A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Svetlana Rakic

A native of former Yugoslavia, Dr. Svetlana Rakic earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and her doctorate in art history from Indiana University. She is the author of several books on Serbian Orthodox icons and the interrelatedness of modern art and religious thought. Most recently, she has published the book Art and Reality Now: Serbian Perspectives (New York: A. Pankovich Publishers, 2014).

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She has published extensively on post-Renaissance and modern art in American, Serbian and Bosnian journals and has given lectures and presentations at many scholarly institutions and organizations such as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the European Science Foundation, the British Academy in London, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Chicago, UC Berkeley, and the SECAC/MACAA Conferences. Rakic is the recipient of Indiana University’s prestigious Esther L. Kinsley Award and Franklin College Faculty Travel and Faculty Excellence awards.

Her paintings dealing with “inner landscapes” have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Bloomington, Terre Haute and Franklin in Indiana, as well as in galleries in Serbia and Germany. In 2007, she received the Puckett Award of Recognition presented by the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute in a show juried by David Edgar of the Arts Administration Program at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. In 2004, she received the Pfizer Award of Honor presented by the Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute in a show juried by curator Nato Thompson of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Since 1996, she has been teaching art history and studio art courses at Franklin College. Most recently she has been invited to teach at the summer program for the Sinoway International Education Group at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou and at Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China.

Phone: (317) 738-8278 | Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Source: Franklin College


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People Directory

Alexander Dzigurski

By Milana Karlo Bizic

One of America's greatest artists of Serbian extraction, Alexander Dzigurski, recently passed away in San Francisco, near his beloved Pacific Ocean. Dzigurski was an internationally known artist, famous for his unique and colorful seascapes. He was blessed with a prolific talent for capturing the action and color of the sea on canvas. One of his larger canvases (36"x48"), called From Sea to shining Sea, hangs in the Franklin Mint Museum. It was painted in 1976, in honor of the nations Bicentennial, when the Franklin Mint Gallery of American Art commissioned him "as America's finest painter of the sea" to paint his expression of the sea that bounds the beauty of this noble land.

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Publishing

Sailors of the Sky

A conversation with Fr. Stamatis Skliris and Fr. Marko Rupnik on contemporary Christian art

In these timely conversations led by Fr. Radovan Bigovic, many issues are introduced that enable the contemporary reader to deepen and expand his or her understanding of the role of art in the life of the Church. Here we find answers to questions on the crisis of contemporary ecclesiastical art in West and East; the impact of Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract painting on contemporary ecclesiastical painting; and a consideration of the main distrinction between iconography and secular painting. The dialogue, while resolving some doubts about the difference between iconography, religious painting, and painting in general, reconciles the requirement to obey inconographic canons with the freedom essential to artistic creativity, demonstrating that obedience to the canons is not a threat to the vitatlity of iconography. Both artists illumine the role of prayer and ascetisicm in the art of iconography. They also mention curcial differences between iconography in the Orthodox Church and in Roman Catholicism. How important thse distinctions are when exploring the relationship between contemporary theology and art! In a time when postmodern "metaphysics' revitalizes every concept, these masters still believe that, to some extent, Post-Modernism adds to the revitatiztion of Christian art, stimulating questions about "artistic inspiration" and the essential asethetic categories of Christian painting. Their exceptionally wide, yet nonetheless deep, expertise assists their not-so-everday connections between theology, ar, and modern issues concerning society: "society" taken in its broader meaning as "civilization." Finally, the entire artistic project of Stamatis and Rupnik has important ecumenical implications that aswer a genuine longing for unity in the Christian word.

The text of this 94-page soft-bound book has been translated from the Serbian by Ivana Jakovljevic, Fr. Gregory Edwards, and Andrijana Krstic. Published by Sebastian Press, Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Contemporary Christian Thought Series, number 7, First Edition, ISBN: 978-0-9719505-8-0