Our annual lecture, organised in honour of our late colleague Dr Cathy Oakes, will take place via Zoom on 3rd February 2025 at 7:00 pm GMT (01:00 pm CT; 02:00 pm ET; 20:00 in France). Cathy, who was one of the founding members of the Centre for Marian Studies, was an art historian with particular expertise in medieval Marian iconography, and her untimely death in 2019 remains a great loss to us on both a personal and academic level. Every year we hold an event around the time of Candlemas as an opportunity to remember Cathy and to reflect on the importance of Marian art.
This year we are delighted that The Reverend Dr Ayla Lepine, who is the Associate Rector at St James’s Piccadilly in London and an art historian and theologian, has accepted the invitation to be our speaker. Her lecture will explore two works of art featured in her forthcoming book, Women, Art, God. In the series entitled The Annunciation (A Study), Julia Margaret Cameron reimagined and reconfigured paintings by Renaissance artists including Perugino and Lippi. In her photography, blurred and hazy aspects of the image are suggestive of the Holy Spirit in this new technology.
A century later, the American nun Sister Corita Kent produced a groundbreaking silkscreen print, The Juiciest Tomato of All. This artwork compared the Virgin Mary to a ripe fruit, with a title inspired by Del Monte tinned fruit and vegetable slogans from her local supermarket. By considering these two artworks by women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a pair, new ways of encountering Mary in art history, theology, and prayer can emerge with unexpected resonance for the twenty-first century.
Our Guest Speaker
Ayla Lepine joined St James’s in July 2022, before which she was Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery. Originally from Canada, she moved to the UK in 2003 to study theology and art history. Following her PhD in Victorian sacred architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she held fellowships at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and the Courtauld, and was lecturer and fellow at the University of Essex.
She was ordained in 2018 and served her title at Hampstead Parish Church. Ayla’s approach to ministry focuses deeply on belonging, beauty, and social justice. She has published widely on modern art and the sacred, and was co-curator of the National Gallery’s 2022 exhibition Fruits of the Spirit: Art from the Heart, which paired paintings from the National Gallery and across the UK with Galatians 5.22. Her publications have appeared in British Art Studies and Tate’s ‘In Focus’ series, as well as books including Modern Architecture and Religious Communities. She is a trustee of the UK charity Art and Christianity, a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, and a member of the St Paul’s Cathedral Visual Arts Committee. Ayla is also a member of the Church of England’s Contested Heritage Committee and a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London.
If you would like to join the audience, please send a message to Catherine O'Brien at the following email address : info@marianstudies.ac.uk
You will receive the free Zoom link the day before the event.