Artist Talks
Art & Spirituality Panel
Sunday, October 4th, 2pm
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KMAC Contemporary Art Museum is excited to have the exhibition The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans on view until October 4th, 2026 thanks to funding from Art Bridges.
Celebrate the closing of this exhibition and join us for a panel discussion on how art and faith or spiritual practices can work together in an artist's journey, practice, or way of using art to interact with the world. This event is free and open to the public.
Panel Moderator:
Ramona Dallum
Panelists:
Sirene Martin
Dr. Jabani Bennett
Jon Cherry
Gray Henry
Alayna Altman
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This event is made possible by Art Bridges. Special thanks to the Center for Interfaith Relations.
Ramona Dallum’s career weaves together education, arts administration, community philanthropy, and artistic practice. She is a creative practitioner powered by creativity to be a community catalyst, cultural innovator, and curiosity-driven communicator—someone who deeply connects with people, purpose, and place. Ramona’s passionate about curating spaces where culture, art, dialogue, and diverse perspectives enhance people’s quality of life. She is the Founding Creative Practitioner for Dallum Ventures.
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Alayna Altman is an artist exploring the connections between memory, cosmology, and identity. She works in oil paint and written word to create narrative-based pieces rooted in genealogy and her own spirituality. Her work moves between abstraction and figure, blending stories with forms. Through color and text, she plays with how memory can shift, fade, and reappear in new ways. She is interested in the connections between all beings, and aims to serve as a bridge between the past and present. She was the artist in residence for the Festival of Faiths in 2025 where used live portraiture to explore the theme of sacred belonging.
Dr. Jabani Bennett is a Louisville-based artist, writer, and mindfulness facilitator whose practice explores belonging, cultural inheritance, and radical grief. Classically trained as a painter and rooted in collage traditions, she works across portraiture, food, and found materials to bring past and present into conversation. Drawing from family archives and life’s quiet moments, her practice extends beyond the studio through participatory arts experiences that co-create spaces for restoration and care.
Jon Cherry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, based in Louisville, Kentucky. His work emerges from a holistic, cross-disciplinary practice that blurs the lines between visual journalism, fine art, and community benefit.
Gray Henry majored in art history and world religions at Sarah Lawrence where Joseph Campbell supervised her thesis in mythology and Hinduism. She taught these subjects along with filmmaking in NYC at Dalton and Fordham. She taught world religions and art history in Cairo at the American College ,and later in Cambridge and Canterbury UK where she began her doctoral work on her lifelong study of the symbols of the Tree of Life defended by the Cherubim. She directed 2 publishing houses in Cambridge 1979-1990.Returning home to Louisville, she helped establish the Merton Center at Bellarmine from where she ran the Year of Tibet for Kentucky.(later helping with several Dalai Lama events). She has taught at Center College and U of L World Religions and has been on the board of the Center for Interfaith Religions for 30 years bringing scholars to speak. She continues publishing with Fons Vitae focused on world spirituality.
Sirene Martin is an Assistant Curator and NAGPRA Coordinator at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and an emerging specialist in African-American and African Diasporic Art. Her research focuses on African traditional religions, specifically the Black American tradition of Hoodoo/Conjure, its persistence across the United States, and its impact on Black American visual and material culture.