Kythe Heller: Conception of piece with original text, conversation ritual (with Ty Yule) and collaged text, with collaborators Shelley Loheed (images front and back), Ty Yule (excerpts of conversation), George McCrae (translator of Anonymous: “The Thunder Perfect Mind,” Nag Hammadi revelation text), and Michiko Hachiya (author of Hiroshima Diary, translated by Warner Wells).
Kythe Heller is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where she is completing a dissertation in comparative religion with a second field in literary arts, film, and visual studies/critical media practice. She is the author of the poetry collection Firebird, which was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, and critical studies on religion and poetics published by Cambridge University Press and Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Tricycle, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The MacDowell Colony, The Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard University. She founded Vision Lab, a global interdisciplinary art and research collective; edits Forecast Journal; and is a poet on the faculty of Bard College’s language and thinking program.
Shelley Loheed—images, front and back
Ty Bo Yule is a scruffy, middle-aged, retired queer cult leader living in Minneapolis with his amazing wife Katrina, his attack cat Kevin, and Miami the hustler cat. After getting his mother’s hopes up by getting a master’s of theological studies from Harvard, he is currently a bartender who writes things in his spare time. Chemicallyenhancedbutch is where you can find his neglected blog or buy his book and also say stuff to him.
George W. McRae, d. 1950, Charles Chauncy Stillmann Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School
Shelley Loheed is a graduate of the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Upon completing the Fifth year Program, she received the Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholarship and traveled to Indonesia. This experience had a profound influence on her life and art.
Loheed is a certified Kundalini Yoga instructor and has been teaching yoga since 2000. She is also deeply influenced by the philosophy of physicist David Bohm. Loheed’s artwork is in the collection of the Boston Public Library, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass. Her work has been praised by Boston’s Artsmedia as “gorgeous, ethereal drawings in which cryptic markings—ranging from simple geometries to botanical forms—are washed with sheer layers of delicate color.”