Agent Mulder Does Art

The peripatetic Karen Mulder (who “curated” the gallery of Passion Week art that begins on page 42) experienced some culture shock as she moved from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, las September. But that was nothing compared to what she felt in 1991 when she moved from L’Abri Fellowship in the Swiss Alps to Southern California. For this native New Yorker, California seemed as strange as Libya, where she visited her parents numerous times while she was in college.

The daughter of an oil company executive, Karen grew up in Venezuela (she is fluent in Spanish) and Australia. Today, she continues to travel and speak all over the world—in China, Australia, England, the Continent. She is heavily involved in planning the arts workshops for “Loose in the Fire,” a two-week interdisciplinary conference to be held July 19 to August 1 in Oxford and Cambridge to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s birth.

Karen has been a key player in a number of efforts to connect and encourage Christians in the arts. She has been involved with the C.S. Lewis Foundation since 1991, and with Christians in the Visual Arts since 1986. In the early eighties she cofounded Christians in the Arts Networking (CAN)—an organization that got a great boost in membership thanks to a 1983 article by CT‘s administrative editor, Carol Thiessen.

Karen has written about the arts for CT on many occasions and is serving as CT‘s arts editor. Readers of arts journals will want to watch for her forthcoming article in Inklings on Sister Wendy, the accidental art critic who has re-engaged PBS viewers with painting. What does Karen think of this cultural arbiter in a wimple? Although she doesn’t agree with all of Sister Wendy’s artistic assessments, Karen is glad to see her warming the public’s heart towards art.

Like Sister Wendy, most of Karen’s preparation to teach art history is informal. (During her sojourn at L’Abri, she studied art history intensely.) But more recently, Karen spent two years in a more formal and rigorous setting at Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music and the Arts. There, as the Menil Scholar, she wrote a thesis on a living German stained-glass artist and was given the Aidan Kavanaugh Award for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement.

Now at Union University, Karen (who used to sail) is landlocked but loving it. Along with her specialized classes in art history and photography, she is teaching the art history and music history survey courses that all liberal arts students must take. “It’s my one chance to proselytize for the arts early on,” she says with evangelistic enthusiasm.