By Andrés Martinez

The yearning for intimacy with the sacred remains as potent today as it was in medieval days, when art was preoccupied almost entirely with depicting the divine. Last night’s spirited (pun intended), time-traveling Zócalo Public Square/Getty “Open Art” event at the Getty Center connected wide-ranging contemporary yearning (as evidenced by the success of the grilled cheese sandwich press, the recurring monthly apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Mojave Desert, and the spiritual fervor at Burning Man) to the medieval art on display in the Getty’s exhibition Things Unseen: Vision, Belief, and Experience in Illuminated Manuscripts. …

By Callie Enlow

By Laura E. Pérez

Alinka Echeverría’s The Road To Tepeyac, a series of photographs of pilgrims to Mexico’s famed Basilica de Guadalupe, is an invitation to think about altars, embodiment, and visibility.

Alinka and I met on November 14, 2014, at the Berkeley Art Museum and spoke of many things, including her experience growing up in a small village in England, where her family relocated to from Mexico while her father completed his graduate degree. Alinka studied anthropology in Europe and began working as a documentary photographer but felt creatively stymied. Exhibiting her photographs, on the other hand, has led to work somewhere between documentary and fine art, anthropology and something else—a reflection …