of associations. Connecting various histories and objects in the matrix of a loom, Sanctuary opens a conversation between high and low, corporeal and insubstantial, secular and sacred.

Sanctuary was on view at Saint Mark’s Cathedral through July 2018. It was on exhibition at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in 2025.

About the artist

Josh Faught’s work explores conjunctions between various histories: the history of textiles, sociopolitical histories, and the artist’s personal history. Solo museum exhibitions include a site-specific installation at the Neptune Society Columbarium as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award Exhibition, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, both 2013. Faught is the recipient of the Betty Bowen Award at the Seattle Art Museum, 2009, the 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and the 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award. He is an associate professor of textiles and fine arts at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco and Oakland.

About Western Bridge

Founded in 2004 as an art exhibition space in Seattle’s Duwamish industrial district, Western Bridge has operated since 2012 as an itinerant art initiative, commissioning work by artists including Josh Faught, Allyson Vieira, and Rob Fischer.