Religion, art and creativity in the global city

At the mention of the theme of religion, art and creativity, one might think about splendid houses of worship, artfully decorated manuscripts of sacred texts, beautifully crafted artefacts like altars, statues and icons or small intricately worked Torah pointers or elaborately carved Qur’an reading stands. Monumental churches, mosques, synagogues, Hindu or Buddhist temples, religious shrines and other spiritual sites often include impressive art work. Museum shelves are crowded with remarkable artefacts originating all over the world and representing millennia of faith-inspired creativity. Diverse genres of spiritual music are praised for their beauty. Without doubt, incredible artwork and beauty can be found in famous sites of worship, international museums, concert halls and venues of spiritual music. But, is the intersection of religion, art and creativity limited to iconic houses of worship, museums and spiritual artefacts (largely of the past)? The question emerges of what kinds of religious art and artefacts are produced today? What are contemporary manifestations of spiritual creativity? What examples of faith-inspired arts can be found among the ordinary urbanites and faith communities in cities across the globe?

This special issue explores a broad range of questions about contemporary faith-based art, creativity and expressive life. It takes readers to more unlikely places that are situated beyond the beaten path of famous houses of worship and dominant art worlds to witness and explore complex interactions between religion, art and creativity in global or globalising cities. The six authors in this issue introduce ordinary and often invisible urban faith-inspired spaces and lifeworlds. They explore informal or vernacular arts, expressive cultures and creativity in ‘unexpected places’ (Wali, Severson, and Longoni 2002), where ordinary pious urbanites engage in creative activities, generate astounding artefacts and creative expressions, critically engage cities and spaces and produce meaning for themselves, their neighbours and communities. The authors examine faith-inspired creative works and practices, like culinary arts, sartorial expressions and the religious reworking of popular music genres that are not often analysed. They asked timely questions about how, for example, youth in Senegal insert global music genres like Hip-Hop into local pious circles and practices of a Sufi (mystic) movement and adapt this genre to best fit their needs and requirements. Authors ask how a diverse Latino immigrant congregation uses colonial aesthetic forms and expressions to come together to construct a shared Catholic parish. The authors consider specific art forms, like stain glass work, and analyse how its expression is mediated in a concrete context at the intersection of suburban localities and gendered expectations and institutional hierarchies. Articles in this issue ask questions about the resourceful localisation of Muslims and their communities in Europe and North America and how they creatively address questions of civic participation, urban visibility and larger issues of justice and equality in multi-cultural and multi-religious global cities. Finally, they address complex issue of the significance of the culinary and other arts in a unique spiritual celebration and the possible marketing of this event for touristic purposes. All articles in this issue introduce creative acts and processes that are situated beyond the realm of celebrated arts and culture. Despite their relative invisibility, these examples represent the creativity of relevant urban creative constituencies that have long been neglected and deserve attention and analysis.

In recent decades, global cities have celebrated themselves as centres of trendsetting creativity. They compete by way of ever more expensive and attention-seeking cultural edifices, projects, exhibitions, events or festivals. Art and creativity have been at the centre of numerous neoliberal urban development or renewal projects. Politicians, planners and investors suggest that museums, galleries, convention centres, creatively restored historical streets or markets and related art, film or other cultural venues and festivals will attract visitors/tourists, new residents and engender further investment in businesses like restaurants, hotels or shops. If successful, such art and culture projects, they assert, will also boost real estate values in their vicinity. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is the poster child of such policies. Municipalities and planners hope that cultural anchor projects will generate a constant flow of visitors, produce considerable media attention, and will on the long run turn the respective venue and its vicinity into a must-see item on the itinerary of wealthy visitors. Much of such planning is based on increasingly commercialised notions of the arts and their profitable role in neoliberal urban policies.

Planting cultural anchors and related projects, municipalities launch elaborate public relations campaigns to elevate and maintain their cities in competitive global circuits of art exhibits, festivals and similar cultural venues and events. They vie to attract vast spectacles and events, like the Olympics, global conferences or mega-festivals. Whether or not these events are related to the arts, artistic features, elements, extravagant artefacts, exhibitions and performances feature prominently in how the respective city presents itself on such occasions (and beyond) to visitors and the world via images that are beamed across the globe. To improve global visibility and reputation, municipalities call in consultants to construct images and effects to insert their city into glittery and profitable global circuits of artsy places, events and claim their share in the resulting profits. To create, promote and maintain their role as a ‘creative city’, many municipalities have reached for Richard Florida’s advice of how to lure and keep ‘the creative class’ in their ‘creative city’ (2002). The results are often increasingly predicable and uniform urban quarters where restaurants, bars, music venues and galleries line the streets and often dislocate previous low-income, immigrant or minority communities. This approach, Peter Hall noticed is now ‘the only game in town – any town’ (2004, 256). These profitable spatialities largely cater to the lifestyles of upper middle class and elite constituencies. In the process of such globalised transformations, cities become centres of cultural consumption often at the expense of cultural production (ibid, 257).

Taking a closer look at these contemporary art circuits and competitions, three questions emerge: (1) What about less visible spaces such as suburbs, smaller cities or more marginal urban spaces and their creative manifestations? (2) What is the role of vernacular or everyday artistic and creative expressions of ordinary urbanites? (3) What is the role of faith-inspired art and creativity in cities and urban spaces? Each of these questions is relevant in and of itself. The authors of this issue explore their complex intersection and explore faith-inspired art and creativity in urban streets and spaces, suburban churches, minority religious communities and their spatial vicinities, at religious celebrations, and analyse interactions between pious discourses and popular music genres in Senegal, Brazil, the UK, Germany and the United States.

Secular fashionable definitions, dominant intellectual and artistic networks, privileged urban locations, profitable art markets and broader political and economic contingencies largely define what is seen and recognised as relevant expressions of contemporary creativity. Other trends, spaces, sites, activities, creative expression or artefacts have often ignored, marked as insignificant or even forcefully pushed aside as inappropriate. In recent decades, scholars and observers have taken a growing interest in diverse manifestations of vernacular and informal creativities that unfold away from the globalised limelight of commercialised arts venues and circuits (Hallam and Ingold 2008, Lippard 1997; Wali, Severson, and Longoni 2002). Alison Bain urges scholars to reconsider stereotypes of bland and uncreative suburbs. She insists that ‘there is a lot more cultural work happening in suburbia than the North American urban scholarly literature reveals’ (2013, 19). She conceded that suburban cultural and creative worker often labour away from the limelight of artistic circles and that their art might not pay much, but she insists that we should consider ‘their relative power and influence in shaping the suburban landscape of which they are an integral part’ (ibid, 27; see also Felton and Collis 2012). Similarly, smaller towns are frequently labelled as cultural unproductive and not at the forefront of cool cultural production. Gibson, Brennan-Horley, and Walmsley (2010) challenge such sterotpyes and describe the vibrant and creative landscape of festivals in rural Australian towns.

A number of scholars examine the creative work and contribution of immigrants and their communities (Chappell 2012; Fernández-Kelly and DiMaggio 2010; Lena and Cornfield 2008; Bedoya 2013), or working-class communities (Edensor and Millington 2009) to illustrate that ‘the arts have burgeoned well beyond the spectacle of the symphony, the ballet, a blockbuster exhibit, or a Broadway musical’ (Stern and Seifert 2010, 262). They ask questions about the scope and transformative potential of ordinary people’s creative activities and challenge dominant discourses and definitions of art and creativity that are often contemptuous of popular aesthetics and creativity (Edensor et al. 2010; Zitcer, Hawkins, and Vakharia 2016; Wali, Contractor, and Severson 2006). Roberto Bedoya discusses the ‘Chicano practice of Rasquachification’, where homeowners decorate their houses in bright colours and re-/use mundane artefacts for complex and very visible embellishment (2014, 1). This creative work is part of a larger endeavour of becoming visible and a quest for social and spatial justice as marginalised groups claim urban spaces, belonging and participation. Such creativity is ‘rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability’ and has the ‘capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado’ (ibid, 3). Their aesthetic of ‘making something of nothing, of the discarded, irreverent and spontaneous’ (ibid, 5) opposes elements of dominant consumer society. These creative expressions are not guided by profitability, but reflect people’s quests to embellish their environment, and to claim and transform urban spaces. They emphasise quality of life, local aesthetics or livability concerns for all urbanites, especially also lower class, marginalised and immigrant communities.

Scholars argue that we need to transcend dominant notions of arts and aesthetics and take seriously all creative expressions, including those that elite sensitivities label as not worthy of the term art (Gibson and Connell 2011), like for example, popular arrangements of Christmas lights or garden gnomes (Edensor and Millington 2010; Potts 2010), or new art forms of such as garbage arts (Humes 2013, 187). Beth Juncker and Gitte Balling advocate an ‘expressive cultural democracy’ where individuals are free and supported in their ‘independent ways of experiencing meaning creation and creating value in everyday life’ (2016, 232) versus being evaluated using dominant definitions or standards of artistic practices and production. These interventions challenge the emphasis on profitability that marks many celebrated arts projects and instead favour the ‘expressive life’ (Ivey 2008, 23) of ordinary people and communities (Gibson 2012; Zitcer, Hawkins, and Vakharia 2017).

Until recently, faith-inspired art and creativity, expressive culture, lived religious arts and their vernacular or informal manifestations were rarely looked at in the analysis of urban artistic scenes, cultural innovation and creative achievements and seldom praised as remarkable instances of urban originality. In the last two or three decades, a growing number of scholars turned their attention in particular to creative urban place-making activities of immigrant and minority faith communities (Dwyer, Gilbert, and Shah 2013; Shah, Dwyer, and Gilbert 2012; Truitt, forthcoming). By way of complex place-making activities, immigrants and their religious communities symbolise their arrival and permanence in cities, seek to leave their mark on their new urban environments and claim their legitimate spaces and venues of participation in the city (Kuppinger 2014b; Warner and Wittner 1998). Using creative and aesthetic means, immigrant faith communities seek to become visible (Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014) and recognised urban constituencies (Kuppinger 2015). Such place-making includes activities range from individuals’ efforts to remake or embellish their homes (interiors and exteriors), to the creation of neighbourhood spaces, activities, processions or celebrations, and the renovation, construction and embellishment of places of worship or other faith-based meeting spaces (Kuppinger 2017; Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009). Houses of worship anchor new arrivals in cities and establish their positions as relevant nodes on the global map of their larger faith community. Whether by claiming spaces momentarily and becoming more permanently visible in the city (Kuppinger 2014a), or by building sizable houses of worship, faith-inspired activities and edifices illustrate transformative processes triggered by religious constituencies. Localising a faith community in a new city is a creative endeavour as individuals, informal groups and communities design new spatialities, socialities, and forms of cultural expression, translate or insert beliefs, ideas, religious norms and practices, celebrations and faith-based lifeworlds into new localities.

The artistic contributions of faith-inspired urbanites are, of course, not limited to immigrant groups. Creativity unfolds in established faith communities as they continue to practice and refine existing art forms and creative practices, incorporate, invent or discover new creative expression or genres, move to inhabit urban new spaces, or transform, remake and adjust popular and other cultural forms and expressions to serve their spiritual purposes. European and North American churches, while often pushed to the analytical margins in urban studies continue to be relevant sites of spiritual arts and creativity (Wuthnow 2003). New pious aesthetic practices emerge as larger cultural contexts transform and produce new artistic expressions and genres. Established and often invisible vernacular creative activities continue to flourish as the pious carry their expressive practices into the future. Popular creative practices, like the culinary arts, have recently come to new prominence as ‘foodies’ discover ethnic and religious food practices and products (e.g. Zukin 2010, 159). Faith-inspired creativity includes a vast realm beyond the construction and embellishment of houses of worship, as the faithful use, create and remake an extensive field of musical genres and expressions (Abdul Khabeer 2016; Alim 2005), experiment with sartorial styles and expressions (Tarlo 2010), or creative culinary processes and transformations (Fischer 2011).

The articles in this special issue examine a broad range of faith-inspired creative expressions that are off the beaten track of notable cultural spaces and venues. They engage concrete manifestations of social, cultural, artistic and aesthetic innovation produced by pious individuals and their communities in global cities and spaces. The authors analyse creative and social justice work of a Muslim activist network and association in Chicago, the role of gender and creativity in the making of suburban churches in London, the complex interactions between Sufi Islam and Hip-Hop music in Dakar, Senegal, the creative use of colonial symbols and creative forms in immigrant parishes in Miami, and creative architectural, interior design, culinary and sartorial expressions of Muslims and their community in Stuttgart, Germany, and the complex culinary and festive expressions in an African diaspora Candomblé community in São Luis do Maranhão, Brazil.

Muna Ali introduces IMAN, a Muslim organisation in Chicago that works for urban justice and tolerance. She notes that in cities’ competition for global recognition and their quest for fostering ‘creative industries’, inequalities are largely overlooked and religious actors and disempowered minority communities as creative agents are absent. Ali explains that after 9/11, Muslim Americans have been under siege as they are caught between Islamophobes and terrorists, the state security apparatus and intra-community divisions. This complex situation engendered creative interventions inspired by piety, assertive identities and a passion for social justice. Ali explores how IMAN’s faith-based mission envisions transformative changes of Chicago’s South side through a variety of programmes and public events. Centrally Ali examines IMAN’s biennial art and social justice ‘urban international’ festival, where art is a creative endeavour and a vehicle to reimagine the city and world. At this event creative forms and expressions freely intermingle in a creative space of interfaith and multi-cultural celebration.

Nazneen Ahmed and Claire Dwyer turn their backs on secular downtown arts and cultural venues and explore suburban spaces that are often perceived as bland and uninspiring. They focus on female-stained glass artists and their works in two churches in West London during suburban development in the twentieth century. They insist on the significance of suburban churches as sites of creative innovation and challenge stereotyped about them being conservative and uncreative. They examine a 1930s Anglican church and explore the role of three relatively unknown female artists and their work in the church interior. Their second example analyses the collaboration of a contemporary female-stained glass artist with a parishioner-artist in the making of a ‘lightbox’ window for a renovated church. They highlight the role of stained glass as an artistic medium in the creation of worship spaces for suburban congregations.

Joseph Hill analyses Sufi Hip-Hop in Dakar, Senegal. The notion of ‘Islamic Hip-Hop’ is for many an unholy alliance, whether for bringing Hip-Hop into Islam or for bringing Islam into hip hop. In Dakar, many popular rappers are followers of the Fayḍa Sufi movement and use their art for spiritual purposes. Despite criticism from many would-be defenders of both Islam and Hip-Hop against what they consider an unholy alliance, within the growing Fayḍa movement, Hip-Hop established itself as a legitimate and effective recruitment tool and to teach religious principles. Explaining the place of Sufi Hip-Hop in mediating between this Sufi movement and changing realities in urban space, Hill highlights the role of aesthetics and performativity as opposed to debates in relation to a ‘discursive tradition’ in regulating changes in acceptable religious practice. He situates Islamic Hip-Hop as a faith-inspired urban phenomenon that established itself in Dakar and staked out a position for itself among many pious urban youth.

Alfredo Garcia introduces an immigrant Catholic parish in Miami and how this congregation creates unity in the face of diversity. He argues that the case of Miami is salient to consider because its development into a global city was mediated by dramatic shifts in immigration, as many neighbourhoods witnessed profound changes in socio-ethnic composition in recent decades as a result of political and economic changes in nearby nations. Garcia explores the question of how a concrete religious community worked with and addressed such rapid changes and worked to construct a cohesive community through colonial art, architecture, and structures. He focuses on the establishment of colonial missions in the parish’s geographic area and explains how this peculiar colonial model is used as an ethnic unifier. Garcia insists that the parish’s creative actions demonstrate a useful strategy for meso-level civic institutions in addressing issues facing immigration, diversity, and community in the global city.

Petra Kuppinger examines artistic and creative contributions of pious Muslims in Stuttgart, Germany, where in recent decades (pious) Muslims and their communities became creative urban contributors and stakeholders. Analysing exemplary artistic and creative contexts like exterior and interior mosque design, the work of a culinary artist and the sartorial creativity of pious Muslim women, she highlights the largely ignored artistic and creative work and contributions of Muslims in Stuttgart. She illustrates how Muslims participate in urban cultural contexts and creatively remake urban spaces, materials culture and broader cultural fields and contexts and argues that pious Muslims are relevant artistic and creative urban participants.

Scott Barton introduces the Festa de Divino Espirito Santo, São Luis do Maranhão, Brazil. Reflecting distinctly African influences in north-eastern Brazil, this traditional Catholic festival includes huge-tiered layer cakes and female tin drum choirs. Barton explores the festivity’s Tambor de Mina/Candomblé religious element. He analyses the celebration in the context of debates about religious syncretism and explores the use of such festivals for touristic purposes. He focuses on the role of the huge cakes produced by the families of participating children as creative expression of faith and culinary arts and discusses the public rites that reflect the domains of Afro-Brazilian religious practice, popular festival culture, gendered performance, ordered forms of etiquette and celebration of creative self-expression. Relevant performances occur in kitchens, at the altar and in discourses with the deities where Afro-Brazilian women teach the children, cook for the children/festival, perform as Caxeira, the drum choir, lead the religious ceremonies and share the process of incorporation of the deities.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.