MOBIA: Museum of Biblical Art

Invitation to Prayer is a sculpture of Jeremiah Lanphier, created by renowned artist, Lincoln Fox. On September 23, 1857, Lanphier began inviting businessmen in New York’s financial district to prayer meetings, sparking a noonday prayer movement that quickly spread throughout the city and the country. This sculpture, commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the first meeting, sits outside the American Bible Society and MOBIA (Museum of Biblical Art) on Broadway at 61st Street on Manhattan’s decidedly secular and skeptical Upper Westside.

I’ve probably passed this statue many times in the year since it was installed, and I’ve passed the American Bible Society as long as it’s been there. And, like many others in my neighborhood, without even thinking, I assumed that there was nothing in this building for me. I assumed it was a place where Christians evangelized and would insist that I take Christ as my savior or be doomed. So I was most surprised to learn yesterday that on the second floor of the American Bible Society building is a small museum — a place that could not be more in synch with Spirituality & Health magazine.

MOBIA, “the nation’s first scholarly museum of art and the Bible,” exists solely to help everyone understand how the stories and symbols of the Bible have influenced the history of art and today’s visual culture. How you choose to use that knowledge, that influence, and the emotions evoked by great art plus education, is up to you.

I visited MOBIA to learn about the museum’s winter exhibit, “Chagall’s Bible: Mystical Storytelling,” which will be featured in our November/December “Opening: A New Way of Seeing” department.

Before I began working at S&H, I was a reader, and the thing that I loved most about the magazine — the reason I wanted to work here — was its welcoming feeling. I was raised without any religion and, although I always had a sense of something larger, I only began to formally study and declare myself “spiritual but not religious” as an adult. So I cannot tell you how pleased I am to have discovered MOBIA. Like the magazine, MOBIA has no agenda other than educating and sharing. (Through September 21st, you can see the first U.S. exhibit of the rarest etchings by Albrecht Dürer, including Adam and Eve, Fall of Man, Melencolia I, and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.)

The museum is the brainchild of Ena Heller, who in 1997, straight out of grad school, started an art gallery within the American Bible Society and in 2005 expanded it into a 2,700-square-foot main gallery with all kinds of corollary lectures, concerts, and workshops — all for an admission fee of only $7.

To establish this museum, Heller had to overcome pervasive assumptions like my own — that setting foot inside was an invitation to “be evangelized.” But the museum’s mission is something quite different:

“MOBIA considers the religious as well as the aesthetic and historic significance of objects created in the Jewish and Christian traditions. The reach of its exhibitions, publications, and programs extends from high art to folk forms, from contemporary art to rare printed and manuscript Bibles drawn from one of the world’s most important collections of rare Scriptures. MOBIA is an independent museum serving the nation at a crossroads of culture where, too often, cultures clash.”

So if you’re in New York, give it a visit! Such visit could be an invitation to pray … or not — your choice. And stay tuned for MOBIA’s amazing Chagall exhibit in the pages of our November/December issue.