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The Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery’s community gallery is filled with watercolours depicting 500 years of Anabaptist history these days – a history containing celebration and innovation alongside hardship and persecution.
Radical Roots is the work of artist and professor Gareth Brandt, who has travelled to many of the prominent sites of the Anabaptist movement, from the rivers of the “third baptisms” of early leaders like Felix Manz to the gate of Nuremburg, a significant centre for reformers in the early 16th century.
“I base it on my photos and my kind of emotional experience,” Brandt says of his process of capturing history in his watercolours, “The paintings are kind of folk-art style, so they’re fairly realistic, but I do take some artistic liberty to say, ‘This is my experience here.’”
Brandt’s goal with his work is to invite viewers into the same experience he had, either to witness in wonder or grief. The exhibit is laid out in a quasi-chronological order so that gallery-goers can have the full experience of that history.
“I hope that they also leave with a picture of what the movement was,” says Brandt, “because often, I think people only know so much – a part of the story – or they may be deeply impacted by the immigration of their parents and grandparents from eastern Europe and may not know that there’s a deeper longer story.”
“The one advantage of the 500-year-old story is that all people can relate to it, regardless of when they were kind of grafted onto this story.”
Having taught Mennonite history for a couple of decades in academic institutions like Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Brandt finds that sharing the history of the Anabaptist movement and the stories that comprise it personalizes his faith for him. “Art, in a sense, has a way of getting under the skin that an academic lecture might not,” he says. “That name connection is not as important as the spiritual connection, which I think everyone can relate to.”
Radical Roots will be on display in the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery’s community gallery until October 20. Hours and more information are available at the gallery’s website.