After more than a decade as an art dealer and gallery owner specializing in contemporary Southeast Asian art, in the last year Tyler Rollins founded a nonprofit organization nurturing connections between contemporary art and religious faith. The Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts is based in Charleston, SC and forefronts a focus on transcendence and orienting oneself to a higher power knowing that these can be a source of insight, illumination, and inspiration.
He and Zuckerman discuss Edgar Allan Poe, how to build a community, the Holy City, justifications for art, soulful connections, polite conversations, pandemic introspection and access, divisiveness, the link between a career practice and a life practice, connection to a higher purpose, the relationship between integration and transcendence, gentleness, cracking the shell of self, being uncomfortable, the notion of faith, allowing artists to flourish, creating space, a contemplative approach to art, empathy with and towards something higher, the divine, general acts of kindness, and not walking alone!