Dorothy Emerson

Bio

Rev. Dr. Dorothy May Emerson is a Unitarian Universalist community minister with Rainbow Solutions in Medford, Massachusetts, where she coordinates educational programs and writes about socially responsible investing and money and empowerment and serves as an organizational consultant.  She made her first altar assemblage—“Everything Emptying into White”—in the early 1970s before she learned the term to describe her work.  In the early 1980s she learned about altars from Kay Turner, editor of Lady-Unique Inclination of the Night, and realized she had been making altars for many years.  Her first entry in a juried art show was in 1982—“Women Take Back the World”—in the Radiation-Risk Reception Area Exhibition in Austin and Houston, TX, sponsored by Women and Their Work.  Other altars have been shown at Harvard Divinity School and Stebbins Gallery in Cambridge, MA.  The current group of altars has been shown at the Medford Arts Festival and at an art fair at Springstep.

Statement

Altars are one of the ways I express my spirit in tangible form.  I’ve never been a great mediator, but I find myself in a deeply meditative state as I assemble diverse elements into an altar.  I have several working altars in my home and find them useful tools for centering, regaining balance, and working out problems that concern me.

I’m always on the look-out for materials that might find their way into altars. It’s a way for me to give new life to things that were once valued but later discarded—my own recycling project.

I hope that the altars I create as art pieces will inspire the people who live with them to reflect on the various aspects of life the altars address.  I hope they will see beauty and possibility in the simple things that are part of the altars and in the connections among the altars’ diverse and perhaps unexpected elements.  My dream is that my work will inspire people to rediscover hidden pieces of themselves they might revive to create new ways of being in the world.