Liturgical artist Nancy Chinn will give a slide lecture at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 6, in 107 Devlin Hall as part of WSU’s Art and Architecture Lecture Series.

Chinn serves as adjunct faculty in the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif., and as artist-in-residence in various churches and seminaries.

Chinn’s slide lecture will mainly focus on commissions she has done for churches, sacred art and the importance of collaborative art. She also will address what makes the commission of sacred art different from a secular commission.

As a painter and creator of large, seasonal and site-specific liturgical spaces, Chinn works either on commission or as an artist in residence with local congregations to create original art to use in worship. Often her work is aerial, architectural in scale, and made from ephemeral materials for particular seasons or feasts.

Chinn began her liturgical work 25 years ago. The impulse was provided by frustration with imageless, symbol-impoverished, word-dependent worship in Protestant traditions, she says. Today her work and her teaching are widely acclaimed by many denominations and Jewish communities.

Chinn’s ideas and more than 60 colored pages of her liturgical work can be found in her book, "Spaces for Spirit, Adorning the Church," 1998.

Nine of her watercolor and mixed media works form the core of a book, "Wisdom Searches," written with Harriet Gleeson and released November 1999 by Pilgrim Press.