A Hot Artistic Summer

Against shallow appearances and short-term outcomes

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A YOUNG WOMAN walked past 48 Ludlow Street and peered into the big front-store window of Sommwhere, a cream-colored venue on the Lower East Side. She saw a long table decked out with elaborate florals, candles, notecards, and well-dressed New Yorkers enjoying delicately seared halibut and watermelon gazpacho from Chef Henry. The temperatures blazed hotter than the corner crew smoking their cigarettes—the city’s hottest day of the year, perhaps in years.

“What is this?” the young woman asked Josh, who was watching from outside. He struck up a conversation with our new friend. He explained the budding lore of Inkwell—a storytelling community seeking transcendence. “You might like it,” he said. “But are you religious?” She wasn’t. And yet she was, as he discovered later. “This looks like the Last Supper,” she commented. His eyes lit up and they laughed before she moved along down the street, her curiosity piqued.

Inkwell Reserve was actually a first supper. It was an inaugural storytelling dinner designed to bring together artists, writers, thinkers, and connectors all in one room—a space celebrating the poetic, communal nature of our faith. In collaboration with two visionary minds at Ethereal Events, it followed an evening pop-up art gallery which featured artists sharing their paintings, poems, and music. The pop-up drew a crowd of over 200 people throughout the evening, spilling out onto the streets as they dialogued with new friends and old. Those conversations lingered and eventually were shooed back home to different corners of the city after dark, where the buzz continued. The night was attempting to bridge the blossoming twin sides of Inkwell—the electric social and the writerly contemplative.

The next day’s invite-only dinner brought together 25 guests who help shape, care for, and contribute to the arts community of New York City and beyond. These guests occupy unique lanes of life and ministry to make truth not merely persuasive, but compelling; to live into the reality that beauty will help save the world.

PERHAPS THE MOST MEMORABLE event of the evening was the question everyone asked the Inkwell team: “What was this for?”

Surely such an event must come with a sponsored ad. Surely such an event must require an airtight agenda. Surely an outpouring of abundance does not manifest from dust. Surely?

In the landscape of America’s northeast, the strongholds of efficiency, utilitarianism, and productivity dominate the action and ethos of work. Christian artists in the city struggle under massive pressure to conform to either an egocentric elitism, or find themselves drowning in the demands of chasing likes, follows and fame—creating for the sake of the algorithm. One of the event’s featured artists and dinner guests shared how intense it has been to take the leap towards God’s calling on her life to be a working artist. The very act of following that vocational call flies in the face of a society insisting that security, safety, and success are the highest values in life.

WHILE THIS DINNER was not without intention or strategy, it was surely a risk to try something open-handed and paradoxical—not knowing the exact deliverables was an act of faith and took the Spirit’s leading. It’s a tender process of learning along the way, grappling with how to make something beautiful but not hollow. To provide a flash of elegance, while still drawing from the deep, sacred wells of a theology of the arts.

While the event’s aesthetics were elevated, perhaps its metrics were quiet. Maybe the success was in that conversation with the stranger who looked through the window, curious about the deep richness of the scene before her. Maybe it was in the simple beholding of Jonathan Girma and Ravahn’s moving performances. Perhaps these small moments of awe and connection were just what was needed for a certain musical theatre college student—the one who raced down to lower Manhattan just to catch a glimpse of the storyteller who spoke her language and shaped her life. Inkwell Reserve was an attempt to “live the questions” as Rainer Maria Rilke says—to not seek the answers which cannot be given, because right now we would not be able to live them.

In the face of so much noise and hustle, Inkwell Reserve’s intention was to simply be a place of refreshment and connection. A haven for artists to bask in a measure of abundance and to just have a really good meal together. To leave inspired and with a peek behind the veil at what the Lord might be doing around the city. “All this noise,” an artist said, “and I’m just out here trying to be a child.”

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Elizabeth Sanders
Artist & Photographer

Elizabeth is a photographer, creative thinker, and shy writer. She spends her days taking photographs and working with the Inkwell team. You can find her at www.elizabethjoysanders.com or on Instagram.

What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!

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Photography by Paulo Verzani and Lacy Croce.