Sanctuary For Peace, 2004 Mixed Media Painting by Stacy Stewart Smith

Sanctuary for Peace is a work that changes as you move around it — and asks you to change as well.

At 48" × 60" × 4", this is not simply a painting but an environment. A graphite and gesso drawing on canvas depicts the interior of an empty New York City MTA subway car — that most democratic of spaces, where strangers from every nation sit inches apart, briefly sharing the same air, the same destination, the same silence. In Smith’s Abstractrealist vision, the emptiness is not absence. It is invitation.

Mounted over the canvas, a Plexiglas case carries its own language. Scratchitti — the etched marks of the street — cast shifting shadows across the surface as light moves through the work, revealing calls for world peace inscribed in known and unknown tongues. The phrase world peace is etched directly into the Plexiglas, present always, but visible only when the light is right. At the top of the work, a passage from Acts 2:4 is etched into the case — the Pentecost, the moment when all people suddenly understood one another across the barrier of language.

We all speak in different tongues, Smith suggests, but desire the same thing.

The Sanctuary series, of which this is among the largest works, operates in graphite and gesso — a primarily colorless palette in which light itself becomes the medium of transcendence. Works from the series were exhibited at Smith’s Brooklyn gallery in 2005 and collected by Gallery Guichard in Chicago. Sanctuary for Peace is a rare remaining original.

Graphite and Gesso on Canvas beneath Scratchitti on Plexiglas · 48" × 60" × 4" · 2004
One-of-a-kind original. Shipping insurance is strongly recommended; please add it to your purchase.