Ted Prescott

Photo credit: Andrew S. Bale

Theodore Lewis Prescott is Emeritus Professor of Art, Messiah University. He studied art at the Colorado College, and got his MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, at MICA. Professionally his life has been divided between three activities. Teaching is largely past tense now, but he started the studio art program at Messiah College (now University) in 1980. He served as Department Chair, held two successive Distinguished Professorships, and retired as Emeritus Professor of Art in 2009. He has also taught in Gordon College’s art intensive program in Orvieto, Italy, several times.

Ted Prescott has written about art as well, with articles and essays published in several venues, including Image, American Arts Quarterly, and The New Criterion. He’s written several catalog essays, edited a book about contemporary figurative art, A Broken Beauty, and curated an exhibition that included publishing a catalog about recent Jewish and Christian art, Like a Prayer. See a list of his publications here. He wrote for and edited the publication for Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA, an art and faith organization) for over ten years and served as the organization’s second president.

His sculptural practices tend to be “slow,” and yet he has exhibited extensively, has completed a number of commissions, and has worked in some public collections. He’s proud to have work in the Vatican Museum’s Collection of Modern Religious Art. In sculpture he’s drawn to the nature of materials, and while versatile in the use of traditional materials like wood, stone, and metals, often employs unconventional things. He loves the poetic resonances that can occur between forms and materials. The vocabulary of his sculpture is indebted to modernism, but he finds continuity with the past, and does not believe that what is new negates what is old. Visit his website to see his work.

Links to posts and programs featuring Ted Prescott:

  • Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
  • The cultural effects of advertising — Ted Prescott, Jackson Lears, Mark Crispin Miller, James Twitchell, and Pamela Walker Laird discuss how advertising affects personal and social life. (53 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 76 — FEATURED GUESTS: D. H. Williams, Catherine Edwards Sanders, Ted Prescott, Martin X. Moleski, Stephen Prickett, and Barrett Fisher
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
  • Depicting the human form —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 minutes)