Meinrad craighead: praying with images

Meinrad Craighead Artist, scholar, and visionary Meinrad Craighead has spent a lifetime mining the world's mythology to explore our human relationship to the Divine as represented in historic religious icons, particularly images of God as the Great Mother.

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Born in North Little Rock and raised in Chicago, Craighead was steeped in the Catholic tradition and deeply influenced by the steady nurture of her Arkansas grandmother. Her gift for art and her fascination with the spirit realm emerged early on, during the hot summers of her Arkansas childhood. Craighead attended parochial schools until she entered the University of Wisconsin to earn the Master of Fine Arts in Craighead left the Midwest for the Southwest where she took a teaching job in the art department at the University of Albuquerque.

After two years in the Southwest, Craighead was invited to teach art in Florence. She would spend the next 21 years in Europe, exploring the imagery of the ancient goddesses Demeter, Persephone, and Artemis, the Black Madonna, and Hildegard of Bingen.

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She lived for 10 months at Montserrat, the mountaintop monastery near Barcelona known for its shrine to the Black Madonna. After 14 years of monastic life, Craighead emerged from Stanbrook Abbey to begin her most fruitful artistic period, working on a series of extraordinary images of the feminine Divine with support from the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Eventually Craighead returned to New Mexico to continue her solitary, contemplative life of prayer and painting. Now, at age 73, she lives and works in her home on the Rio Grande River in Albuquerque.