Comune di Cagliari Assessorato alla Cultura	Centro comunale d'arte e cultura
Arturo Lindsay "Sanctuary of souls"
"Sanctuary of the souls of childrens" (2000) woods, tulle, sand, candles, shells and a mirror

In Lindsay’s installation the identification of art with the past takes on the intensity of a modern image modelled on the themes of tradition, on the stylistic characteristics of a far-off culture which returns to appear thanks to the force of memory. The artist constructs a sanctuary as a homage to the African children who died during the Atlantic crossings connected to the slave-trade: the so-called "Black Diaspora".

The souls of the dead children rest in this magical place which is transfigured in the white light of a tenuous and impalpable veil or shroud that envelops the construction and protects it from every-thing else. Suspended in the middle of the Sanctuary we have a small Cayucho in sea-blue coloured wood in which five sculptures of children are aligned, all in the form of dolls, also painted in blue and each in a different symbolic pose.

A talisman sways over their heads, representing the most aerial point of the installation: a source of lightness that radiates invisible energy all around in accordance with an alchemical process which unites the heavens with the marine depths.

And in order to recall the depth of the ocean Lindsay covers the floor of the Sanctuary with a bed of sand which takes on the guise of community land which everyone can step on and trample and in which they can acknowledge their common destiny.

If the ocean contains the lost souls then the ship serves to recover the bodies, to reconstruct the story and history of a people and in order to transmit and hand down the spiritual energy that belongs to their primary image. The Sanctuary is imagined as a room of the soul, place of historical memory but also the point of the crossing and the passing through of the present in which different traditions meet with the entire charge of symbols, underlining persistence and duration. The use of mirror fragments fixed below the small ship serves to diffuse light reflections from above to below, and vice versa, like shivers which remind one of the thought of life when faced by the drama of death: seashells and votive candles placed on the white sand that reflect light while a Black Madonna from Cuba looks outwards with sobriety.

The combination of the blue and white express the spiritual condition of the artist who is looking for a holy feeling of space, an interior condition which allows him to combine the ‘atmosphere’ of the pureness of the souls of the children with the violence of slavery that afflicts humanity – in the past as today – as an uninterrupted process of the negation of life. A person who has a profound knowledge of Afro-Atlantic and Latin rites, for years Lindsay has worked in order to bring about a total communication in which the concept of art is not tied to the individual in his or her own right but to the possibility of taking part in a collective aesthetic ritual.

Lindsay mixes artistic genres in an interactive hypothesis which simultaneously sees the actuation of the pictorial surface, the plastic sense of sculpture, the adoption of objects of daily use, the manipulation of the materials of nature and the creation of simulacra in which religion and culture express the same ethical and aesthetic tension.

The installation project also foresees the experience of the performance: that is, the use of the body of the artist who together with the public in real time faces the field of the work as if this were a place of purification, a temple of prayer, liberation and redemption where each human being is elevated to the symbol of offended and wounded humanity.

The high spiritual tension given to the image of the Sanctuary, pervaded by the light of interior meditation, contrasts with the clamour of everyday events which in Lindsay’s thought are the symptom of the tragic destiny of mankind.

A mankind grappling with survival, increasingly more incapable of living the ancestral dimension which is its bond with the universe, the pacific coexistence with other beings.

Arturo Lindsay

After having received a Master’s Degree in painting in 1975 at the University of Amherst (Massachusetts) and his Doctorate in Art at the University of New York in 1990, Lindsay is presently a professor of Painting and the History of Art at the Spelman College in Atlanta and at the University of Panama. In paying particular attention to the "Black Diaspora", Lindsay works within the fields of painting and the installation, investigating the connections and existing relations between Afro and Latin-American cultures and contemporary aesthetics. "Le Cajas de anima" are among his most recent installations: those in which art, religion and culture are mixed and blended in the chromatic profusions of the ancestral stories of the "Santeria", the complex of religious rites and beliefs transmitted to Latin-American and Caribbean cultures by way of the Middle Passage of the Black Diaspora.

Principal one-man exhibition and installations

1971	Arturo Lindsay, Università Statale Centrale,
1971	Arturo Lindsay, Università Statale Centrale, New Britain, Connecticut.
1977	Arturo Lindsay, Craftery Gallery, Hartford, Connecticut.
1982	Guardiani Ancestrali, Mona Berman Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
1983	Arturo Lindsay: Opere Recenti, Augusta Savage Gallery, Amherst, Massachussets.
1984	Collaborazioni, Sutton Gallery, Huston, Texas.
1988	Immagini Ancestrali, Hammonds House Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.
1992	Las Siete Potencias Africanas, Chastain Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.
1994	Canto a la Libertad de Africa a America, Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Panama. Congo Spirits, Chassie Post Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.
1996-98	Animas, arcangeles y antepasados: Opere Recenti di Arturo Lindsay, mostra itinerante, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, Georgia
1998	Intermedia Art Center, Minneapolis, MN – Diggs Gallery, Wiston-Salem, NC.
1998	"Cajas de anima", per "Percorsi dello Spirito", Cittadella dei Musei, Cagliari.
1998	WinstonSalem, NC Intermedia Art Center
1998	Animas, arc’ngeles y antepasados: Recent Work by Arturo Lindsay Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University
1999	Segunda Bienal Iberoamèricana de Lima - Salones de Artistas Invitados Pancho Fierro, Retorno de las ’nimas Africana, Lima, Perù

Principal group exhibition

1973	Trough Young Black Eyes, Wardsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut.
1976	Black & Hispanic Visions, Davidson Art Center, Middletown, Connecticut.
1980	14 Artisti latino americani, Castle Gallery, New Rochelle, New York.
1983	Artisti degli anni ’80, Museo di Arte Afroamericana, Los Angeles, California.
1984	African American Art in Public & Corporate Collections, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.
1986	Arte Caraibica: le correnti africane, Museo di Arte Contemporanea, SoHo, New York.
1987	Plexus International Art Slaves, Santuario di Sa Itria, Gavoi, Italia.
1991	Southern Expressions: Tales Untold, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia.
1992	Bienal de Arte Pictórico, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Panama.
1993	Ceremony of Spirit: Nature & Memory in Contemporary Latino Art, mostra itinerante, Museo Messicano, San Francisco, LA – Bellingham, WA.
1994	Mapping the Self: Models of Identity in A Postmodernizing Stato, Telfair Museum, Savannah, Georgia.
1996	The Ark of Well Being, Plexus Performance, "Roof Garden", Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma.
1997	In Search of Balance: The ArtistScholar, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
1999	Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Museum and the Center for African American History and Culture Locating the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in African American Art, Washington, DC Cinque Gallery Artists in the City, New York, NY
2000	Kubatana Gallery Transgressions and Transformations, Atlanta, GA Arco Chato (Convento de Santo Domingo) Altares Panama, Panama Longyear Museum, Colgate University Ceci n’est pas... Hamilton, NY Ruth Hall Hodges Art Gallery, Morris Brown College Remembrance of a Legacy, Atlanta, GA