Ted Prescott

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.