On February 22, 2017, the Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts hosted a live recording of the award-winning public radio podcast ON BEING with Krista Tippett, featuring an interview with Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya in front of a live audience. To watch an interview of Krista Tippett with Jonathan Anderson, please click here.
On Being is a Peabody Award-winning public radio conversation and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website and online exploration, a publisher, and public event convener. On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact. For more information, visit onbeing.org
Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a New York Times best-selling author, and the host of On Being. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom."
Krista grew up in Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. She studied history at Brown University and went to Bonn, West Germany, in 1983 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study politics in Cold War Europe. In her 20s, she became a freelance correspondent for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. She lived in Spain, England, and Scotland for a time, then pursued a M.Div. from Yale. When she graduated in 1994, she saw a black hole where intelligent coverage of religion should be. As she conducted a far-flung oral history project for the Benedictines of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, she began to imagine radio conversations about the spiritual and intellectual content of faith that could open imaginations and enrich public life.
In 2007, Krista published her first book, Speaking of Faith. It is a memoir of religion in our time, including her move from geopolitical engagement to theology and the cumulative wisdom of her interviews these past years. In 2010, she published Einstein's God, drawn from her interviews at the intersection of science, medicine, and spiritual inquiry. And now, Krista's New York Times best-seller Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living opens into the questions and challenges of this century.
Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist and author who was also trained as a physicist. His work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world. He is the founder of Whale & Star Press and the author of books in philosophy, poetry, and art, as well as scientific papers. Martínez Celaya is the Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College.
Having developed a practice influenced by and in dialog with literature and philosophy, Martínez Celaya has created projects and exhibitions for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, among others, as well as for institutions outside of the art world, including the Freedom Tower in Miami, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York, St. Mary’s Church in Limerick, Ireland, and the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, among others.
His work has been the subject of several monographic publications including Enrique Martínez Celaya, 1992-2000 (Wienand Verlag: Cologne, 2001), Enrique Martínez Celaya: Working Methods (Ediciones Polígrafa: Barcelona, 2013), and Martínez Celaya: Work and Documents, 1990-2015 (Radius Books: Santa Fe, 2016). Martínez Celaya is the author of On Art and Mindfulness: Notes from the Anderson Ranch, published by Whale & Star Press (Los Angeles) in collaboration with the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, October, published by Cinubia (Amsterdam), as well as Collected Writings and Interviews 1990-2010 and The Nebraska Lectures, both published by the University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln).
As a physicist, Martínez Celaya published scientific papers on superconductivity and lasers, and is the inventor of several patented laser devices. He has worked in collaboration with scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, and architects, including the Canadian rock-band, Cowboy Junkies, the poet and Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann, and the novelist Mary Rakow. Martínez Celaya has sponsored programs for children, assisted public schools in curricular development, and advised companies on creative practices. In 1998, as an extension of his commitment to the education and formation of artists, Martínez Celaya founded Whale & Star Press, an imprint that publishes books on art, poetry, art practice, and critical theory.
Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba in 1964 and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He initiated his formal training as an apprentice to a painter at the age of twelve. He studied Applied & Engineering Physics at Cornell University and received his Master’s in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley and pursued a Doctorate degree before abandoning physics for art. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and earned a Master of Fine Arts with the department's highest distinction from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Martínez Celaya taught as a tenured professor in the faculty of Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University and was honored as the second Presidential Professor in the history of the University of Nebraska.
Martínez Celaya lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
martinezcelaya.com