Monica Lopez de Victoria

I have always wrestled with the reality of being an artist who is involved in church. My sister, Tasha, and I were home-schooled pastor's kids; part of an small, active Miami church where our whole family was required to serve regularly.

Church wasn’t very interesting or fun for us, but in our teens we finally found a niche for ourselves in organizing concerts and promoting bands through our youth group. Despite its success, certain church members didn’t like the diversity of the events we were staging, so things started to slow down and later my family was asked to leave the church. This resulted in my father being unemployed for years and our family struggling to survive.
It was an extremely painful experience to have the people I grew up with and who were supposed to ‘love all’ essentially stab us in the back and throw us out without looking back. However, after many years I could finally see how it was the best thing that ever happened to me and my family – it broke our bond to institutional religion and brought us all to a very pure connection to God himself. We didn’t go to church for a few years but kept studying the Bible and staying tight as a family.
During this time my sister and I were studying art and developing our God-given talents. We decided to collaborate under the name TM Sisters so we could explore new artistic territories. Aware of the importance of community we tried to get involved with different churches. People were nice, but it was weird. They would find out that we were artists and then mention some sort of project that was needed at the church – a mural for the nursery or redesigning the bulletin. However, these weren’t the kind of spaces we wanted to pour our skills into. This happened consistently with a majority of the churches we visited. It was frustrating to see how the roles of art and creativity were being minimized in churches all across Miami.
Finally, my sister and I found a church where we started to feel more comfortable. The people were real and honest, and not superficial. They were supportive of creative people and genuinely wanted to understand what we made. Through this group of Christians we were able to see that we have a very important and valid place in church. Tasha and I got involved doing video and installation projects. We saw how God worked through these pieces to enhance the experience of the church and our own growth – we realized that artists have a responsibility to show churches how they can make things visually exciting. This was also a safe place for us to experiment with the new programs and ideas that we were learning as part of our professional work. It was great to get feedback from people who were not educated with the elitism of art history or who were used to artistic contexts.
At the same time our professional art career was taking off, and we were being booked for back to back exhibitions all over the place. It was difficult to know how to balance everything. When a project in church came up and we were already swamped, I felt guilty having to say no. I felt like I was saying no to God. After a while, Tasha and I learned that this was ok. We just needed to be sensitive to what God wanted us to focus on at any specific time.

We as artists need to keep our standards high, both inside the church and with our professional work. We need to know when to put in a lot or a little amount of time, and learn to flow with the plan that God has. It is far worse to produce a bad product that is substandard than not doing it at all. The work must be quality wherever it is, whatever it means personally to the artist. What you create is a representation of who God is and what he is doing. Strive for excellence and inspiration from God as they are the most important tools for an artist.

Love to you all

Steve Cole