A Drop Still Has Ripples
Dedicated to Robert W Funk (1926-2005) and John Dillenberger (1918-2008).
Our hours of discussion — about biblical art in a world of biblical historical criticism, Christian nationalism, nones, new Jesus movements more faithful to the founder, churches closing daily, and churches doubling down on imperial Roman tradition — led me to the creation and assembly of this collection.
It is a collection of works intended to open questions that might inspire the viewer to explore, to seek more contextual understanding of texts, to understand issues with translation, and to become more familiar with the histories of faith traditions. Perhaps a drop in the ocean, but a drop still has ripples.
Introduction
Is it possible to create biblical figurative art that stands on its own merits today? Further, is it possible to do so while encouraging viewers to explore possible contextual interpretations more deeply? These are big questions, particularly in light of the contemporary political and social situation in the United States, and these are the questions which led to the creation of the Kasper Collection of Contemporary Biblical Art.
This is art which is meant to be religious (i.e.: a group activity) rather than simply spiritual (i.e.: an individual activity). That is to say, what is gathered here is a collection of art dealing with religious themes from the Bible which require our deepest consideration as to meaning and possible social actions.
Nine Missouri artists (plus myself, Iowan James Kasper, who contributed two works) were enlisted to create the sixty artworks in this collection. My feeling was that figurative art — and in particular figurative art dealing with fairly well-known representations from art history — would be the most accessible avenue of approach. In general, the artists were left to their own devices to initiate questions and discussion through their work as they saw fit. In a few cases I suggested general settings and individual details. The artists were paid for and retain all rights to their works. None of the original works are for sale.
There was no process of oversight, interference, or feedback during the creative process. After all, it would be self-defeating to ‘force’ yet another single viewpoint while espousing the desire for community discussion.
As a group, we decided that each artist would create an interpretation of the cross or crucifixion. This would offer a chance to see the range of artists’ individual visions of one theme as a counterpoint to the other non-repeated themes.
The catalog, website, and exhibitions are all designed to allow the viewer to personally engage with the works before reading the artists’ essays. While it is enlightening to hear from the artists, first and foremost we want you to have the direct experience of interpreting their artworks for yourself.
James Kasper 2025
The Artists
Dr. Anthony Alioto retired after teaching 37 years at Columbia College, including the last 16 as the first John Schiffman Endowed Chair in Ethics, Philosophy and Religious Studies.Dr. Alioto earned a BS in history and literature, and then served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War as a personnel specialist. After his military service, he returned to graduate school at Ohio University, where he was the John F. Cady Fellow, earning his masters and doctorate in the history of science and philosophy.
As an author, Alioto has written several scholarly texts, including A History of Western Science, which has been used in universities throughout the country. With Dr. John P. McHale he authored: Saintly Sex: Saint John Paul II, Sex, Gender and the Catholic Church.
His memoir is entitled: The Ninefold Path, based on personal experiences with life-threatening chronic illness. In 2020 he published a novel about the revolutionary student movement in the late 1960’s, Idiot Savant. His first young adult fantasy, published in 2023, is Dogdreams: The Adventures of Two Huskies in the Multiverse.
Matthew Ballou (1976, USA) is an artist and writer living in Columbia, MO with his partner and four children. Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA ’01) and Indiana University (MFA ’05), he is a Full Teaching Professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Visual Studies at The University of Missouri where he has taught since 2007.Over the last decade Ballou has shown his artwork in exhibitions across the US, most recently at the Daum Museum in Sedalia, MO, the Riverside Art Center near Chicago, IL, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.
Writing has been an important aspect of Ballou’s output for over twenty years. Highlights of his publications include a cover feature on the work of Odd Nerdrum in Image Journal; a profile on painter Joey Borovicka in The New Territory; and an extensive review of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Retrospective for the Chicago-based publication neotericART. He recently completed invited texts for The MU Museum of Art and Archaeology, SEEN Journal, and Oxford University Press (Grove Art).
APPROACH
I created these paintings with the intention of illustrating a few of the strange, violent biblical stories that have stuck with me since my childhood in Christian evangelicalism. I hope my stylized images of these challenging passages encourage a deeper appreciation of the meaning they embody. Furthermore, I hope the works help expose the all-too human desire to cast ourselves as integral actors within a larger cosmic narrative.
Askia is a Missouri-based artist who was born in Queens, NY. Working between representation and abstraction, he employs a mixed media approach that combines acrylic, oil paint, dry media, digital media and collage elements to tell stories about the human experience.He graduated from Columbia College (Missouri) with a BFA and received his MFA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He also holds a Master’s in English and teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
APPROACH
I use artwork as a tool to search for meaning — to make sense of myself, the world, and the human experience. I weave together representational and abstract elements with a range of literary, historical, and philosophical references to create narratives with overlapping meanings.
This is embodied in my work through the Non-portrait. The Non-portraits started as a response to two competing impulses I felt to simultaneously reject and participate in portraiture. The Non-portrait is a way of drawing on aspects of my own lived experiences that are contradictory (for example feeling invisible and hyper-visible at the same time), while also serving as an archetype with which to explore larger themes that connect to the broader human experience.
Cheryl Hardy’s meticulous, hyper realistic artwork is deeply informed by a lifetime of environmental awareness and activism.She was born in Winchester, MA. She graduated with a BS in Psychology from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, in 1980, an MA in Psychology from SUNY-Binghamton in 1982, and a PhD in Psychobiology from SUNY-Binghamton in 1985, completing postdoctoral fellowships in Aging and Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center from 1985-1988. She has taught at SUNY-Binghamton, Lincoln University, and is currently Professor Emerita in Psychology at Columbia College. She resides in Columbia, MO with her husband Mark Baltzer.
APPROACH
Retirement has allowed me the freedom to draw daily. I use recycled drawing paper and a mechanical pencil to slowly build up multiple layers of graphite for a hyper realistic effect. The Heaven and Earth diptych was created over six months (and on the seventh month I rested).
After spending the first half of his life trying to become a physics professor, James Kasper spends the second half of his life as a ceramist, sometime rock star, composer, poet, and painter.He received his BA from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA and an MS from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. He founded Prairie Dog Pottery Inc. in 1993. With Joseph Norman and Gigi Macabre he founded the band nraakors in 2021. In 2025 he founded Clays, Glazes, Firing, a photo catalog of commercial C04 and C5 clays and glazes fired in electric, gas and wood kilns.
APPROACH
When creating intentional works, I first read and study the subject until I feel comfortable that I have a solid grip on all the elements. Early sketches will contain as many of these elements as possible. After much re-arranging and culling I begin to get a feel for the over-arching elements, the backbone of the story.
I begin a new series of sketches and repeat the process. At some point, I sense I have distilled down to just the required bits. I then work to give form, viewpoint, and intent to the sketch.
After this, I refine to create what I hope is a work that stands on its own intrinsic artistic merits while also maintaining the story. My aim is to inspire deeper thought and discussion.
Jane Mudd is a professional artist, community arts organizer, and public works artist. She was Assistant Professor of Art at William Woods University, Fulton, MO and retired in 2019. She currently resides and works on a farm east of Fulton, and at Orr Street Studios in Columbia.APPROACH
My interest in religious-themed art originated from 16 years of Catholic schooling. Religion has always been a stable factor in our large chaotic family, and will always, in some capacity, be a part of who I am. I came to believe that man is and always has been a mythmaker, and as an artist I wanted to contribute to that mythmaking as it gives meaning to mankind’s existence. I never lost interest in the beauty and power of Renaissance and Baroque storytelling through art—it is something that has excited me for a long time. It is my humble opinion that the reason the Jesus myth has been kept alive over the last two millennia is in part because of classical artists’ masterful and dramatic invention in narrative, composition, and technique in the western traditions of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
My work in this collection is meant to reinvent some of New Testament stories while investigating several masters’ classical techniques and approaches. I am interested in the belief of Jesus the man. Like so many, I feel that beliefs and teachings which brought hope and salvation to a world of violence and fear have gone seriously awry since his death.
Nora Othic was born in Vallejo, CA, a suburb of San Francisco. In the 1960s, her family moved to Marceline, Missouri, where she still resides. After graduating from high school in Marceline, and working in the trades for a number of years, she began commuting to Columbia, MO to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia and received a BFA in 1991.Following that, she worked full-time as an artist, selling her work at art fairs and galleries. Today, she works solely through galleries, including Sager-Reeves in Columbia and Sherry Leedy in Kansas City. Her work can be found in many private and corporate collections as well as in museums such as the Daum in Sedalia, MO, the Nerman in Overland Park, KS, and the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, MO.
APPROACH
While I have never created a suite of artworks precisely like these, they are similar to other narrative series that I have done over the years: figures from Greek mythology as farmhands or carnival sideshow freaks, figures from the Bible as rural denizens, and illustrations of the people featured in rock ’n roll or country lyrics. I seldom make stand-alone works but rather think in series of paintings or drawing, whether landscapes, figurative works, or still-lifes. I often imagine producing them as being like making cookies: I prepare a bunch of canvases or panels, decorate the surfaces, and place them on racks to cool.
Nearly all my work has a rural theme. I have been calling myself a Neo-Regionalist for some time, which is simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and fairly accurate. My work owes a debt to Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood and to all the WPA murals that grace post offices in small towns. Like the Regionalists, I’m looking back to Renaissance and Baroque art. There is also usually a current of corny humor in it — overly theatrical poses or an elevation of simple subjects to iconic status, such as heroic pigs and chickens.
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen was raised the son of a Southern Baptist pastor who also happened to be a musician from the Jesus Rock movement of the 1970s. Daniel in turn sang in the underground “Christian horror punk” band Blaster the Rocket Man in the 1990s. The group disbanded after their third and final album, The Monster Who Ate Jesus (1999). Sporadic reunions followed, most recently in the summer of 2025. Daniel has resided in Glasgow, Scotland since 2002.He eventually gained a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow in 2020. His pithy thesis title was “‘You Are the Old Entrapped Dreams of the Coyote’s Brains Oozing Liquid Through the Broken Eye Socket’: Ecomonstrous Poetics and Weird Bioregionalism in the Fiction of R. A. Lafferty (With a Comparative Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian)”.
Daniel remains ardent for monsters and the monstrous. His most recent academic essays include “Towards a Blackfeet Biosemiotics of Postapocalypse: Tracking Ecomonstrous Transmotion in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones” in Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture (Bloomsbury 2024) and “Turtle Island of the (Un)Dead: Indigenous Kinesis of Kinship and Plague in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Richard Van Camp” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (Palgrave 2025). Daniel also writes fiction.
His most recently published stories are “Bugguts” in Disease of Finitude: David Cronenberg Inspired Microfiction (2025) and “There Will Be a Place for You” in Folkloric: A Magazine of New Folklore, Issue 1 (2025).
Visit Dr. Petersen’s Website
View More of Dr. Petersen’s Work
Dr. Petersen’s YouTube Channel
Mike Sleadd was a church kid and so were all his friends. They worshiped and had their primary social life in a Southern Baptist church in LaGrange, a small rural town in Kentucky, where Mike’s father was a deacon at the church. The family were very regular attendees: two services on Sunday, one on Wednesday, and Bible School in the summer. Mike was so active in the church that many people called him Brother Bob (Bob was a joking nickname because of his last name, Sleadd—bobsled).Though he planned on majoring in Pre-Ministry at Georgetown College, a Baptist College in Kentucky, getting up early on a Sunday morning to attend church while away at school didn’t last long. He has not been active in the church since. After graduating with a BA in visual art he worked as a designer for Kentucky Educational Television, the University of Kentucky, and freelanced cartooning, illustration, and graphic design. He also began exhibiting his artwork. He received his MFA degree in drawing and printmaking from the University of Missouri in 1994. He taught college—graphic design, advanced drawing, printmaking, and illustration—from 1982 to 2023, retiring as professor emeritus from the Columbia College Art Department after teaching there for thirty-five years.
APPROACH
I am not a realist.
I’ve always approached my artwork with the freedom to bend, twist, and distort both the drawing technique and the concept. In order to keep somewhat aligned with these biblical narratives I played a game of tag with the original stories, but made some adjustments along the way.
I like ink because it’s unforgiving. You put the line down — you’ve got to live with it. You’ve got to make it work, make it part of the composition. It’s like life to me: If you make a mistake you’ve got to learn to incorporate it into who you are and what you do. I like pen and ink for that reason.
Although a feather quill was used for centuries as a writing and drawing instrument, I use the plume of the feather often in my work. After sketching lightly with pencil on paper, I dip the feather in my inkwell and sketch the loose expressive lines. The grey ink-wash lines, which give a hint of movement — for example in The Last Supper and Heaven — were done with this technique. My detailed line art was rendered with a dip pen, the offspring of the feather quill pen.
I often begin with expressive gestures using that ink-soaked plume of the feather. From those initial strokes, I weave an array of patterns into detailed, whimsical abstractions. While the drawings in this collection were not quite so freely expressive, I like that they carry some of the whimsy and spontaneity seen in my other studio work.
Colleen Francis Smith is a painter based out of Rocheport, MO. In her work, she draws from myth, oral tradition, and personal narrative to craft paintings of richly hued, psychical environments that question deeply embedded narratives of femininity. She holds an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a dual B.A. in English Literature and Studio Art from St. Joseph’s University. She has completed residencies through the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild, the Eastern Frontier Foundation, and Chashama and currently teaches drawing and painting at Lincoln University of Missouri.APPROACH
My overall goal in making these paintings was to encourage others to ask deep questions about their individual faith traditions. I wished to illustrate that nothing is absolute, that God is between the lines of the Holy books, and that often we get the message entirely wrong and enact the exact opposite. I want to show that these are stories, not concrete history — occurrences shrouded in myths that are not fixed and can be questioned and even rewritten. We create our own Gods and they in turn, shape us.
Shannon Soldner imagines the stories people tell themselves, the personal mythologies created to make sense of the world. Her work seeks to give a glimpse into the fictitious inner worlds of her subjects. Through her narrative paintings, she asks the viewer not only to explore these myths and fables but also to question their own.Shannon, a native of Colorado, was born in 1976. She received her BFA with honors at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2015 with an emphasis in Studio Art. She lives and works in Columbia, MO.
APPROACH
My process is simple in structure, though it often takes more time than I expect. It begins with a concept — an initial spark, a seed of an idea. From there, it slowly takes root, often unfolding at a frustratingly gradual pace. That’s when the real work begins. Seldom does a painting emerge fully formed; those are rare gifts. More often, the idea needs time to settle, to be questioned, reimagined, and sometimes completely undone. In many cases, I don’t fully grasp the depth of a piece until well after the paint has dried and a new idea has already begun its own slow evolution.
The works in this series were no exception. Each one started from a loose impulse and changed significantly through the act of making. The original thought is often just a starting point — what develops is something layered, unexpected, and more complete than I could have planned.
Visually, I try to reflect the movement of thought itself — how ideas fragment, repeat, and reform. Brushstrokes build and break apart, mimicking the way we process, revise, and internalize what we think we know. I’m interested in how simple marks can carry weight over time, accumulating into something that feels cohesive, even if it’s unresolved. My aim isn’t to resolve an idea, but to stay open to where it leads.
Much of this project was shaped by research and rabbit holes — moments of deep curiosity that sent me digging into everything from personal memory to philosophy, from visual culture to small, passing obsessions. These paths don’t always lead to answers, but they often open up new ways of thinking. I see painting as a space where instinct and investigation meet. In visualizing those threads, my hope is that each piece invites a similar kind of engagement — one rooted in curiosity. I believe that real understanding begins not with certainty, but with a willingness to hold space for questions, contradictions, and the unknown.
Alonzo Williams (b. 2001) is an animator and comics artist based in O’Fallon, IL. As an artist, Williams explores the effects of mixing visual languages from comics, video games, and other media.He enjoys playing the piano, playing video games, learning to code, and reading Christian literature. He holds a BFA in drawing from the University of Missouri – Columbia.
APPROACH
Much of my work blends study and spontaneity. Most of my pieces depict biblical scenes, so I start with prayer and reading, attempting to understand the context of the passage through an emotional, spiritual, and practical standpoint. Then, I quickly place the first mark on the paper and loosely sketch out the composition.
Building simple shapes into the picture, I investigate ways to frame the characters into their environments, establishing contrast of detail between their simplified forms and a complex background. I frequently go back and forth between my drawing and the Scriptures, adding in new elements I discover along the way. Pleasant surprises pop in and out as the process matures.
The pieces are filled with fantastic symbolism, and yet I hope to invoke a sense of intimacy to a modern audience. There is a relationship that develops between God and humanity, and whether that relationship feels rather distant or surprisingly close, He is there. In creating these pieces, I hope to make the reality of this relationship more apparent.