Creatives connect at arts festival

Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

Mother nature added poignancy to the presentation at a Seventh-day Adventist arts festival of an award honouring a pioneering filmmaker.

Floods prevented Gabe Reynaud Award recipient Dr Robert Wolfgramm from attending the eponymous ceremony in Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church, March 31. The ceremony closed the second annual Manifest Creative Arts Festival.

Robert travelled from Suva to Nadi to fly out of Fiji but rising water prevented access to the airport. He found accommodation with an uncle on a nearby hill. Friend Genna Levitch, who accepted the award, used the scene as an analogy of Robert’s life—as an “enigmatic” composer and writer who pioneered contemporary Christian music and who serves as editor-in-chief of the Fiji Daily Post and of the New Fijian Translation Bible.

“[Robert]’s been marginalised for his work but remains dedicated to his art and his God,” said Associate Professor Daniel Reynaud, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Theology at Avondale College of Higher Education, during the reading of the citation. “We who follow stand on his shoulders.”

The award and the ceremony honours Daniel’s brother, an Avondale alumnus and former Adventist Media Centre senior producer who became the church’s first professionally trained director.

Manifest, coordinated by the church in the South Pacific through Adventist Media Network and host Avondale, celebrates and encourages the production of creative arts for ministry. The focus this year: filmmaking; fine arts; song composing; and writing.

Manifest received a record 74 entries across five competitions and offered up to $1000 for winners.

Artist and designer Shelley Poole won the new Avondale Fine Arts Prize for her painting Formed Out Of The Earth/Birth. For the first time, two recipients shared a prize: teacher Nathan Dalton and current and former Avondale students Josh Bolst, Nick Lindsay and Josh Hamilton won the Hope Channel Prize for their films Love: Loss and The Great Controversy. Jason Cook and Lisa Holland from Tasmanian-based music ministry Firesong won the new Institute of Worship Prize for their song, “Love Eternally.” Lucy Richardson and Steele McMahon, both students at Brisbane Adventist College, won the Psalter Music Prize for “Just For The Unjust.” Avondale arts student Sara Thompson won the Signs Publishing Company Prize for her poem “The Least.” Anna Beaden, an Avondale arts and teaching student, won the Avondale Young Achiever Prize for a song—“He Chose You”—she submitted on the closing day.

Artist and inaugural Gabe Reynaud Award recipient Joanna Darby, whose exhibition opened the festival, presented the charge. She noted the similar roles of artists and prophets, describing them as having the “shared privilege of knocking on the doors of people’s souls.”

Academic and writer Dr Andy Nash, a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Southern Adventist University (Collegedale, Tennessee, USA), brought balance, noting during his sermon earlier in the day how God responds to people when they begin worshiping the work of their own hands. His advice: give up your dreams. “Are we willing to entrust what we love most to God’s refining fire?” he asked.

Manifest also featured an academic lecture, at which Andy, author of the spiritual memoir Paper God, spoke of the art of telling true stories, and the screening of the contemporary Christian music mockumentary Jesus People. Paul Kim, a senior producer at Adventist Media Productions (Simi Valley, California, USA), presented the screening and another of the best short films from the church in North America’s SONscreen Film Festival, of which he is executive director.

Author Karen Collum joined Joanna, Paul and Andy for a panel discussion about faithful creativity then put her theories into practice by reading from her children’s book Fish Don’t Need Snorkels during the worship service.

At a seminar later in the day, Andy reflected on his experience as an assistant editor for Adventist Review, of which he is now a columnist, and as editor of Adventist Today. He defined himself as a liberal at the former and as a conservative at the latter. His challenge: for these groups to meet more often at the text. Scripture is my final authority, he said.

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