God’s mother is the morning star: the life and art of Joseph Mender

ENThis dissertation focuses on the artistry of Joseph Mender, a Lithuanian-American carver and painter. Its purpose is to understand Joe, his art work, and his beliefs within the cultural and historical context of his life. The study considers the relationship between material culture and belief. It examines the transformation of culture through recollection, distance, and the crisis of exile. Ethnographic research conducted between 1985 and 1991 provided the primary sources for this study: field notes compiled from informal conversations, audiotaped and videotaped interviews, observation, photography, the artist's journals and art work. Secondary sources on Lithuanian and Lithuanian-American history, culture, religion, and traditional art give a broad contextual background. Research shows that Joe emigrated from a rural village in Tsarist-controlled Lithuania to Brooklyn in 1913 at age seventeen to escape the Russian draft. There, he became passionately involved in the labor movement and in Lithuanian nationalism.Questioning the Catholicism of his youth, he reinterpreted it into a new faith, at once radical, nationalistic, and mystical. As he approached old age, he expressed his faith in vivid artistic forms: carved walking sticks and over 200 small paintings. Joe's art was an act of remembrance and connection — to his native land and its history and to his own past. It was simultaneously personal and collective, inventive and traditional. It affirmed his identity as it connected him to a larger group beyond himself. His art was an expression of private convictions, intended for the benefit of his fellow Lithuanians. It was unshakably rooted in tradition, yet it reinterpreted and transformed that tradition. Through his art and writing, Joe integrated and made meaning of the chaotic events of his life, enabling himself to age and, eventually, to die well.