All Faiths Beautiful: From Atheism to Zoroastrianism is not the first American Visionary Art Museum showcase in recent memory that, so it would seem, lays down an ideological direction from the outset.
After the fashion of Race, Class, Gender ? Character two years ago - though not last year's oddball offering, Home and Beast - the newly-opened exhibition bears a title that would fit a lecture series on multiculturalism.
According to the Museum itself, this is "The exhibition for folks weary of the appropriation - the supersessionism - of any religion utilized as a reason for making war upon those who do not subscribe to the same faith."
Themes along this line, though laudable, do not necessarily promote discussion. All Faiths Beautiful exists in constant danger of obscuring its artists' unique, occasionally obsessive projects with talking points that encourage a single and rather predictable, window of interpretation.
That said, the themes that the new exhibition raises are a great excuse to present more of the outlandish outsider art that is the gallery's forte.
In the hands of curator and AVAM founder Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the intellectual underpinnings of All Faiths Beautiful never quite translate into solemnity.
The Museum's 13th mega-exhibition may not succeed as an incisive intellectual statement, while its number of poignant and morbid offerings don't register against the more adventurous and spectacular creations.
Ironically - and pleasantly - the worth of diversity and individualism finds a cogent embodiment not in the show's disquisitions on religion, but in its reassuringly eclectic array of assemblages, installations and traditional media.
Disproportionately large sculptures account for some of the most memorable entries in the Visionary Art Museum's permanent collection. Likewise All Faiths Beautiful boasts life-sized papier-m??ché figures by sculptor Pamela Smith, not to mention a shell-encrusted female nude by Timmerman Daugherty. These attentively-crafted works seem like overgrown dolls, and are perfectly at home in a museum that keeps an overgrown whirligig right behind its primary gallery.
Another large entry, "The Captive," by Wilfred Regon Martin, is distinguished more by a haunting directness than by attentive detail. As with several other works in All Faiths Beautiful, the religious inclinations behind this hulking gold-painted warrior are less likely to grab attention than its unexpected presentation and material.
The same cannot be said of Christina Varga's "Mohammed-Jesus-Buddha" triptych panels - another exhibition centerpiece - which uses serene images that more or less distill the cross-theological and cross-traditional aspirations of the show as a whole.
Some of the other graphic works are elusive, almost mystical in comparison. It isn't easy to see how renderings such as the cosmic, vivid and overwrought "Praying" by Alex Gray fit into the Museum's essentially folk art aesthetic.
But canvases such as those of Edith Valentine Tenebrink - whose art, motivated in part by the prophet Obadiah, was once discovered at a flea market - certainly do. Her paintings, along with the smaller pictures that line the passages between the main exhibition rooms, are the perfect complement to overpowering selections such as "The Captive."
Artist and PostSecret founder Frank Warren's submission of anonymous postcards appears to have been conceived in the same paradoxical spirit of simultaneous mystery and intimacy that informs Tenebrink's pieces.
In fact, there are texts in every corner of All Faiths Beautiful - including advertisements for a collection of poems by 13th century mystic Jellaludin Rumi, newly illustrated by exhibition contributor Michael Green.
The show is populated by works that either contain incredibly simple messages or, at the other extreme, are idiosyncratic enough to defy easy explanation.
Despite this, visitors will find the gallery's walls covered with quotations from several of history's most profound religious leaders, philosophers and theorists.
Perhaps such gestures towards religious awareness strike a forlorn note in an age where even American high art consistently proves powerless to effect cultural and personal enlightenment. Then again, it is in toying with the boundaries between high art, low art, and stuff that barely classifies as art that the AVAM is at its imaginative best.
There may not be another exhibition on earth where you will find a fluorescent red skeleton in a baseball cap only footsteps away from a painting of Walt Whitman. Yet juxtapositions like this are nothing uncommon at All Faiths Beautiful, and alleviate the on-message uplift that would otherwise drag the show down.
All Faiths Beautiful will be on display at the American Visionary Art Museum until August 31, 2008. Call (410)-244-1900 or visit www.avam.org for more information.
