Peterson, Brian H.
Brian H. Peterson
Brian H. Peterson has more than thirty years’ experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area. The Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum, he was the editor and principal author of the major Michener publication Pennsylvania Impressionism as well as monographs on painters William L. Lathrop, Robert Spencer, and Charles Rosen. His critical writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, American Arts Quarterly, Photo Review, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
As a practicing artist, Peterson has had more than thirty solo exhibitions of his photographs since 1980. His work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Denver Art Museum, Library of Congress, Milwaukee Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In The Blossoming of the World, Brian H. Peterson—author of the critically acclaimed The Smile at the Heart of Things—picks up both pen and camera and journeys to the deep end of life. Along the way he confronts some painful contradiction—beauty and violence, love and grief—and reflects on illness, family, death, dreams, epiphanies, and the birth of self-awareness.
More storyteller than philosopher, Peterson struggles to reconcile his Christian faith with his love of science, creativity, and spirituality in all its manifestations. Through word and image he quietly looks for—and finds—the common ground that unites thinking and compassionate people of all shapes and sizes.
Full-color reproductions of Peterson's photographs accompany and enrich this collection of essays and reflections.
Book Website
- What are the essential ingredients of a creative life?
- How does an artist become an artist?
- Can art and religion find common ground?
- What does it mean to be an individual, and as individuals can we be separate and singular as well as communal and connected?
Brian H. Peterson wrestles with these questions and offers some answers in The Smile at the Heart of Things, a wide-ranging and deeply satisfying collection of personal essays, journal entries, and reflections on art, artists, and art museums. Drawing on his experiences as a musician, visual artist, scholar, and museum curator, Peterson connects his own search for growth and meaning with larger issues of creativity and the human spirit, often by simply telling stories about his own life and the lives of artists, friends, and family members.
For those of us who strive to juggle our career and family, our jobs and our true passions, The Smile at the Heart of Things offers insight into the ways people balance their world and contemplates how religion, family, loss, love, and even personal struggles inform our lives and make them richer.
The key ingredients to a creative life, suggests author Brian H. Peterson, are nourishment, honesty, beauty, depth, and hunger. These ingredients form the five main sections of the book, within which Peterson gathers essays about art and artists, journal excerpts, and life stories—“not the entire story of someone’s life,” he says, “but a story from life that is also a glimpse into a life.”