About the Artwork #1:
The Weather Project 
Olafur Eliasson
2003
26.7 x 22.3 x 155.4 m
200 low-sodium mono-frequency lights, projection foil, haze machines
Turbine Hall 
Tate Modern 
London, England
Images: Studio Olafur EliassonCreated in 2003 for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, artist Olafur Eliasson’s site-specific installation employed a semicircular screen, a ceiling of mirrors, and artificial mist to create the illusion of a sun. Backlit by approximately two hundred mono-frequency lights, the semicircle and its reflection created the image of a massive, indoor sunset seen through the artificial mist in the room. The Weather Project tried to give viewers an illusion of being close to the sun within the clouds, but the reality is that a huge semicircle was hung from a mirrored ceiling, which the reflection made look like a full circle. The replica of the space below, which could be seen in the ceiling, resulted from the mirrors on the ceiling. The audience made the effects complete as some adults and children were often seen lying down on their backs, staring at the ceiling and making different gestures so they could watch their reflections.
https://publicdelivery.org/olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project/
https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101003/the-weather-project

About the Artist #1:
Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is an Icelandic Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, Germany, a laboratory for spatial research. Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project, which has been described as "a milestone in contemporary art," in Tate Modern. Eliasson has engaged in a number of projects in public space, including the intervention Green River, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007 in London, a temporary pavilion designed with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Traedal Thorsen; and the New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund in 2008. He also created the design of the Breakthrough Prize trophy. Like much of his work, the sculpture explores the common ground between art and science. Eliasson was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and has been an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olafur_Eliasson
https://olafureliasson.net/

About the Artwork #2:
The Lights Inside It
Lita Albuquerque
2018
Pigment on panel, 24K gold leaf on resin
213.4 × 213.4 cm

Light and space artist Lita Albuquerque has been investigating our place in the universe through installations, environmental works, paintings, and sculpture throughout her critically acclaimed career. She emerged in the 1970s, a student of acclaimed artist Robert Irwin. In her early works, she marked the California desert with colored pigment—mapping both the earthly and celestial terrain—a practice she has since brought to other sites worldwide. Among her best-known projects is Sol Star (1996), for which she marked the desert south of the Great Pyramids of Giza with blue circles, each one associated with a star. Albuquerque’s work is centered upon scale, and our smallness in an infinite cosmos. “I was interested in that impossibility of vision,” she explains, “being able to perceive only what is around us, yet aware that […] what we are perceiving is only part of a much larger vision.” Albuquerque’s work questions our place in the enormity of infinite space and eternal time.

About the Artist #2:
Lita Albuquerque (b. 1946) is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist and writer. She has developed a visual language that brings the realities of time and space to a human scale and is acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent artworks executed in the landscape and public sites. In the 1970s Albuquerque emerged on the California art scene as part of the Light and Space movement and won acclaim for her epic and poetic ephemeral pigment pieces created for desert sites. She gained national attention in the late 1970s with her ephemeral pigment installations pertaining to mapping, identity, and the cosmos, executed in the natural landscape. Albuquerque has been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, and MOCA, among others. She is on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design.

About the Music: 
“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from the album Bach’s Greatest Hits

Lyrics:
Jesu, joy of man's desiring,
Holy wisdom, love most bright;
Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.

Word of God, our flesh that fashioned,
With the fire of life impassioned,
Striving still to truth unknown,
Soaring, dying round Thy throne.

About the Performers: 
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski and the Norman Luboff Choir

London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. From the outset, the LSO was organized on cooperative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. The profit-sharing principle was abandoned in the post-war era as a condition of receiving public subsidy for the first time. As a self-governing body, the orchestra selects the conductors with whom it works. At some stages in its history it has dispensed with a principal conductor and worked only with guest artists. Among conductors with whom it is most associated are Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, and Valery Gergiev. Since 1982, the LSO has been based in the Barbican Centre in the City of London. The LSO claims to be the world's most-recorded orchestra; it has made recordings since 1912 and has played on more than two hundred soundtrack recordings for the cinema, of which the best known include the Star Wars series. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Symphony_Orchestra
https://lso.co.uk/

Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) was a British conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-twentieth century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra and his appearance in the Disney film Fantasia. He was especially noted for his freehand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed. Stokowski was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and many others. He was also the founder of the All-American Youth Orchestra, the New York City Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, and the American Symphony Orchestra. Stokowski was a lifelong champion of contemporary composers, giving many premieres of new music during his sixty-year conducting career.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski

Norman Luboff (1917–1987) was an American music arranger, music publisher, and choir director. Luboff studied at the University of Chicago and Central College in Chicago. Following this, he did graduate work with the composer Leo Sowerby while singing and writing for radio programs in Chicago. With a call from Hollywood to be choral director of The Railroad Hour, a weekly radio program starring Gordon MacRae, Luboff began a successful career scoring many television programs and more than eighty motion pictures. He also recorded with artists such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine, and Doris Day. In 1950, he established Walton Music Corporation, to publish his music. Walton Music exists today as a major choral music publisher under the guidance of Luboff's widow, Gunilla Marcus-Luboff, a former Swedish television producer. Luboff was the founder and conductor of the Norman Luboff Choir, one of the leading choral groups of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. They came to prominence through their participation in the very successful Christmas broadcasts with Bing Crosby which ran from 1955 to 1962. History was made in 1956 when Luboff and his choir recorded with Harry Belafonte on Calypso, the first album to sell one million copies. The choral group toured yearly from 1963 to 1987, and recorded more than seventy-five albums. The holiday albums Songs of Christmas (1956) and Christmas with the Norman Luboff Choir (1964) were perennial bestsellers for years. Luboff and his choir won the 1961 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Luboff

About the Composer: 
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos, instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites, keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier, organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and vocal music such as the St. Matthew Passion and the Mass in B Minor. Since the nineteenth-century Bach revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. After being orphaned at the age of ten, he lived for five years with his eldest brother, after which he continued his musical education in Luneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Muhlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Kothen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas's) in Leipzig. There he composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university's student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he was granted the title of court composer by Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic, and motivic organization, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach

About the Poetry & Poet: 
John Donne (1572–1631) was an Anglican cleric and one of England’s most gifted and influential poets. Raised a Roman Catholic, Donne later converted to Anglicanism, though his sensibility, as indicated perhaps in his late Christian poetry, always seems to have remained with the Catholic Church. Unable to find civil employment, Donne was eventually persuaded of his calling to the church and took Anglican orders in 1615. His work is distinguished by its emotional intensity and its capacity to deeply delve into the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and personal salvation. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and contain a variety of forms, including sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, and sermons. His poetry is noted for its eloquent language, fusion of intellect and passion, and inventiveness of metaphor. In 1621, he was appointed the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, and also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614. After a resurgence in his popularity in the early twentieth century, Donne’s reputation as one of the greatest writers of English prose and poetry was established.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

About the Devotion Author: 
Taylor Worley, Ph.D.
Visiting Associate Professor of Art History
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Illinois

Taylor Worley is visiting associate professor of art history at Wheaton College and project director for ‘Thinking about Thinking: Conceptual Art and the Contemplative Tradition.’ He completed a Ph.D. in the areas of contemporary art and theological aesthetics in the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews and is the author of Memento Mori in Contemporary Art: Theologies of Lament and Hope (Routledge, 2020). Taylor is married to Anna, and they have four children: Elizabeth, Quinn, Graham, and Lillian.